http://mediajusticekpfa.blogspot.com/
Monday, October 6, 2008
SEPTEMBER SURPRISE:
SAWAYA SCORNS KPFA STAFF, APPOINTS RIJIO AS GENERAL MANAGER
“Goodbye, goodbye! And here’s a job for you.”
Perhaps she didn’t speak those exact words, but the Pacifica Network’s departing Executive Director, Nicole Sawaya, used her very last day at work to appoint a General Manager at Pacifica ’s oldest radio station, the Bay Area’s KPFA. In an email sent out late in the afternoon of September 30, Sawaya announced she was appointing the divisive Lemlem Rijio to permanent status as KPFA General Manager. Rijio already held the job on an interim basis, but by appointing her as permanent-status GM, Sawaya ignored a call by scores of KPFA staffers for new leadership at the troubled station.
Under the Pacifica Bylaws rules for filling management positions, the Executive Director is empowered to select a station General Manager from a pool of candidates submitted by the Local Station Board. Sawaya chose Rijio from a pool of eleven candidates, without interviewing all eleven.
Rijio was appointed interim General Manager in the spring of 2006 by Greg Guma, the Executive Director at that time. Guma recently said that he and Rijio had agreed that Rijio would hold the interim GM job for a maximum of nine months, then return to her previous position as Development Director. Writing to a radio email list, Guma said, “I wish she had stuck to the arrangement we had made and returned to the job she originally had.”
Later in 2006, Rijio appointed Sasha Lilley as Program Director, a job that had been vacant for years. Although both Rijio and Lilley occupied their jobs only in interim status, they soon began taking unprecedented actions to expand their own power. Lilley told the members of the station’s Program Council that she, not the PC, would make programming decisions (contrary to a ruling by KPFA’s governing body, the Local Station Board). In January 2007, without consulting the PC, management took the program Youth Radio off the air because one episode of the show included a song containing FCC-prohibited words that the show’s producers had forgotten to edit out. Youth Radio never returned. Under Lilley’s direction, the Program Council, which formerly met weekly, now rarely meets at all. This past June, a community representative to the Program Council resigned, complaining that, “there's no ongoing body of work visibly connected to an actual programming process.”
In the summer of 2007, Rijio surprised the station’s unpaid staff members by announcing that management was withdrawing its recognition of the Unpaid Staff Organization (UPSO) as the official representative of the unpaid staff. Unpaid staff are the majority of KPFA staff and produce the majority of the station’s programs. KPFA’s Local Station Board and Pacifica ’s National Board subsequently passed motions ordering management to re-recognize UPSO, but Rijio has ignored those directives. While most of KPFA’s paid staff are unionized, the unpaid workers now have no official collective representation. UPSO was not engaged in any negotiations with management at the time of the derecognition; given its timing, management’s only plausible motive was to claim authority over the unpaid-staff voter list for the LSB elections later that year (but, although some unpaid staffers did not receive ballots in that election, dissatisfaction with management had already become sufficiently widespread that reform candidates won two of the three staff seats anyway).
[snip]
- Anthony Fest
Media Justice KPFA
mediajusticekpfa @ gmail.com
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