The state legislator from Arvada, believed to be a direct descendant of Cotton Mather, already had a leg up in the race for Bluenosed Zealot of the Year: He founded Focus on the Family's local political arm (the Rocky Mountain Family Council), he used to erect billboards offering legal help to women "injured" by abortions, and he's the unchallenged champion of animals' sexual rights on the entire Front Range. While leading the unsuccessful Amendment 16 battle for censorship in 1994, Arrington worried about the influx into the state of materials depicting woman-dog and rodent-derriere relationships. Now this busy, busy fellow is a hired gun for the City of Aurora, which is trying to shut down Christal's, a shopping-pleasure palace for consenting adults.
Aurora city attorney Charles Richardson says the crusade against Christal's started a few years back when a gaggle of citizens complained that Aurora's own staff attorneys weren't qualified to fight smut the way it should be fought. They suggested Arrington, and he's been paid about $12,500 to wage the holy war, which has been highly successful: Earlier this year, a federal court of appeals upheld the city's aggressive anti-porn law, overturning U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch's ruling that the law was unconstitutional. The city filed a writ in U.S. District Court on August 11 to try to prevent Matsch from conducting a hearing next month on related complaints filed by Christal's attorneys.
Arrington's current rate, says Richardson, is $125 an hour. "He gave us a discount," says the city attorney, adding that the fiery Arrington has done "well" at his work. Richardson says he had no problem hiring Arrington for the work. "Any big city has to have a protocol for this," he says of the 255,000-population suburb. The idea, he adds, is for Aurora to force smut peddlers to relocate in neighboring cities that have less stringent or less strictly enforced laws. In some ways, however, Aurora will never really be a city. After all, its newspaper, the Sentinel, refers to Arrington, whose Amendment 16 campaign sought to virtually stamp out "offensive" speech, as a "civil-liberties attorney." You know, like Joe Stalin was a small-d democrat.
Mopping up: Attorneys for big-time janitorial contractor Maintenance Unlimited Inc. got hopping mad last week over a July Westword story that said the National Labor Relations Board "found" the company had violated federal labor law 69 times in a dispute with workers trying to organize in the Denver Tech Center. In fact, the attorneys pointed out in the process of demanding a retraction and an apology (Letters, August 6), the NLRB had merely alleged that those infractions took place, and a judge had yet to issue any findings on whether their client had engaged in unfair labor practices.
Point well taken. But here comes the judge.
In an August 6 ruling, federal administrative law judge Albert A. Metz found that Maintenance Unlimited, the major janitorial contractor in the southern suburbs, has violated federal labor law by harassing employees who want to form a union.
Local 105 of the Service Employees International Union has been trying to organize Tech Center janitors for much of the past year ("Janitors in a Conundrum," July 23). The judge upheld most of the complaints brought by attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board and singled out Maintenance Unlimited's treatment of 38-year-old David Rocha as an especially galling example of the company's labor record.
Like most of the firm's other employees, Rocha is an immigrant from Mexico. He made just over $5 an hour before he was fired. The father of four took part in a brief strike last summer during which he was quoted by local newspapers and radio stations as saying he "just wanted to be treated justly." He told Judge Metz that Raul Castorena, a Maintenance Unlimited supervisor, had threatened that he and other union supporters "were going to be taken to the sky." Rocha interpreted that comment, which was made while he and Castorena were alone in an elevator, as a death threat. He filed a complaint with police. While Castorena told the court that he was only joking, the judge ruled that the remarks violated Rocha's rights under the National Labor Relations Act.
Being taken to the sky might actually be a relief to many Maintenance Unlimited employees, judging by the plantation-style working conditions they allegedly have endured at ground level. Judge Metz's ruling referred to constant verbal abuse and petty harassment of employees. The NLRB has charged that some workers were forced to clean toilets with their bare hands, that the company told employees they couldn't wear pro-union T-shirts on the job, and that supervisors asked workers to leave through different exits on days when they knew union organizers were waiting outside. Metz found the infractions serious enough that he ordered Maintenance Unlimited to offer jobs to Rocha and other employees fired for union activity and to compensate them for their loss of income. The company was also ordered to post prominent notices in six Tech Center buildings informing janitorial workers that Maintenance Unlimited has been found in violation of federal labor law and now promises to be on its best behavior regarding union-organizing activities.
Maintenance Unlimited has 28 days from the date of Metz's ruling to "file an exception" to the judge's findings. Should the company do so, the case would be heard by the full NLRB in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, the firm's skirmish with the union has moved to a new battlefield: the boardroom of the Cherry Creek School District. The company's cleaning contract with the school system is up for renewal, and activists are arguing that a contractor that has violated labor laws isn't fit to sweep up after schoolchildren. Call it class warfare.
Numbers crunching: Tired of all the bleating between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News over who's got the biggest circulation figures of them all? Just be glad you don't subscribe to a daily in the Bay Area, where the crossfire over circulation has grown so intense that a pair of papers controlled by Post mogul William Dean "Dinky" Singleton have been dragged into court over the matter. A lawsuit filed by a local furniture retailer doing business as Leather 4 Less accuses Singleton's MediaNews Group Inc. and its California subsidiary, Alameda Newspapers, of squeezing advertisers 4 More. The suit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, claims that Singleton's Oakland Tribune and Hayward Daily Review overstated circulation figures, defrauding advertisers by making them pay for access to non-existent readers.
The suit says that an April audit by the Audit Bureau of Circulations trade group found that the Tribune had overstated its circulation by 17 percent and that the Daily Review was off by 6 percent. Attorneys for Leather 4 Less are asking advertisers who believe they were overcharged to join in the suit, which they hope to turn into a class action. However, a judge has yet to certify the class. And Alameda Newspapers president Scott McKibben (brother of Post publisher Ryan McKibben) says Dinky's dailies have nothing to apologize for. "We think it's baseless," says McKibben of the suit. In fact, McKibben insists that advertisers got the papers they paid for and adds that a mere technicality separates the paper's numbers from the auditors'. "The bottom line is, the papers were printed, they were delivered and they were paid for," he says.
For Dinky's advertisers, though, the lawsuit remains...essential reading.
