Over the Dead Body of General Otis

L.A. Times Newsroom Unionizes

In January, journalists and editors of the Los Angeles Times voted 248-44 to join the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America, a welcome blow against this labor-hating publication. Through much of the 20th century, the newspaper was the leader and organizer of the bosses’ war to bust L.A.’s union movement and maintain Southern California as a bastion of the racist open shop. The journalists’ recent success, combined with the fact that the pressmen are already organized, should be seen as an opportunity to spur the rest of the paper’s workforce to organize.

Tronc, the company that owned the paper during the organizing drive, sought to intimidate the journalists with threats of pay cuts and layoffs and created a shadow newsroom made up of staff that could potentially be used as scabs. This is typical of the union-busting Times. Over the past ten years alone, anti-union forces at the paper unsuccessfully tried to decertify the pressmen’s union five times. Despite the organizing victory in the newsroom, contract negotiations have yet to begin and the union’s position remains tenuous. Less than three weeks after the journalists voted to unionize, the Times is now being sold to L.A. billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who was a substantial shareholder in Tronc while it was trying to crush the newsroom’s unionization bid.

From its appearance in the early 1880s as a right-wing rag under Harrison Gray Otis, the Times would earn the reputation “as the most powerful and persistent enemy of organized labor in America, a role of which Otis was intensely proud” (Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California [1977]). A robber baron who liked to be addressed as “General,” Otis, together with his son-in-law Harry Chandler, led a cabal of railway tycoons, developers and bankers that molded L.A. into a strikebreaking and scabherding haven for the capitalist bosses. The Otis/Chandler dynasty ruled and looted the city and much of Southern California for several generations.

“Los Angeles Daily Liar”

Otis fought tooth and nail to rid his newspaper of any hint of union organization. While the printers won a union shop in 1883-84, Otis used lockouts and scabs some years later to drive the union out. He would eventually open a school to train linotype operators as reserve strikebreakers. Meanwhile, the pages of the paper were filled with venomous anti-labor tirades, prompting Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene V. Debs to brand it the “Los Angeles Daily Liar.”

By the first decade of the 20th century, low-wage L.A. was “a city of slave owners, slave drivers, and chattel slaves,” as one unionist put it. To ensure “economic freedom,” Otis set up the anti-union Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association (M&M), which came to represent 80 percent of the city’s companies and ran the police force as its own private army.

In June 1910, 1,500 metal trades workers struck 25 L.A. firms—the largest strike in the city’s history until that time. An anti-picketing ordinance was passed, and cops arrested hundreds. Then on October 1, two explosions ripped through the L.A. Times building, killing 21 people. Before the blood could dry, the Times screamed on its front page, “Unionist Bomb Wrecks the Times.” Labor leaders denied the accusation, pointing to a leaky gas jet and the strong odor of gas fumes on the evening of the disaster. Some even accused Otis himself of ordering an attack on the building. The capitalist rulers pinned the blame on the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union (IBSIW), framing up two unionists for murder: John J. McNamara, the secretary-treasurer of the IBSIW, and his brother James.

The McNamara case roiled L.A. labor and was followed closely by workers throughout the country. The Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and a host of individual unions came out for the McNamaras. Even conservative AFL leader Samuel Gompers denounced the case as a frame-up, while the AFL Executive Council organized to raise funds for legal defense, declaring that the brothers were the “innocent victims of capitalist greed.” In June 1911, 80,000 workers gathered in Chicago against the drive “to hang J.J. McNamara and wreck union labor.” And on Labor Day—renamed “McNamara Day”—protests occurred from one end of the country to the other. In Los Angeles, 20,000 demonstrated.

In the midst of this struggle, SP candidate Job Harriman (one of the McNamaras’ defense attorneys) was poised to win the upcoming mayoral election. To avert an SP victory and put an end to the labor struggle, the city rulers needed convictions in the McNamara case. Help came from the brothers’ lead attorney, Clarence Darrow, who engineered a plea deal that was signed off by L.A. business leaders, including Otis and Chandler. Under the final deal, James was made to confess to planting the dynamite. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, while his brother received 15 years. In an interview decades later, John made clear that “neither Jim nor I wanted to plead guilty. We wanted the case to go to trial.” He denounced Darrow for concealing from the brothers the massive working-class support they had. John said that had he and James known the truth, they would have never gone along with the plea deal.

