Don’t Drink the KPFA Kool-aid!

an alternative view of KPFA’s latest civil war, from a grassroots labor perspective

Adapted from a written statement by Curt Gray submitted to the Berkeley Labor Commission

I am writing as a longtime union member as well as a longtime Berkeley resident. I am a member of Local 510 Sign and Display, a union of workers who set up and dismantle tradeshows at convention centers. I have been my union’s past representative to the Alameda Central Labor Council.

I also speak as someone with long experience in local radio, and with varied experience in and around KPFA over several years. I was a volunteer programmer at KALX here in Berkeley for 15 years. I have been involved with KPFA as a listener activist since 1993, and was part of the struggle that gave membership rights in the Pacifica Foundation, parent of KPFA, to subscribers and staff. That meant voting for and representation on a real local station board, where formerly there had been only a self-appointed advisory board.

I helped write the election rules that allowed subscribers and staff to elect KPFA’s local board for the first time. I was elected to and served on the local station board. I organized a Labor Programming Collective within KPFA to try to expand Labor programming and involve more labor activists in creating that programming.

What I am here to say is that the charge of ‘union-busting’ is a smoke screen, a PR sales job. The current controversy at KPFA is not a repeat of the events of 1999; that’s another misrepresentation. Pacifica is not responsible for taking the Morning Show off the air. Removal of the Morning Show is being used as a pawn in an internal corporate campaign coordinated with job actions — a calculated violation of the union contract.

Who is doing this and why?

For decades KPFA has been effectively owned, controlled and run by a culture of patronage and exclusivity that has resisted any ‘outside’ oversight. The patronage has to do with who gets or keeps a show, who gets a job, and who has easy access to the air.

A particular clique of people, both inside the station and influential people in the community, benefit from, support, and protect a patronage culture. The insiders who control the division of the spoils extend well beyond the union membership; they put their aims and interests above those of the outsiders, including union members.

The “ownership” clique includes some but not all of the paid staff, some but not all of the unpaid staff, and well placed and influential supporters in the community. It has had a disproportionate and unhealthy power over KPFA, and has viewed any other organizational form of authority within the station, including the elected station board, the station manager, the Foundation board, the Executive Director, the Program Council, and the unpaid staff organization, as a threat that must be outmaneuvered or neutralized unless they are clearly in the back pocket of the clique.

When the Pacifica stations, including KPFA, made subscribers and workers members of the foundation, and started letting these broad constituencies elect station boards with powers of oversight for their stations, there was resistance from the start, especially at KPFA.

The new elected station boards are no longer only advisory. They are real station boards, approving the station budget, evaluating and helping to select the station General Manager and Program Director, and provide community input into station policy. They provide a measure of accountability where there was none before.

It was inevitable that there would be conflict with the pre-existing patronage culture that had formerly ruled the station for so long, using a self-selected advisory body that had no real power, only able to act as a rubberstamp.

This is the real context of the current teapot rebellion of the Morning Show. The clique-that-calls-itself-KPFA is sick of dealing with elections and all the other reforms that came out of the struggles in the years after 1999. When you give people membership rights and elections, it leads naturally to a change. Subscribers and unpaid programmers on the station board begin to insist on accountability, transparency, fairness, and more community participation. And such basic progressive demands are a fatal threat to even the strongest patronage culture.

Using their control of the air and the good will of the majority of listeners, who know nothing of the goings-on behind the scenes, the patronage protectors have managed to maintain a majority on the station board most years since the board became elected. Even after elections began, they have kept control of the station, keeping the board from performing its oversight function, forcing out managers that were too independent, and handpicking their own to run the station in a way that does not interfere with their prerogatives.

For the first forty years of its existence KPFA had very few paid staff. This began to change in the Eighties and the Nineties. In 1995 the unaccountable body that was running Pacifica purged hundreds of unpaid programmers from several stations. They began a switch from a community based programming philosophy to a more “professional” Public Radio style format that depended on many more paid programmers.

