Firing of LAT pressman remains a mystery

You'd figure they have had plenty of practice by now, but when Ed Padgett was let go after 39 years on the job, it was up to a woman in HR to inform him on the phone that the firing was due to "safety violations, dishonesty and suspicion of sabotage." If she offered any fuller explanation, Padgett isn't saying. From Frying Pan News:

"It was similar to jumping into an icy cold pool of water," Padgett recalls. "I felt like crying because I'd been there so damn long, but I soon got over it." He drove on to his meeting in La Mirada, but hasn't been back to the Times printing plant on Olympic Boulevard to clean out his locker. "I just have my work boots in it," he says, "and a knife I use to trim newsprint rolls when they get twisted up -- it saves a lot of money." Padgett filed a grievance through Teamster Local 140-N, a process that may take another month. His case is complicated because the Times fired him the day his union was to ratify a new contract.

Padgett is not just another Times employee. He is a union activist and a blogger who had been known to post not-so-flattering nuggets about the paper's financial condition. An LAT spokeswoman said icily: ""Ed Padgett served as a pressman for the Times and is not a spokesperson for the company nor did his position provide him with access to overall company operations." Some of what Padgett posted turned out to be true; some of it was closer to gossip. It's easy to see why the honchos wouldn't exactly sing his praises, but how that dislike escalated into his firing has yet to be explained.