Washington Post - Guild NewsJuly 16, 2002 Labor Logjam at the Post
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| After nearly five months of difficult negotiations, your Guild bargaining committee still finds itself seriously at odds with Washington Post management on several key issues. It is very important that Guild members come to the membership meeting this Wednesday, July 17, at 12:30, to discuss progress to date and to hear from you about how you want this process to proceed. The committee cannot settle this problem without your help and your input. In preparation for this important meeting, here is an update for members to consider as we all head into the third month of working here at The Post without a contract. WAGES:
The Post continues to insist upon offering nothing more than a lump
sum in the first year of the contract, an arrangement that the Guild
has never before accepted and one that would have us go two full years
without a single contractual wage increase. The Guild continues to
insist upon some kind of a real wage increase in the first year of
the new contract -- an increase that, unlike lump sums, would raise
the floor on which future increases would be built. The Post has offered
a $1,350 lump sum for full timers and Overall, the Guild’s most recent proposal calls for 3 percent wage increases, on average, for each of the three years of the contract. That’s 1.7 percentage points less than federal workers got this year and 1.1 percentage points less than they are poised to get next year. By contrast, Post management proposes wage increases in the second and third years of the contract that would, on average, amount to 1.2 percent per year over three years. (In the commercial departments, where average salaries are lower, the increases proposed by Post management would average 1.6 percent; in the newsroom they would average 1 percent). UNION SECURITY: Post management continues to insist on new contract language that would seriously undermine the union’s survival at The Post, a threat that even non-members recognize as a dangerous situation. Here are the facts: Until the 1970s, the contract at The Post required at least 80 percent of Guild-eligible employees to pay union dues. The union was a powerful force and consistently won wage increases that had Post employee salaries ranked No.1 among major newspapers in the nation. For the past twenty-plus years membership has been voluntary, making it more difficult for the union to maintain that level of effectiveness. One of the things that has allowed the union to survive and still have an impact under this situation is contractual language that requires those who join to remain members until the annual one-month "window period" comes around, during which time everyone has the opportunity to quit. This allows the union to budget for legal and other expenditures (remember, it takes money, lawyers, office staff and other resources to represent employees effectively). Now Post management wants to change the contract so that members can quit any time, instead of during one month every year. They speak of "choice" and "freedom" -- standard union busting talk -- but this is nothing less than a cynical attempt to turn The Post into a non-union workplace. Without a union, there would be no workplace contract. Without a contract, you would be at the mercy of your bosses’ will: You could be fired for any reason (other than federally designated acts of discrimination), and there would be no mechanism for filing grievances when you believe you’ve been treated unfairly.
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And,
of course, wage increases -- along with health care, holidays, vacations,
sick leave, sabbaticals, pension, 401(k)plan, tuition reimbursement
and other benefits -- would be determined solely by the employer, not
through negotiation with your union representatives. Post management
hopes they can buy
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*Membership Meeting*
Wednesday,July 17,12:30 P.M. |
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VACATION:Your bargaining committee has been working hard to hammer out a plan with Post management that would retain your current ability to save unused vacation for two years but also satisfy some of the company’s concerns about the financial liability inherent in that system. The two sides have worked out a plan that largely accomplishes that but that still fails to deal with The Post's effort to take away people’s accumulated vacation from the past several years without properly compensating for it. E-MAIL and GUILD COMMUNICATIONS: Post management continues to push for language regarding the use of e-mail to communicate with Guild-covered employees that is far more restrictive than necessary. The National Labor Relations Board has spoken clearly on this issue, and the Guild has agreed (and is willing to write into any contract) to abide by the Board’s rulings. But this is not good enough for The Washington Post, that bastion of free speech, which is demanding that we sign a contract that would restrict our ability to communicate with employees to a far greater extent than the NLRB has ruled to be appropriate. This is a relatively new area of law, and one in which technology is changing every year. It would be wholly inappropriate for the Guild to sign a contract that signs away more of our freedom to communicate than necessary. WRITING
FOR THE WEB: Post management continues to refuse to accept even the
most innocuous language regarding our rights with regard to work for
washingtonpost.com. The company is stuck in the awkward position of
claiming on the one hand that the Web site/WPNI is a separate operation
from The Washington Post and, on the other hand, that we can be required
to write for it for In summary, although we have worked out many details for a new contract, a few major issues remain and at least one of them -- union security -- threatens to completely change the nature of your employment at The Post. We had hoped that management would have heard the message conveyed by our recent byline strike, pickets, letter-writing campaigns and other actions, which showed just how unified we are as a group and just how strongly we feel about having a voice at work. What will it take? What must we do next? Come
to Wednesday’s membership meeting and look ahead to your future. --
Rick Weiss
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Washington-Baltimore
Newspaper Guild, Local 32035 TNG-CWA, AFL-CIO/ 1100 15th St., NW,
Suite 350 Washington, DC 20005/ 202-785-3650 /Fax: 202-7859 Copyright © 2002 Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild |
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