Employees at the Virgin Islands Daily News will vote this month on whether to bring a union into the nearly 70-year-old paper.
Luis "Tito" Morales, president of the V.I. Central Labor Council and of the United Steelworkers of America St. Thomas-St. John chapter, said Thursday that workers at the newspaper have petitioned for a vote to join the Steelworkers.
A petition signed by at least 30 percent of the employees of business is necessary to force a vote on whether to unionize, Morales said. In the case of the Daily News, "We had more than 30 percent," he said.
The voting will be by employees in the news, advertising, business office and production departments – "all but management," he said. He estimated the number of employees at 60 to 65.
The vote will be by secret ballot on Nov. 18 and 19, Morales said. Officials from the National Labor Relations Board in Puerto Rico will come to the territory to oversee the balloting.
Morales said the Steelworkers tried unsuccessfully a few years ago to convince employees at the Daily News to petition for union representation. Now, he said, there is campaigning going on. He would not elaborate, nor would he say what employees would have to pay in dues if they were to join the union.
One longtime employee who did not want to be identified, for fear of reprisals, said the driving force behind the call for unionization is low morale.
"The issue is not money," this individual said. "It’s how they (managers) treat people. . . It’s like you’re not even there."
The newspaper was founded in 1930 by J. Antonio Jarvis and Ariel Melchior Sr. Until the late 1970s, it was basically a Melchior family operation. Melchior Sr. sold the paper to the Gannett Co. mainland newspaper chain, which sold it at the end of 1997 to Emerging Communications Inc., an affiliate of Innovative Communication Corp., owned by Jeffrey Prosser.
The paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1995.
