Our Call to Action: We Are the Guild!

The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild’s members are the union’s greatest resource. It is our duty to educate and train our members to take a more active role in the life of the union, working in collaboration with the local’s staff to achieve WBNG’s aims of organizing more and more workers under the Guild. To bring this about, we must do more organizing without renouncing the work of bargaining and enforcing the kind of quality contracts that have motivated workers to join the Guild and work for employers who have contract with WBNG.

WBNG commits itself to training its unit officers, shop stewards and activists so that they can properly process grievances and handle unit administration tasks, in addition to working with local leaders and staff when called on to fulfill duties that benefit the entire local.

Unit leadership is key. Since we are the Guild, we need more Guild members to participate in the life of the union, and bring down whatever barriers exist to greater participation.

Local staff possess the skills to negotiate contracts, pursue external organizing assignments, represent members at grievance and arbitration hearings, and provide strategy to conduct successful internal organizing campaigns.

There are several ways by which WBNG can meet our goals.

Training for Unit Officers

• WBNG has the option of offering local-wide training for unit officers as it does for shop stewards. In some instances, unit leaders can benefit from on-site workplace training given by WBNG staff, particularly their local representative. Also, unit officers can obtain advanced training at the National Labor College, CWA District 2 or other training institutes. There are also cases in which “train-the-trainer” sessions can be conducted and steward training done within the unit by knowledgeable unit officers.

• WBNG must maintain a schedule of training of its members through various initiatives: by providing two to three local-wide trainings annually, which may include, but are not limited to, Unit Leader Training, Steward Training, Negotiation Training, Train-the-Trainer Training. In-unit training, such as a retraining/refresher course at an advanced organizing training class and or train-the trainer training sessions must be explored. External training must also be considered when it comes to identifying future unit leaders with time to train and recruiting new members in open shops). The local should be prepared to invest in its members by offering lost time to members who take training from an source outside WBNG or The Newspaper Guild-CWA in exchange for the member’s commitment to invest time in service to the local and the bargaining unit.

Additional Unit Officer Positions

• WBNG open-shop units should create an “organizing unit vice-chair” position; the next time local bylaws are subject to revision, this should be made a requirement. Once an internal organizing strategy is devised within the unit and reviewed by the local Executive Council, the local should be prepared to offer advanced organizing training to the unit’s organizing vice-chair and top-organizing lieutenants so that they can successfully carry out the strategy. Organizing vice-chairs should be able to enlist up to three organizing lieutenants for professional training that may be eligible for lost time.

• In certain cases, the nature of the organizing strategy will require lost-time payments for recruiting purposes. First priority should go to active unit members who have been sufficiently trained. Unit members not sufficiently trained should be steered to training opportunities in order to be considered for a lost-time position.

In union-shop units the stewards or unit officers should delegate responsibility for mobilizing the unit and greeting new members properly.

In both union-shop and open-shop units, new hires should be greeted promptly. All new members should be invited to participate actively in the affairs of the unit, the local, and the larger Guild. A “Guild Owners Manual” should be distributed to each new member; the content of which should contain important contact information for WBNG, details about the local’s Web site, a copy of the unit’s history, and a copy of the local’s bylaws.

Local Staff Functioning

• Local representatives should, to the extent possible, only handle bargaining and possibly the final-step grievances. The local representative’s primary point of contact should be the unit chair, and vice versa.

• Smaller units would have to operate more independently, consulting the local representative on major issues and negotiations. Some smaller units already function this way. New prospective units are being told this up front now before they decide to affiliate. The best way to assure quality representation for the unit, many believe, is to have unit leaders actively participate in WBNG affairs. As we strive toward greater member participation, active involvement at both the unit and local levels – and even within TNG-CWA – provides an invaluable opportunity for leadership training. And those leaders can serve as models for their fellow bargaining unit members.

• To meet this expectation of smaller bargaining units, WBNG must make sure unit officers and stewards are properly trained to handle such additional responsibilities. Some units already handle some of their day-to-day administrative activities.

