Santa Barbara News-Press Body Slammed in NLRB Decision
Judge Rules Against Daily on All But One Point
Although one day late, Judge William Kocol gave pro-union workers at the Santa Barbara News-Press newsroom about the best Christmas present they could ever hope for.
On December 26, Kocol, an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board, issued a sweeping denunciation of what he described as “flagrant” and illegal anti-union tactics deployed by News-Press management and ordered the embattled daily to rehire the eight pro-union employees it had fired last year with back pay. Despite News-Press insistence that union affiliation had nothing to do with these disciplinary actions, Kocol concluded in his 75-page “recommendation” that none of the eight would have been fired were it not for their strong pro-union sympathies. Additionally, Kocol ordered the News-Press to rescind “the discriminatory” job evaluations that were used to justify the lower bonuses paid last year to several pro-union newsroom workers.
Likewise, Kocol found that the News-Press “demoted” award-winning columnist Starshine Roshell-who now writes for the Independent-because she’d written two pro-union columns. The News-Press claimed it was doing away with columns to devote more space and energy to local news, but Kocol noted how the paper’s decision to hire Laura Schlessinger as a columnist at the same time undermined these claims’ credibility. So total was management’s opposition to the union, Kocol concluded, that an editor who refused to go along with these unfair labor practices-Bob Guiliano, who refused to reprimand a reporter-was himself illegally terminated. (Kocol, however, did not order the daily paper to rehire Guiliano and give him back pay.)
