| San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 | |||
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| Date | November 1--12, 1994 | ||
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The San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 was a labor dispute called by the Newspaper Guild in November 1994. Employees of San Francisco's two major daily newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner walked off the job for eleven days.
San Francisco's two major daily newspapers were longtime rivals that had been working under a joint operating agreement since 1965. [1] Employees had been working without a contract for the past year.
Wages were one major issue leading to the strike: while the unions demanded a 3.5 percent annual raise, management offered only a 2.46 percent annual raise over four years. Another point of contention was management's plan to cut the jobs of more than 150 teamster drivers over several years. [2]
Starting on November 1, 1994, some 2,600 reporters, editors, drivers, press operators and paper handlers of the San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner walked off the job.
The strike turned violent. Bricks were thrown through paper carriers' windshields as they drove from the newspaper distribution center, and one non-union driver was hit on the head with a lead pipe, suffering a fractured skull. One teamster driver was killed by electricity when scaling a power pole. [3]
At the beginning of the strike, The Examiner's Head of Development Chris Gulker re-launched his pilot web project called the Electric Examiner [4] as The Gate, [5] thus creating the official online version of San Francisco's two big newspapers. This news service remained "heavily dependent on wire-service stories" [6] for lack of contributing journalists and editors.
The striking journalists set up their own online newspaper, the San Francisco Free Press, [7] and competed with The Gate as "the soul of the Examiner and the Chronicle." [8] Led by the Examiner's Associate Editor Bruce Koon and former SF Weekly editor Marcelo Rodriguez, [9] they received assistance from Cynsa Bonorris, who coded the html, and Dave Winer, who pitched in helping automate the production process. [10] The team operated from a makeshift newsroom using their own hardware and a local ISP for rented server space. [11]
The Free Press scored a scoop during its first week, reporting that Senator Dianne Feinstein had been wrongly accused of hiring an undocumented worker in the early 1980s. [12]
During the strike both online newspapers were claiming a total of more than 100,000 readers a day, which was a fraction of the actual newspapers' estimated circulation of 600,000, but far beyond the 10,000 or so people in the Bay Area who had access to them. [12]
On November 12, 1994, after eight straight days of negotiations mediated by San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan, the newspaper strike came to an end as management and a conference of eight unions announced a tentative agreement. [13]
The two competing electronic newspapers published during the strike have been hailed as "a milestone for online news," [11] especially since the "speed and relative ease with which both groups published electronic newspapers was a clear demonstration of the power of computers and digital networks for distributing information to a potential audience of millions of computer users worldwide." [5] The strike "put the Web on the radar screens of news organizations" [11] and triggered an "exodus" [14] of Examiner staff to the web. Among them was David Talbot, who founded Salon.com after the Guild's online newspaper convinced him of the "potential of the new medium." [15]
The San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) is a labor union in the United States and Canada. Formed in 1903 by the merger of the Team Drivers International Union and the Teamsters National Union, the union now represents a diverse membership of blue- and white-collar workers in both the public and private sectors, totalling about 1.3 million members in 2015. The union was formerly called the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America.
James Phillip Hoffa, also known as James Hoffa Jr., is an American labor leader and attorney who was the tenth General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He is the son of Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was first elected in 1998, and re-elected in 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016 to five-year terms. In 2018, Hoffa was elected chair of the Road Transport Section of the International Transport Workers' Federation at its quadrennial Congress in Singapore. Hoffa is the second-longest serving General President of the Teamsters Union, after Dan Tobin, who served from 1907 to 1952. Hoffa's final term as General President ended in 2022.
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Media related to San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 at Wikimedia Commons
