Teamsters Challenge Transcontinental Over 'S.F. Chronicle' Printing

By: Jim Rosenberg Last Sunday?s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle also was the last printed by the Hearst Corp. newspaper. Subsequent editions have rolled of new manroland triplewide presses in Canadian publisher and printer Transcontinental's new plant, across the bay in Fremont.

While the Teamsters union alleges unfair labor practices at the new plant across the bay, Transcontinental is mum -- although one of its executives denied the allegations a few weeks before the plant opened.

Transcontinental has a 15-year contract to print the Chronicle. Among other newspapers, including its own, the company prints The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian daily based in Toronto, and has had an agreement to print copies of The New York Times for distribution in southern Ontario and western New York State.

The move from the Chronicle's aging flexo presses in Union City (it also operated flexo plants in San Francisco and Richmond while in a joint operating agreement with the San Francisco Examiner) to the Colorman XXL offset equipment will cut costs and produce high-quality color, according to Publisher Frank Vega.

Except for the 1906 earthquake and a 1968 strike, the paper has handled its own printing since the first copies of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle were run off hand-cranked presses, according to a Sunday account on the paper's SFGate Web site.

A Transcontinental spokesman, division executive and manager in Fremont did not return calls for comment on start-up of live production. Transcontinental typically employs comparatively small, efficient, highly cross-trained and self-managing production staffers at its plants.

Chronicle production employees are unionized, and Transcontinental's non-union shop in Fremont has been a source of friction. Teamsters Western Region Vice President Rome Aloise, who is president of Joint Council 7 in San Francisco and secretary-treasurer of Local 853 in San Leandro, tells E&P he is unaware of a single Chronicle employee being offered work at the new plant. With that mind, Aloise says, his union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that Transcontinental "systematically discriminated against these people."

In the May 20 edition of PrintCan, the online bulletin of Graphic Monthly Canada,Ted Markle, senior vice president of Transcontinental?s newspaper group, said job offers were extended to at least two Chronicle employees. He said his company operates union and non-union plants, and that ?we have a recruitment process that?s open for everyone,? with anonymity in the first stages of hiring.

In the same report, Aloise alleged that Transcontinental had held anti-union meetings with those already hired. PrintCan quoted him saying that, unknown to Transcontinental, his union has people working in the Fremont plant, ?so we know exactly what?s going on inside.?

Teamster picketing of the plant was recently suspended so that drivers could learn delivery schedules for the new plant. Their agreement is with the Chronicle, and that "requires that our people do the distribution of the paper," Aloise says, adding that he's not sure Transcontinental has any say in the matter.

Pressure on Transcontinental, although indirect, remains possible, according to Aloise, who early this year said an advertiser boycott might be called if the Chronicle came out of a non-union plant.

"It still may be the case. We haven't ruled it out at all," Aloise says, calling it "one our options." But while acknowledging "lots of pressure from people who lost their jobs to do that," he says he holds out hope for a satisfactory resolution that does not harm the paper -- the source of the hoped-for employment.

Aloise adopted a somewhat more aggressive stance in spring, telling PrintCan that ?we?re prepared for war,? and that Transcontinental was ?playing a very serious game of chicken.?

Meanwhile in Union City, Tom Wibberley, one of more than 200 printing and packaging workers whose positions were eliminated with the end of printing at the Chronicle plant, said he is "disappointed that I couldn't finish my career here." A pressman since he was 20, the 56-year-old Wibberley spent the last 26 years at the Chronicle.

"I understand it's all a matter of savings. I understand that with computers and with circulation falling the way it is, they're trying to save money," Wibberley told staff writer John Cot?, adding that he was nervous about his future, given the state of the economy.

Another pressman, Rodney Lablue, 42, told Cot? he is back in school and hoping for a refinery job in San Ramon.

The Union City plant's administrative director, Nancy Franklin, says some equipment will be scrapped and some will go to other newspapers, among them Hearst's Albany, N.Y., Times Union, which will use a Chronicle inserter. According to the Chronicle, the presses in Union City originally printed one of Detroit's newspapers. They were converted from letterpress to flexo in 1991.