Los Angeles Times Guild set its first-ever strike authorization vote Thursday as contract negotiations with ownership near their third year, TheWrap learned.
“We didn’t reach this point lightly,” Guild Chair Matt Hamilton said in a statement obtained by TheWrap. The guild said that 80% of its membership pledged to vote yes in its strike authorization vote. “But Guild members are doing more with less every day after several rounds of layoffs, while management continues to drag its feet in negotiations and insists on extreme positions that would roll back job protections. This supermajority of Guild journalists shows that we want a fair deal, and are ready to do what it takes to get one.”
Since contract negotiations began in September 2022, the guild has seen layoffs impact approximately 200 Times staffers. The strike authorization vote has not yet been scheduled.
The key issues at hand in the ongoing negotiations include wages, protections against layoffs and “guardrails to prevent Guild work from being outsourced to freelancers, temporary employees, newsroom management and third-party companies,” according to the union’s announcement.
The New York Times’ Katie Robertson first broke the news.
Last month, the L.A. Times Guild slammed management after the paper sent buyout offers to a small group of staffers, a move the union said “egregiously” violates employee contracts.
And this all follows a brutal year for the storied paper, which has been beset by a series of layoffs and buyouts amid incremental ideological shifts mandated by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
In early May, 14 staffers were let go, with Carrillo Peñaloza, an assistant editor on the breaking news team, art director Susana Sanchez and investigative reporter Ben Poston among those impacted.
Prior to that in March, dozens of employees in operations and communications sections were let go, a culling that came shortly after 40 newsroom employees accepted buyouts. These cuts came after the paper lost at least 25,000 subscribers in the weeks after Soon-Shiong overrode the paper’s editorial board to spike a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
AdWeek reported in April that the L.A. Times lost “around $50 million” in 2024.
Read the L.A. Times Guild’s strike authorization memo in full below:
Journalists at the Los Angeles Times are poised to hold a strike vote, a historic first for the West Coast’s largest newspaper.
Eighty percent of the L.A. Times Guild, the union that represents Times journalists, have pledged to vote yes in a strike authorization vote, the Guild’s Unit Council announced Thursday. Such a vote would give Guild leadership and bargaining committee members the power to call a strike.
“Our members produce the award-winning journalism that the Times relies on to bring in readers and revenue, yet management has taken us for granted for too long,” said assistant editor and Guild officer Hugo Martin (he/him), a 38-year Times veteran.
Times management and the newsroom union, a unit of Media Guild of the West (The NewsGuild-CWA Local 39213), have been bargaining over a new contract for nearly three years. Journalists at the newspaper have not received a cost-of-living increase for nearly four years — a period when inflation drove up the price of food, housing and other essentials.
During negotiations, the Guild accused the company of trying to intimidate Guild members out of participating in collective bargaining or other union activities, an unfair labor practice under the National Labor Relations Act.
In April, the National Labor Relations Board found merit to the Guild’s allegations and issued a complaint against the Times. A hearing will be held in September.
The protracted negotiations, which began in September 2022, have also been marked by several rounds of layoffs and buyouts, resulting in the departure of roughly 200 union members. The Guild now counts just over 200 L.A. Times journalists in its ranks.
“We didn’t reach this point lightly,” said reporter Matt Hamilton (he/him), chair of L.A. Times Guild. “But Guild members are doing more with less every day after several rounds of layoffs, while management continues to drag its feet in negotiations and insists on extreme positions that would roll back job protections. This supermajority of Guild journalists shows that we want a fair deal, and are ready to do what it takes to get one.”
Key issues left on the table include wages, layoff protections and guardrails to prevent Guild work from being outsourced to freelancers, temporary employees, newsroom management and third-party companies.
