March 9, 2004

---

Every Job Counts: Don’t Send Post Jobs Out of State

Outsourcing of American jobs has become a controversial political issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, and The Washington Post newspaper has been covering it closely. But within The Post Company, the outsourcing of some of our jobs has quietly begun on an experimental basis and it threatens to rob Guild members here of their livelihoods.

The Circulation Department began a 90-day “trial” program last October in which Post customers who wanted to terminate their subscriptions were no longer connected to speak with our local Guild-covered circulation employees. Instead, those Washington-area callers are connected to lower-wage non-Post, nonunion employees working at a call center in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

Instead of being connected to a career Post worker in a Guild-covered job—a loyal Post employee with a vested interest in the success and future of the Washington Post—our customers are funneled into distant switchboards to speak to call-takers nearly 1,000 miles away who are simultaneously performing such functions for other large corporations.

Our Guild contract cannot prevent outsourcing, but it provides that “no Guild unit employee shall be laid off as a direct result” of this practice. But Guild jobs are nonetheless threatened, because Circulation Management is now extending the “trial” another 90 days and is assigning people to lesser duties, while allowing for attrition to shrink the staff ranks.

Forty-five Circulation jobs are in jeopardy now—but many more jobs in other departments could be next. We are talking about good, secure jobs. D.C. jobs. Union jobs. The Post professes to care about the local community and its well-being. We need to stand up and stand together to draw the line on this practice, before it erodes the work lives of more and more of us, and the DC metropolitan community.

-- Darlene Meyer and Rick Weiss
Guild Co-Chairs

Lynn Sulyma
Circulation Department Steward

Click here for the previous issue of Post Guild Unit News

Click here for an index of back issues of Post Guild Unit News