• In larger units that require more involvement by professional staff, unit leadership must cultivate a network of activists within the unit to handle expanded responsibilities that come with larger units. Unit leaders must continually seek to replenish the ranks of activists to avoid burnout among members, while others leave the bargaining unit due to career advancement. Extending an invitation to new members to participate in unit and WBNG affairs is a must.

• Organizing and mobilizing structures will have to be implemented and maintained by the unit’s organizing vice-chair, local representative, and organizer. All three would have to work together and determine how to share accountability. Open-shop units need to organized the free-riders employed at their workplace. Union-shop units need to organize those already in the union; this is called mobilizing. Mobilizing around a new contract or contract enforcement can be particularly effective in raising the profile and the status of the Guild at both open shops and union shops.

Overcoming the Obstacles

• While unit officers and shop stewards already undertake plenty of responsibility, we must find ways to give them incentives to broaden their service, as well as to identify successors that give the unit both experience and bench strength.

• Carving out times to conduct training for members who have widely disparate employers and whose workplaces require more than a bit of effort to travel to either WBNG’s D.C. or Baltimore offices will almost always remain an issue. Lunch hours are always possible, and workplace-sited training cuts the travel issue. Saturdays have proven somewhat popular -- at least for those people who can attend on Saturdays.

• General membership meetings must include ideas and topics that stir interest among members. They must be promoted through the communications means available to WBNG, particularly its Web site, www.wbng.org.

• Employee turnover of our Guild members is an unavoidable problem. This requires persistent attention to organizing at open shops, and training in all bargaining units.

• There are monetary costs of training, which can seem daunting given turnover and burnout. We seek to remedy this with train-the-trainer programs in the units, as well as local-wide training days to achieve critical mass for incoming generations of WBNG activists.

• The bigger the bargaining unit, the longer and more complicated the contract tends to be. Some units would have a very difficult time making a complete switch to a participatory model of trade unionism. This does not, however, excuse WBNG from its commitment to training and educating members in those units so that they become workplace advocates who can easily sniff out contract violations and management shenanigans. Nor does it excuse Guild members in those units from treating the union like a vending machine: dues money in, service out. It is only through collaboration among unit leadership and WBNG staff that individual unit priorities can be identified and achieved.

• Some bargaining units may feel that they’ve been treated with less of a professional, or monetary, presence than larger units. To the contrary, they should be recognized as examples of skilled member leadership for other bargaining units to follow.

• When there are instances where a particularly onerous employer or issue confronts WBNG, there should be no problem with utilizing an “all hands on deck” approach, utilizing all of the skills, strengths and power the local has, with members from other units lending concrete fraternal assistance as part of a coordinated mobilizing strategy tailored to the situation.

Organizing

If, having activated our members to be more participatory in WBNG affairs, we free up our staff for organizing, then whom do we organize? One truism is that anybody who works for anybody else deserves to belong to a union. It is always tempting to snag the “low-hanging fruit” of unorganized, and organized-but-unaffiliated workplaces. We still must apply the classic benchmarks in organizing drives, such as size of bargaining unit and probability of success, when making those decisions.

WBNG has long had an affinity with labor-related organization and union staffs, primarily because the Newspaper Guild itself, when it was a stand-alone union, was seen as a noncombatant when inter-union disputes arose. In the past decade-plus, we have organized still more labor-related units, and our critical mass in this field should be regarded as a plus when it comes to organizing the unorganized. Still, any workplace organizing potential in our core news industry of news and information deserves serious scrutiny by WBNG staff, its Executive Council, and its Organizing Committee. We must also keep in mind that there is strength in numbers: It doesn't take that much more to bargain a contract and represent 300 workers than it does for 30 members.

We see our workplaces changing through the introduction of new technologies and systems. It’s a new way of saying “work smarter” when management really means “work harder.” Yet we have to make our dues dollars work harder by working smarter. Whether in organizing new members, mobilizing current members, in contract defense or in all matters relating to the union, we must always remember to “follow the work” and assert our representational rights at any supposedly weak link in the employer's chain.