Daily News typography changes spark union's ire.

Electronic pagination, outsourcing to eliminate 79 jobs

The Daily News of Los Angeles plans to lay off 79 of the paper's 88 typographical union members involved in layout and ad composition in an effort to adopt an electronic pagination system and to outsource most of the newspaper's ad

The newspaper's contract with the Southern California Typographical Mailers Union, Local 17, is set to expire Nov. 2, and union leaders have indicated that a walk-out is being considered in a fight to save the composition room jobs.

Gerry Curran, president of Local 17, said the union was informed July 26 that the Daily News plans to change to a electronic pagination system. Pagination is a computer-assisted method for laying out whole pages of text on a computer, rather than physically having to cut and paste text on a page -- a process that requires substantially more workers.

Electronic pagination is also usually done by newsroom employees, such as layout editors, rather than typographical employees in the composition room.

The union was also informed that advertising composition -- creating ads to run in the body of the paper, not the classified section -- was going to be exclusively handled by an outside contractor, Volt Information Sciences, headquartered in Pennsylvania, Curran said.

As a result of the electronic pagination and contracting of ad building, Curran said, 79 of the union's 88 positions would be eliminated. Nine union members, who make the printing plates for the newspaper, would retain their jobs, Curran said.

Curran acknowledged pagination would cost some union jobs, but said the typographical workers could do the pagination work just as easily and as well as layout editors.

"They're devastating the whole shop," Curran said.

Tom Burke, the Daily News' labor attorney with the Los Angeles law firm of Pettit & Martin, said electronic pagination and the contracting out of ad building will eliminate the need for a composing room and its employees. Current contract negotiations, he said, focus on the terms for making those changes and eliminating those jobs.

"There has been electronic development in pagination that basically eliminates jobs," Burke said.

But Curran said the union is willing to fight for those jobs, and could call a strike if the issue is not resolved to the union's satisfaction.

"We're looking at it real close," Curran said. "We're going to fight for what we can get."

Founded in 1875, the typographical union is the oldest labor union in Los Angeles.

The Daily News is also in contract negotiations with its 150-member editorial staff with the Newspaper Guild of Los Angeles. The newspaper guild has been without a contract since February.

The paper, owned by Jack Kent Cooke and with a daily circulation of 211,000, is currently up for sale. No buyer, however, has stepped forward.