Paid staff grew while the number of community members involved in creating programming was cut by half. The union that had represented both the paid and unpaid workers was dropped, the majority of paid staff voted to go with CWA, and the unpaid staff lost the representation and recognition they had had for decades.

The patronage culture thought that what Pacifica was doing was good for them. They were on board as KPFA left its grassroots behind and grasped for the brass ring of Public Radio careerism. That is, until the tables were turned and Pacifica Foundation took a new look at programming and staffing. It was only when members of the charmed circle were losing their jobs that they sounded the alarm, which led to the lock-out and the events of the Summer of 1999.

To win the battle with the Pacifica Foundation board in 1999, the Powers-That-Be at KPFA needed the community activists and unpaid staff. And what the community wanted was democratic reform and membership status so that no unaccountable group could ever steal KPFA away from the community again. After a long struggle, the Pacifica board was defeated and the bylaws were changed to give a voice in the station to the stakeholders who supported KPFA. But the patronage insiders saw the new reforms as just another enemy, and started fighting the reforms from day one.

After the struggle to save Pacifica and reform it, the number of paid staff began rising again, as it had before the lock-out in 1999. The Powers-That-Be managed to retain a majority on the local station board and the Pacifica Foundation board. The patronage culture kept swelling the number of paid staff, but the Afghan and Iraq wars kept the subscriber support up for a few years.

As the peace movement started to lose traction, and more folks started getting their information from the internet and other sources subscriber support started falling. But payroll and staffing numbers kept going up.

In the last two years many public stations have had to cut their staffs; the other Pacifica stations have cut their staffs; and Pacifica Foundation has cut its staff. At KPFA, mandated staff cuts were blocked, station reserves were burned through, and an attempt was made to encourage Pacifica to lay off some less favored union members — out of seniority order, contrary to the union contract.

Now the insiders seem to be willing to play chicken with the fate of the entire Pacifica network, drawing a line in the sand over who ‘owns’ KPFA. The confrontation over the Morning Show has been cleverly orchestrated. They knew what they were doing when they burned through the reserve and placed two people with the lowest seniority in one of the most popular shows. They are being reckless, and putting their own interests above the whole community that depends on KPFA.

The tail is wagging the dog. It has fed the whole community, including the labor community, a false, self-serving line of baloney, calling it “union busting”. The KPFA union contract calls for: no job actions. By using so much time on the air to plead for their personal jobs, some paid staff were not doing their job of providing programming.

They forced the hand of Pacifica with their on-air job actions. And they have used the union to keep the show off the air by mandating that no union member would accept transfer to work on the program. Pacifica did not take the Morning Show off the air, the insiders did, using the union in violation of its own contract.

Don’t drink the kool-aid, don’t fall for the con. There are KPFA workers, both union and unpaid, who are against what is being done but are afraid to speak up. The whole Pacifica network, and KPFA itself, is being endangered to protect a level of paid staffing that the station cannot currently support.

I don’t know why these people are dragging KPFA to the brink of bankruptcy for their own self-interest, but I ask, as a Berkeley resident and union member, that the Labor Commission and the City Council not let themselves be fooled by this false campaign.

Curt Gray

CWA-KPFA Collective Bargaining Agreement
This Agreement is entered into as of April 30, 2010, between Pacifica Foundation, its
successors and assigns, (“Employer”) which owns and operates radio station KPFA-FM
and KPFB-FM in Berkeley, California, and the Communications Workers of America
(“Local” or “CWA”).
SECTION 7 - NO STRIKE BREAKING, NO STRIKE, NO LOCKOUT
B. The Union, it’s officers, agents, members and employees of the Employer covered
by this Agreement agree that so long as this Agreement is in effect, there shall be
no strikes, sit-downs, job actions, stoppage of work, slowdowns, retardation of
work procedures, boycott, sympathy strikes, corporate campaigns or any acts that
interfere with the Employer’s operations.