Darrow’s double cross had a demoralizing effect on the L.A. working class. The street protests came to an abrupt end; Harriman lost the election; and the militant organizing campaign of 1910-11 was derailed. In a treasonous move the AFL leadership denounced the McNamaras as criminals and demanded that they be punished. The convictions set back the L.A. labor movement for decades.

Organize the Unorganized!

While journalists and editors are petty-bourgeois professionals, the unionization of the L.A. Times newsroom represents a victory against the labor-hating bosses. Widely viewed today as a liberal newspaper, the L.A. Times, like every capitalist news outlet, is in the business of molding public opinion in defense of capitalist rule—from justifying imperialist war to witchhunting communists and other leftists and demonizing black people, Latinos and the poor. Thus, the Times still regularly publishes anti-union diatribes. In 2004, the paper, acting on behalf of the city’s rulers, launched a propaganda blitz against King/Drew Medical Center, which was the main trauma center for the impoverished, predominantly black and Latino Watts/South-Central/Compton triangle. Especially targeting the heavily black and unionized nurses—as well as black doctors—the Times offensive, which earned it a Pulitzer, succeeded in shutting down the hospital in 2007.

During the Otis/Chandler dynasty, L.A.’s rulers first sought to keep out and then brutally exploited the hundreds of thousands of whites who tried to move West to escape starvation-level poverty in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. At the same time, L.A. increasingly came to resemble a Southern city, with the small but growing black population subjected to Jim Crow-style oppression: housing covenants, job discrimination, segregated swimming pools and beaches. For its part, the Times fomented white hostility against Mexicans and black people. Amid the “Zoot Suit” riots of June 1943, when white sailors and soldiers went on a racist rampage against young Mexicans (and blacks) in downtown L.A., the Times (11 June 1943) denounced “zoot suit gangsterism” and claimed that the servicemen were simply out “to defend themselves from zoot suit attacks.” A decade later, the Times helped kill public housing plans on the grounds that they were “socialistic.”

The open shop in Los Angeles undermined conditions for all working people and served to intensify and further entrench the brutal oppression of black people, immigrants and other minorities. Enforcing the rule of the city fathers against the majority of the city’s population, the LAPD has long been among the most notorious police forces in this country for its racist terror. This cop violence ignited social explosions such as the Watts ghetto uprising in 1965 and the multiracial rebellion in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of the racist cops who brutally beat Rodney King. As we wrote in “L.A. Flashpoint U.S.A.” (reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 9, August 1992): “That the LAPD rivals the military in some Third World military dictatorship is because they have never felt the mobilized power of an organized labor movement.”

In the last few decades, Southern California has experienced successful unionization drives among hotel workers, drywall installers, janitors and home health care workers. This organizing in large part reflects the significant growth of the Latino workforce in the region, including immigrants who bring traditions of labor militancy from their countries of birth. Today, Latinos make up nearly half of the population of Los Angeles County; at the time of the Watts rebellion, the population of greater L.A. was 85 percent white.

Los Angeles is one of the most unequal cities in the U.S., where legions of poor and homeless people live side by side with a small minority flaunting their money, mansions and Maseratis. The growth in unionization that has taken place in L.A. has occurred against the backdrop of a steep decline in union membership nationwide over the last several decades. This wretched state of affairs can be laid at the doorstep of the trade-union bureaucracy, which identifies the interests of the workers with those of the capitalist ruling class and its political parties. An integral component of the Democratic Party, the trade-union bureaucracy has served to launch the careers of many politicians, such as former L.A. mayor (2005-13) Antonio Villaraigosa, who was previously a teachers union organizer.

As we wrote in “L.A. Flashpoint U.S.A.”:

“What is desperately needed is common class struggle to unite organized labor with all strata of the oppressed against their common capitalist oppressors who have impoverished and brutalized the working people who built the wealth of this country. This requires the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party to act as a ‘tribune of the people’.”