Guild Agrees to Pay for Performance

That might sound like a big story, but it's actually a bit stale. It's about 50 years old. The earliest contract we have in the Guild offices is from 1965. It contains these words: "Nothing in this agreement shall be construed as preventing the publisher from paying wages higher than those herein set forth." That phrase has been in every Guild contract since. It means that we agree that the publisher can reward anyone for good performance.

In fact, we encourage it. We certainly hope that this year's Pulitzer winner and finalists were showered with thousands of dollars in pay raises. We hope all the Sun's many award winners - reporters, photographers, artists, designers and many more - are similarly rewarded. And that the same is true for the many young reporters who work countless hours in the suburban bureaus to battle successfully against the Washington Post's higher paid competition.

So when Sun management says The Guild wants "cookie cutter" raises for everyone, nothing could be further from the truth. We encourage as much merit pay as possible. All we are asking is that the people who work at The Sun - who are clearly competent at their jobs or they would not be in them - be given regular raises that help keep them close to rises in the cost of living. Any money management wants to pay for performance on top of that is fine with the union.

Moves on Sick Leave

Guild negotiators made a major move on Thursday toward the Tribune sick leave model that is based on using short-term disability for lengthy illnesses. Though we still feel that the current sick leave policy is not broken, so doesn't need fixing, we did this to help move this contract to resolution.

We tried to do it in such a way that protected the rights and needs of our members. The five yearly sick days offered by Tribune would be raised to 15 under the Guild proposal. Part time employees would essentially get half of what full time employees get.

We also emphasized that our members feel that the sick leave days they have accrued during years of responsible use of their sick days have value. So we propose that the company either allow you to keep those days to augment the 15 yearly days in the future, or that the company buy them back from you on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

In making this move, we were hoping that the Tribune negotiators would respond positively and let us know that we were helping solve a serious issue for them. But we heard nothing of the sort. Instead, Tribune vice president Howard G. Weinstein emphasized that major gaps remained.

Then he and Tribune labor lawyer Tim Fair put two proposals on the table that caused serious problems for Guild negotiators. The first was termed a final offer on vacations. It contained a major flaw as it said you cannot accrue vacation time while you are on vacation, on holiday or out sick. Guild Local President Bill Salganik pointed out that would mean that instead of accruing four weeks vacation per year, someone would get only three and a half weeks.

Weinstein and Fair said they "disputed" those calculations. This must mean that the multiplication tables are subject to negotiation. (You can do the math yourself: After four years of employment, you get a vacation day for every 12 ½ paid days. There are 260 paid days in a 52 week year. Under the company proposal, you would subtract four weeks of vacation, nine holidays and, say, five sick days from that - a total of 34 days. See what you come up with.)

Then the Tribune team put on the table a slightly modified proposal calling for layoffs for all new employees to be not by seniority, but by ability - as determined by management. This would essentially mean the end of job security. The only modification would put these employees on a rehire list for six months, again in order of ability as determined by the publisher.

Seniority is a long recognized way of determining layoffs, but the Tribune proposal is an arbitrary and capricious mechanism. The seniority system protects the workforce - and The Sun --from the whims of different managers who come in with their various favorites and enemies. It would open up the possibility of all sorts of discrimination based on age or other factors. And the only way the union could challenge a layoff would be by saying, "No, you can't layoff our member X, because our member Y is actually less competent." That's a clearly untenable position.

There is a road that can lead to a fair contract and a settlement on Tuesday. We took several steps down that road with the sick leave proposal. But so far the Tribune is refusing to walk with us.

Correction: In a previous bulletin, Tim Fair was incorrectly identified as a Tribune Vice President. He is not. The Guild regrets the error.

- Michael Hill for the Bargaining Committee