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Sept. 27, 2004 (Un)Ethical Bargaining Bargaining on the ethics code ended Friday with the Guild refusing to agree to the final offer on the table and the company exercising its right to impose it. During the eight weeks of talks, there is no doubt that the code was improved. Restrictions were relaxed on memberships in outside organizations and on certain types of partisan activities. Though we were not able to keep the code's First Amendment restrictions off the back of those in the newsroom without journalistic responsibilities, these changes make that burden much lighter. The company also modified a particularly bad provision that would have let it change the code anytime it felt like it. And there was some improvement to language on participating in union activities, though the code still falls far short of satisfactorily protecting your federally guaranteed rights. Other than that, most of the company's responses to Guild proposals were minor changes in the initial proposal -- things like posting the code on the Loop. There were too many basic flaws in the code for the Guild to agree to it. For instance, company negotiators refused to budge on the onerous and offensive disclosure forms that must be filled out and signed each year. This is not surprising since these forms came directly from the Tribune, the people in Chicago who were clearly directing the moves on the other side of the table. But what is fundamentally wrong with this code is that the Tribune style of management is not the best way to achieve an ethical newspaper. Some of you who were in the room on the final day of contract negotiations last summer may recall that after the company puts its contract on the table -- and Guild negotiators reacted with stunned anger -- Tribune labor lawyer Tim Fair said that the contract showed that they were “serious about doing business in a new way." This despite the fact that we had tried to make clear their top-down management model -- typified by their please-your-boss-and-get-a-raise pay scheme -- was not the right way to run a newspaper. In the last year, we have seen the result of that new way of doing business. It has been one of the most traumatic years in the history of The Sun, with a hemorrhaging of talent and experience the likes of which this newspaper has never seen. Time and again during these ethics negotiations, we tried to convince management negotiators -- Fair was again one of those -- that recent ethical lapses showed that their top-down model of ethics was not the way to go; that Jayson Blair was a favorite of top New York Times editor Howell Raines; that the editors at USA Today loved Jack Kelley and dismissed his colleagues who questioned his ethics as "jealous;" that the circulation scandal at Newsday came about because supervisors ordered those beneath them to fudge the numbers. The Tribune types had no answer to these arguments. They stuck to their proposal. It is clearly dangerous to conflate authority with ethics but that is exactly what this policy does. We
are convinced that the company's myopia about its Dilbert-style management
model will not have the same effect on ethics at The Sun that its
actions of last year had on the staff and its morale. But it will
not be because of this policy, it will be because We Are The Sun;
we are ethical people and we put out an ethical newspaper. And we
don't have to ask our supervisor's permission for that. --
Michael Hill, Guild Unit Chair Return to Guild Local Home Page
Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, Local 32035 TNG-CWA, AFL-CIO/ 1100 15th St., NW, Suite 350, Washington, D.C. 20005 202-785-3650 /Fax: 202-785-3659 © 2004 Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. No portion of this website may be reproduced in any form without expressed written permission, except by members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Copyright of photographs is held by the photographers; reprint permission may be granted only by the photographers. WBNG is solely responsible for the content of this website. Questions or comments about this site? Contact Local32035@wbng.org |
