A BRIEF GUILD HISTORY

The year is 1933: The average newspaper employee works 50 to 66 hours per week and takes home less than $20 while William Randolph Hearst builds the castle at San Simeon and urges his minions to "work for the romance of the game." In New York, syndicated columnist Heywood Broun aptly notes in his column, "There has been no mention of an organization of newspaper men and women. There should be one. On the morning of October 10 at 9 a.m., I am going to start one."

Start one he did: The American Newspaper Guild. Recognizing its Canadian membership in the 1970s, the name was changed to The Newspaper Guild.

Bitterly opposed by publishers, 71 men and two women in San Francisco answered Broun's call by meeting in a back room and took the first steps in forming a Bay Area chapter by signing the "Hearst Manifesto." They were editorial employees at the San Francisco Examiner, but within three years they were joined by workers at the San Francisco Chronicle. The Newspaper Guild of Northern California was chartered as the 52nd Local, in April 1936, and four years after Broun's initial column the advertising and business employees were members as well. In 1937 the Guild's national membership had reached 10,000.

The Bay Area Typographical Union, Local 21, was already well established when the Guild organized in San Francisco, having been founded in 1872.

During the turbulent 1940s and '50s, hundreds of Guild officers nationwide were fired, transferred or forced to resign. Publishers used the war and "inefficiency" as excuses. Nonetheless, the Guild grew in numbers and purpose and, having been joined by other locals throughout the area, the local had changed its name to the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild (SFONG). Guild negotiators in the 1950s had successfully bargained top scale wages to $126.75 a week.

In 1951 Hearst killed the Oakland Post Enquirer and SFONG represented workers at the Chronicle, Examiner, News and Call-Bulletin in San Francisco. By the end of the 1950s the News and Call-Bulletin had been merged, and the next decade brought our first contract with the Oakland Tribune. In 1965 the Chronicle and Examiner, after a hard-fought circulation war, consolidated their non-editorial functions into the San Francisco Newspaper Printing Company and closed down the Hearst-owned News-Call Bulletin -- an action legalized retroactively by the passage of the Failing Newspaper (Newspaper Preservation) Act in the 1970s. The Joint Operating Agreement put 600 out of work, but almost all the displaced Guild members were eventually rehired thanks to strong contract language.

Through a series of mergers and successful organizing, the local now represents members throughout California, including units or individual work sites in San Jose, Santa Rosa, Oakland, Fremont, Pleasanton, Petaluma, San Mateo, Sacramento, Modesto, Fresno, Monterey, Los Angeles and Orange County, as well as San Francisco. Our members work at newspapers, wire services, labor union staffs, and as language interpreters in the court systems in Northern and Southern California.

In the mid-1980s Local 52 changed its name to The Northern California Newspaper Guild, and in 1998, following the Guild's merger with the Communications Workers of America and a regional merger with the Bay Area Typographical Union, Local 21, became the Northern California Media Workers Guild/Typographical Union, Local 39521 of The Newspaper Guild sector of CWA.

We merged with the San Jose Newspaper Guild effective Jan. 1, 2009, changing our name to the California Media Workers Guild. Our local number -- 39521 -- and dedication to service and organizing didn't change.