NLRB Sets News-Press Hearing

Just when you might have thought the Santa Barbara News-Press’s problems with the National Labor Relations Board were over, the NLRB has set a February 24 hearing on a list of alleged labor relations violations.

The charges include failure to bargain in good faith and wrongful withdrawal of recognition of the Teamsters union, which represents the newsroom.

Last year the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., one of the most conservative in the country, threw out an earlier NLRB complaint that eight union members were illegally fired in violation of the law. The court ruled that the newsroom union was violating owner Wendy McCaw’s First Amendment rights by seeking to control news coverage, a charge that the union strenuously denied.

The NLRB now claims that McCaw’s withdrawal of recognition and refusal to bargain were based on “an inherently tainted ‘petition’ signed by News-Press employees last May” that was “bogus and illustrative of nothing more than continued, persistent and pervasive illegally by the SBNP management,” said Ira Gottlieb, Teamsters’ attorney.