By Ji Hyun Lim | AsianWeek Staff Writer
After stories circulated about gross labor rights violations and a campaign to intimidate and scare employees into recanting a vote to unionize, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) — a 66-year-old union — has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board Region 21 in Los Angeles against the Chinese Daily News, the nation’s largest Chinese language newspaper, for violating federal laws protecting employees’ right to organize a union.
Located in Monterey Park, Calif. the Chinese Daily News is distributed nationally to some 100,000 people. Most of the 152 employees of this paper are first-generation immigrants and many only hold green cards for employment. Workers allege that they were forced to work long hours with no overtime pay and many felt that their non-citizenship status and limited language ability would prevent them from finding employment elsewhere.
Over two years ago, the management proposed a “financial restructuring” that would tighten the budget of workers at the paper. The management notified employees that wages could be frozen and that all employees must sign a form saying that they are “at will” employees who could be fired any time. Concerned that this “restructuring” would prevent employees from obtaining even their nominal raises, workers — along with the Newspaper Guild sector of the CWA — gathered together to vote on whether the company should unionize.
“All you have to do is talk to the workers to understand how oppressive this management is,” said Bruce Meachum, a Newspaper Guild representative. “They’re first generation immigrants and fighting for jobs … Whatever the grievance process was in the first place was not good enough or we never would have gone our way.”
In October 2000, 95 percent of the workers began to express support for unionization and were able to file cards for representation. During this time, workers alleged that management used scare tactics to force them to renege on their support for a union. One worker says that workers were “called one by one to question them about their union sympathies and [told] the union will only make things worse.”
The workers held an election in March 2001 while Chinese Daily News management hired a union-busting consultant. The management proceeded to hold captive audience meetings to persuade workers into believing that unions are harmful. However, the majority of the workers voted for the union but attorneys for the newspaper appealed the vote on the basis that newspaper supervisors were instrumental in swinging votes.
“There were certain individuals who were employed as supervisors by the [paper] who, despite supervisory status and legal prohibition on their participating, supported the union,” Thomas Lenz, attorney for the Chinese Daily News said. “It’s actually illegal for them to do that.”
He adds, “In Chinese culture, employees are taught to respect authority. It is our position that because of their influence as supervisors and what they did, they created an unfair and unlawful environment for an election so we do not believe it’s a valid election.”
For three months, the newspaper’s management stretched out a representation certification hearing before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s five-member panel in Washington D.C., claiming that one out of every five employees was a supervisor.
On August 2001, NLRB Region 21 upheld the results of the March election, but administrators appealed the decision in October 2001. The decision is currently pending.
Workers are claiming that owners are circulating a petition in an attempt to rally workers to denounce the union. CWA is also accusing management of manipulating employees by circulating the petition right before employees’ annual bonus, which could equal up to 10 percent of their annual salary.
Said Lenz, “A development has come about in the last couple of weeks that the majority of employees, or three-fourths of the employees, in the voting union signed [the petition] saying they did not want the union. We want to be done with this. The employees brought this to our attention and we have asked the NLRB to take that under consideration and case it has before it.”
Hsiao-tsee Chao, former reporter of the paper, disagrees. “The management hired a union buster to try to use scare tactics to get rid of the union. It was political terror. Before I left the company, the majority of the employees thought that their phones were tapped. They talked about hidden cameras in the corners. I thought this was a democratic country. You [should be able] to exercise the right to organize — successful or not.”
Reach Ji Hyun Lim at jlim@asianweek.com.
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