Pressroom Seniority or Company Seniority

Pressroom employees do not work the normal nine to five as many other professions do. And we generally work weekends and holiday’s as well. With many different editions to produce, the window of completion is watched carefully to insure our subscribers have their newspaper delivered on time, everyday.

I noted a misconception within the blogosphere before the union election, many bloggers referred to the pressmen as press operators. In most pressrooms, everyone rotates jobs on the printing crew, one day you’re the press operator, the next day you could be pushing the rolls of newsprint into the reel arms of the printing press.

At the Los Angeles Times, the press operator is exactly what the job title states; he or she operates the printing press on a daily basis. The position of press operator will go the way of the caboose on a train, sometime down the road.

Every year the pressroom goes through our annual ritual of selecting the shift one would like to work for one year. The order of selecting ones shift is based on seniority, or the date you started working in the pressroom, with the men and women with the lowest seniority numbers going before those with higher numbers.

Last week one pressman, that transferred from another department, told two of my crew members the union would restore his seniority to company seniority, this did not go over well at all. If I had not witnessed this incident in person, I would have thought this was but another rumor.

In closing, my new press crew is not the highest in seniority, but the oldest in age. Bill Conover is the youngest crewmember at 52, and Larry Brush the oldest at 69.