Seattle Newspapers May Strike

Monday, November 20th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

SEATTLE (AP) â€” Union negotiators and representatives of the city's two daily newspapers continued contract talks Monday as one strike deadline passed and another was about to expire.

The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which negotiate together under a joint operating agreement, made a contract offer Sunday to the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. The Guild represents 1,000 circulation, advertising and editorial employees and has been without a contract since July 22.

At the request of a federal mediator, negotiators for both sides would not discuss the details of the latest offer. Bruce Meachum, the Guild's chief negotiator, said union leaders hoped to present the papers' last offer to members for a vote. He added, however, that a walkout could begin before that happens.

Guild members labored over the weekend to assemble picket signs and to lay the groundwork for an alternative newspaper and on-line news service. Guild leaders have set a strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.

``We are likely to bargain up until the last minute,'' said Guild spokesman Art Thiel.

Teamsters Local 763, which represents about 460 workers at the papers, had set a strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. Monday. But workers did not immediately walk out. As the deadline expired, no pickets appeared at Times news offices or at the plant where the two papers are printed in Bothell. Teamsters officials could not be contacted for comment; the newspapers said they did not return calls.

Local 763 negotiators reached a tentative agreement with newspaper negotiators Friday, but the union's 170 mailers rejected it in a vote that night. Local 763 also represents about 290 sales and distribution workers who have been working without contracts since June.

Chain-link fences were erected around the Times' buildings in preparation for labor actions. Both morning dailies plan to continue publishing if there is a strike, possibly by hiring temporary workers, Times president H. Mason Sizemore said.

The strike deadlines were timed for the advertising-rich Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period. Anticipating a possible strike, the Times put some advertising inserts planned for Thanksgiving editions in the Monday papers instead.

The Guild had been seeking a three-year agreement with annual raises of $3.05, $1.55 and $1.55 per hour. The P-I quoted a union source as saying the Guild had reduced its first-year demand to below $2 an hour. The last offer announced by the newspapers included an undisclosed raise in the first year of a six-year contract, to be followed by five years of 45-cent-an-hour raises.

Currently, the minimum wage for a reporter with six years' experience is $844.88 a week, or $21.12 per hour.

The 104-year-old Times, a Blethen family enterprise that's 49.5 percent owned by Knight Ridder, and the 137-year-old, Hearst-owned P-I have been fighting an increasingly heated circulation war since March, when the Times switched to morning publication. Before the switch, the Times had been the only major afternoon paper in the country to dominate its local market.

The Guild last struck the P-I in 1936 and the Times in 1953.