What would happen if David and Charles Koch, the conservative billionaire brothers, bought the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and other leading newspapers from the Tribune Co.?

Concerned about the likelihood of the Kochs purchasing some of the largest and most influential newspapers in the nation from the financially troubled Tribune Co., The Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America organized a very spirited debate at the National Press Club in Washington on June 26.

“The fear is that the Kochs are motivated to use the newspapers to further their overt conservative agenda. Credible news will suffer. This is of special concern as virtually every city in America, with just a handful of exceptions, is now a one-newspaper town,” Guild President Bernie Lunzer said in a statement at the event, attended by about 60 journalists, Guild members and members of the public. 

Members of several unions showed up in force at Whirlpool Corp.’s annual shareholder meeting in Chicago Tuesday. David Jones, a retired member of IUE-CWA, and a former Whirlpool employee of the shuttered refrigerator facility in Evansville, Ind., presented the AFL-CIO’s shareholder proposal asking the company to obtain shareholder approval for any future “golden coffin” payments to senior executives.

While millions of 99% Americans continue to be jobless and the nation’s unemployment rate hovers around 8.3 percent, chief executive officers of the nation’s largest companies received a 2 percent pay raise last year. While that may not seem like much of an increase, it came on top of a 27 percent hike in 2010, according to a report in USA Today.

The median, or mid-point, pay of top executives was $9.6 million in 2011, USA Today reported, based on 138 companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 largest companies whose pay data has been disclosed. As more CEO pay data becomes public, the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch website, paywatch.org, will be updated with more complete data in mid-April.

The Americans for Financial Reform Conference on Executive Pay and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act will discuss this afternoon a provision that would disclose the CEO-to-worker pay ratio to investors and the public for the first time. The AFL-CIO is hosting the conference.