Henry Norr and the time card

Though we work in the same town, I don’t think I’ve ever met Henry Norr; I only know him by his long-respected byline as a tech journalist. But I’ve been following the story of his suspension — and now firing — with some interest.

Norr, you may recall, was suspended from his job as a tech reporter for the S.F. Chronicle about a month ago. He’d taken a day off from work because he’d participated in an antiwar protest and been arrested. According to Norr’s own account, he’d followed Chronicle policy in alerting his supervisor to his activities. (The Chronicle has since changed its policy on reporters and political activity, but that’s another story.)

Now Norr’s been fired, and the ostensible issue is that he falsified his time card by marking his day off as a “sick day.”

Now, this may have been a tactical misstep — I suppose he’d be in a stronger position, bureaucratically, had he taken the day as vacation time.

But I can also report from personal experience of ten years’ employment at the San Francisco Examiner — whose then parent company, the Hearst Corporation, now owns the Chronicle; whose old staff, my former colleagues, now work for the Chronicle; and which always shared the same union representation as the Chronicle — that time cards for writers are a joke. (They no doubt have more relevance for copy editors and other folks who work at more shift-oriented tasks.)

I worked most of that time as a theater critic. My work spilled into all hours — I’d be reading a play and doing research in the morning, then maybe take a break for a few hours, then go into the office and check my mail and make my phone calls, then have dinner, then see a show, then return to the newsroom (or later, once I had a PC and a modem, home) to write my review and file it. Sometimes my workday ran in patches from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next day. Sometimes I’d write the next morning instead. I typically covered three to five shows a week, and my work cycle was shaped by the timing of opening nights.

Trying to fit this particular workflow into the management-mandated and union-approved time card template was impossible. If I’d followed the rules as the union had defined them via collective bargaining, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job well. If I filled out the time card accurately, I would have invoked the wrath of management, because overtime would have kicked in, and they didn’t want to pay overtime.

I figured my first responsibility was to my readers, to the theaters I covered and to my own standards. So I did my job the way I needed to, and for nearly a decade I dutifully filled out a time card that claimed that I worked a steady five day a week, eight hours a day routine.

I’m not reporting this because I’m unhappy with the result — I got to do the work that I loved, and I think I served my readership well. (Time cards do not really work when the people involved are creative professionals who love their work.) I’m reporting it because everyone involved knew that this was happening. And not just with me.

So when you hear that Henry Norr has been fired because he falsified his time card, be assured that this is not the real issue. The Chronicle is getting him on a technicality because it wants to fire him for some other reason.

Could it be that the paper wants to cow its staff from participating in political demonstrations that have nothing to do with their beats? Or could it be that it just sees an opportunity to trim someone from its payroll at a time when its financial woes are well-known? Maybe the editors don’t like Norr’s work, or maybe they think they’re over-staffed in tech coverage now that there’s no tech boom to cover. Maybe they’re mad at him because he went public with his dispute.

I don’t know. I do know that the time card is a pretty transparent excuse.