FIRED WORKERS, GUILD DEMAND JOURNAL NEWSPAPERS IMPLEMENT FED-PROPOSED REMEDIES

Fired Journal worker displays the news on a parodied Journal Newspaper front page.
(Photo by Ellen Gervasi)

About a dozen fired Journal Newspaper employees and supporters from The Newspaper Guild, various Northern Virginia unions, and even the Virginia Statehouse rallied June 10, 2003 outside the newspaper’s Alexandria, Virginia headquarters to demand that Journal Publisher Ryan Phillips reinstate the fired workers with back pay and reopen their offices in Maryland.

The workers lost their jobs in December 2002 as Journal employees prepared to vote in a secret-ballot election to determine if the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild would become their union.

The rally came just two weeks after Wayne Gold, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that oversees U.S. labor law, issued a May 29 complaint against the Journal papers.

Virginia State Senator Leslie Byrne joined the rally and even donned a picket sign to show her support for the fired newspaper workers and their federally guaranteed right to unionize.

“The fact is that people were fired for doing what they have a constitutional right to do—that is, to associate, to organize and to make a better life for their families," Byrne told the small crowd.

"The National Labor Relations Board has said that the Journal has done wrong and we expect them to do something about it, and we expect our elected officials in Virginia to do something about it. We are here to ask the Journal to do the right thing,” she said.

Calvin G. Zon, a Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild organizer, offered this warning to the Journal publisher and others who would violate the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees workers the right to form unions.

“We’re here to send a message to Ryan Phillips and other employers that workers’ rights must be respected and that union-busting won’t be tolerated,” Zon said.

“Phillips, who claims that his newspapers are financially distressed, should quit wasting Journal resources on stretching out the long labor board legal process. The workers are entitled to justice now,” he added.

In his complaint of May 29, the NLRB's Gold found that the Journal publisher and his managers had violated federal labor law by unlawfully firing eight workers and closing the Journal offices in Prince George's and Montgomery counties to thwart employee efforts to organize a union.

"The General Counsel seeks an Order requiring Respondent (the Journal Papers) to reopen its Rockville, Maryland and Lanham, Maryland offices and restore its newspaper operations in those offices and they existed prior to the December 2002 closings," Gold said in his complaint against the newspaper.

"The General Counsel also seeks an Order requiring that Respondent promptly reinstate [the eight fired workers] to the emplyees' former positions or, if the positions no longer exist, to substantially equivalent positions."

Gold has scheduled an administrative hearing on the case for July 21.

For more info, contact:

Calvin Zon
WBNG Local Representative
Work phone: 202-785-3650, x17
e-mail: czon@wbng.org