To some past Santa Barbara News-Press employees who are owed money for labor violations, the Ampersand Publishing bankruptcy filing feels like a ploy to avoid paying.
A National Labor Relations Board case has stretched on more than 15 years. News-Press owner Wendy McCaw’s company was found liable and ordered to pay employees $2.2 million, but the payments haven’t been made.
About 25 employees are listed among the hundreds of creditors in the Chapter 7 bankruptcy documents filed last week by Ampersand Publishing, parent company of the News-Press.
“We’ve been told they’re still trying to make Wendy pay up at least what she owes all of her former employees and whatever employees were left, so we’ll see what happens,” former News-Press sports editor and columnist Mark Patton told Noozhawk.
“It would be kind of the ultimate insult if this bankruptcy goes through in a building she owns, and she says she does not have enough to pay employees. It’s kind of a sick irony.”
The NLRB ordered the newspaper company to pay Teamsters Union employees for losses from discontinued merit pay raises and using non-union workers at the company, and backpay to Dennis Moran and Richard Mineards who were unfairly