By Rachel Brahinsky

Just weeks after San Francisco Examiner editor Dave Burgin was fired, and on the heels of lingering concerns about the newspaper's future, graphic designers at ExIn, which operates the Examiner, have voted to form a union.

The move raises complex political questions for the Fang family, which bought the paper from the Hearst Corp. in November 2000. That deal was aided by Mayor Willie Brown, who tried to negotiate a truce between the Fangs and the city's powerful labor unions, which were upset that the new publishers were not planning to run a union shop.

After a conversation with the Fangs in Brown's office, the unions were given the sense that the Fangs might be amenable. That sense didn't last long.

"They smiled and said they would be happy to work with us, and then they turned around and engaged in some of the most antiunion tactics I've ever seen," said Doug Cuthbertson, executive officer of the Northern California Media Workers Union, which represents editorial, administrative, and other workers at the San Francisco Chronicle. "We went ahead and started signing people up, especially in editorial. Over the course of the next six months to a year, the Fangs ... ferreted out the leadership and got rid of all of them. Right now we are exploring legal action [regarding the firings]."

Examiner staff refute Cuthbertson's claim. "That charge is just bullshit," executive editor Zoran Basich told the Bay Guardian. "When we make staff changes, it's about trying to make this the strongest paper we can. I don't think those charges have any merit."

A majority of the Fangs' 25 graphic-design employees voted Feb. 8 to join the Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU), which also represents production workers and printers at the Chronicle. ExIn's designers create advertisements and lay out editorial text for the Examiner as well as Asian Week and the Fang's chain of Independent newspapers.

The graphic designers we talked to said they were prompted to organize because of the work environment. Last fall, after publisher Ted Fang was ousted from the operation by his mother, Florence Fang, ExIn's graphic designers became increasingly restless as rumors of impending job cuts spread.

"We heard she wanted to force us to do 32 hours instead of 40 and that she wanted us to have to go home early without pay if there was no work," Grant Corley, night foreman for the design department, said. "They were going to cut our health benefits. And they wanted us to speed up. We finally figured it was time to organize."

Corley's bargaining unit represents a small percentage of the Examiner's staff, but it's hard to say how small. When we asked for the total number of workers employed by the Ex itself and by ExIn as a whole, staffer Brian Underwood told us the company's attorneys had instructed him to say "no comment."

Publisher Florence Fang could not be reached for comment.