Asian American Labor Struggle at Chinese Daily News

August 8, 2003 - More than two hundred activists and community members rallied in support of organizing workers at the Chinese Daily News in a show of force timed to coincide with the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) National Convention.

Management at the Chinese Daily News, the largest circulating Chinese-language newspaper in Los Angeles, has refused to recognize their workers' right to organize a union. With an NLRB decision pending on the workers' vote to unionize more than one year ago, Chinese Daily News continues to intimidate active workers and discourage the formation of a union, according to the workers inside.

Steve Atkinson, a lawyer for the CDN told the LATimes that the newspaper's workers are ignorant about American unions, indicating that their pro-union vote could not be trusted. "[Those] Asians were not sophisticated enough to understand what they were being told was a bunch of lies," he told the paper.

Nonetheless, the CDN workers who addressed the crowd did not seem intimidated or misled, and vowed to continue their fight for dignity and respect on the job. As politicians, labor leaders, and rank and file activists addressed the crowd in Spanish, English, Korean, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and French, their message was the same. "Take one of us on, take all of us on," they cheered.



(Atkinson quoted in LATimes "Asian Workers Flex Their Union Muscles" by Eric Chan, Sep.03, 2002 p.B4)