A courageous letter signed by three dissident staff members and former union stewards appeared in the S.F. Bay Guardian in October 1997, pointing out that: "CWA members granted management the absolute right to fire at will all on-air personnel hired after Sept. 1 1997. "
And "The new agreement, which both CWA and Pacifica have called "win-win," creates the same kind of unfair two-tier pay system that BART and UPS workers successfully opposed in their recent strikes. It specifically states that management can hire temporary workers for as low as $7.50 an hour for work for which other employees receive a substantially higher wage. "
Paid staff gave up all these rights at a crucial time where any such action as a work stoppage, slow down or boycott, sympathy strike or corporate campaign would have exposed the hijacking of Pacifica and the enormous financial fraud committed by the leadership.
March, 1997: Community members hired a lawyer to fight to retain the rights of local board members to sit on the National Board while Pacifica began to change the bylaws to make the National Board self perpetuating and exclude station board members and staff from the National Board.
1997: National Board meeting in Oakland: Take Back KPFA had a sizable picket outside the Oakland hotel where the board was meeting. Inside Mary Frances Berry was voted in as the new chair of Pacifica. KPFA representative and Board Secretary Roberta Brooks attempted to have a motion entered into the minutes as passed that had not been approved at the last meeting. A Take Back KPFA member held up a tape recording of that meeting to prove it. At that moment KPFA paid staff entered in their new CWA T-shirts. They read a prepared statement regarding their personal pay issues and left. We ran after them, pleading with them to stay and listen or to join the picket line outside. One and all, they refused.
With the exception of KPFA, the media were beginning to take interest in the story, and articles were posted and disseminated via the internet. While the urgency of the KPFA/Pacifica issue became increasingly apparent, paid staff kept completely silent.
The last chance for KPFA staff to write a letter came and went in February, 1999 when Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ed Herman wrote a moving appeal, alerting the public to the imminent danger. We ? the activists on the outside - hoped that, finally, staff would have the courage to put their names to that letter. They did not sign on - not even under the wings of luminaries such as Chomsky, Zinn and Herman.
That was the last chance to rescue KPFA and Pacifica before the lockout and occupation of the station by security guards. In retrospect it is evident that paid staff only began to act when their personal jobs were at stake. It is sad to say that a large number of paid KPFA staff seem to be people who see this not as a station that belongs to the community, accountable and inclusive, but as a place to pick up a pay-check.
When on July 14, 1999 armed guards, hired by Pacifica, tried to arrest Dennis Bernstein after he disclosed the attempt to sell KPFA on Flash Points, Dennis tried to find a way to warn listeners of the take-over by running upstairs to the news department. Mark Mericle was just reading the headlines and was getting ready to lead with a story on health care. As Dennis tried to get his attention and removed the feed reel with the story from the tape deck, Mark refused twice to deviate from his schedule. Only when the board operator opened the microphone and the sounds of the struggle went on the air did Mark report on what was going on.
The battle for Pacifica was not over when staff returned to the station after the 1999 lockout. Paid staff returned without Nicole Sawaya and accepted the appointment of Jim Bennett by the Pacifica National office in her stead.
Silence among the paid staff fell again on the station at the end of 1999 as the fight over the dissolution of the national hi-jack board of Pacifica continued. Most of staff did not participate in the law suits, in the pickets of National Board members, or in the boycott of Pacifica National News. Staff was very late in supporting Free Speech Radio News - started in a garage in Berkeley - and even late in supporting Democracy Now!
While members from community organizations, most notably from the CdP, were arrested at picket lines, and organized and financed the first two rounds of elections for a KPFA Local Station Board, staff retained their silence. Staff as a whole did not allow the Local Station Board to report on the developments of the bylaws via regular Local Station Board reports. Listeners who depend on the station to keep them informed about such things had to wait for sympathetic programmers to offer time.
KPFA staff as a group refused to participate in the boycott of Pacifica National. From 1999 until removal of the last hijackers from Pacifica’s national staff in 2002, KPFA transferred to that office hundreds of thousands of dollars of listener donations used to fight the community and the lawsuits.
The crucial period from early 2002 until very recently saw KPFA and Pacifica under judge’s orders to develop a new set of bylaws. The Local Station Boards and committees, several dozen people at each station worked, very hard at consensus. At KPFA the board held meetings at the station to make it easy for staff to participate in the writing of the bylaws. One staff member participated.
Listeners wrote into the bylaws unprecedented rights and representation for staff on the local and national boards, giving them 25% membership on all boards. Under the old bylaws staff representation was zero.
Community stations across the country interviewed members on the bylaws committees, and even participated in the process. But staff at KPFA for which the bylaws were written maintained an almost uniform silence.
The story repeated itself in changes concerning Program Councils. Many community stations have such councils: Madison, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; and the GRC (Grassroots Radio Coalition) contributed from their experience. KPFA staff almost entirely ignored the debates over responsibility and rights of Program Councils and then sabotaged the outcome by not attending meetings or overturning decisions taken in them.
In the years from 1999 to today, KPFA staff had unprecedented freedom to run the affairs of the station as they pleased. Pacifica's national office no longer interfered. There was an in-house General Manager who was willing to cooperate fully with paid staff. There was no Program Director for most of that time. KPFA paid staff was in charge -- and is now.
If there have been no significant changes in all these years, is it because KPFA is already perfect? Even the paid staff majority would not say that. Even friends of staff, such as Doug Henwood, say - terrible to hear - that "KPFA is irrelevant". KPFA is known as Pat Scott Radio because it still operates under the same system of NPR - derived structures, in violation of the founders intent, and with a paid staff lacking in diversity as it was in 1995.
KPFA, as a station, in spite of its freedom from interference by the National Board, has not participated in the media democracy movement, in the resurgence of community radio via the GRC, the micropower movement, Indy media or other efforts to free the air and open access. As a station with a huge staff and unprecedented resources KPFA has been unable even to conceive of what Amy Goodman has actually done, initiating a national media collaboration involving] radio (ranging from community to NPR stations) with television and the internet.
Democracy has a hard time coming to KPFA in spite (or some would say, because of) the leanings of so many paid staff members towards the Democratic Party. There can hardly be a clearer indication of entrenched and reactionary power, than more than a year's adamant resistance to shifting the station's most popular and respected program, Democracy Now! to a time when most working people can hear it. Ownership of airtime, turf and power have also prevented an open, honest discussion over strategies to produce the best possible programming for the station as a whole.
To those of you who read through this long and critical letter, please consider what is truly most to your advantage, and that of the community you have obligated yourselves to serve. Please support a free and democratic KPFA.
Maria Gilardin