LADN Endangers Workers, Public, to Score a Political Point

by Julia Rosen [courtesy of Working Californians blogs]

Today I had the high honor of taking over the Fire Dog Lake weekly labor issues blog post. Here is was was published thanks to Tula over at the AFL-CIO. It is an update to an earlier piece. Go read the comments!

The Daily News is well known for being virulently anti-worker. Basically, the paper takes the position that everyone should be making poor wages and grateful for having a job, no matter how dangerous. The paper supports privatization and job outsourcing and routinely editorializes against workers’ rights issues.

The other week, the paper published a breathless report about the salaries of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) employees, publishing the name, job title and corresponding salary of all employees in a searchable online database, in tandem with an article about how much they make.

The editor went so far as to put up a note at the head of the article, urging people to read the article and “see how your pay compares with theirs.” This is a divisive attempt to try and depress the salaries of other city employees who are currently in contract negotiations with the city. The Daily News wanted to influence the bargaining process by publicly smearing the LADWP workers. (The paper has since pulled the article, but this link still includes the editor’s note.)

What they ended up doing was putting the workers—and all of us who depend on water and power systems—at risk. Typically when salary information is released for reasons of public transparency, only job titles are listed, not full names. By publishing names, the paper opened up a treasure trove of information for would-be saboteurs. Imagine how much damage someone could do by creating a fake badge, complete with real name and title to get access to our water and power system. Individuals already have attempted to do so in the past. In addition:

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