Guild Committee Recommends Ratification

The Guild Bargaining Committee has reached a tentative agreement with The Post for a new two-year contract. This agreement comes amid tremendous turmoil in our industry and at a time when friends at newspapers large and small are taking pay cuts, losing vacation time and having their 401(K) matches slashed.

There are good things in this agreement and parts that we agonized over. Some of you, no doubt, will have questions and we will do our best to answer them. We are recommending this settlement because we believe it is the best we can do in this environment and that delay will only leave our members with less protections if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

Guild Bargaining Committee

HERE ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS:

* First, the good news. Our vacation, sick leave, pension and 401(k) matches remain the same, as well as the two-weeks pay per year severance requirement. Indeed, all benefits for current Guild-covered employees are preserved. New employees hired after August 31, 2009 will be enrolled in a different pension plan and receive a lower 401(k) match.

On pay, employees working 30 hours or more per week who are on the active payroll as of June 12 will receive a $1,000 lump sum payment and another $600 payment a year from now. Part-timers working less than 30 hours per week will receive $800 at contract signing and $450 next year. This is the first time in recent memory that we have reached an agreement that does not include an actual wage increase. But given the climate of wage and benefit cuts elsewhere in the industry and the fact that The Post’s newspaper division showed an operating loss of more than $50 million in the first quarter, we believe this is the very best we could achieve.

* The Guild has been working for the inclusion of WPNI employees into our contract for years and we are pleased that this is about to happen. As previously announced, most WPNI employees will move to the Northwest building within a few months. Five producers in Sports, who have been here on a temporary assignment, will be staying permanently and will soon be covered by the Guild contract after further discussions about classification and pay. As other WPNI employees begin to transition into the newsroom and other departments, we will have similar discussions about which ones will be covered under the Guild contract and what their job classifications will be. A Memorandum of Agreement on Integration will be an appendix to the Guild-Post contract.

* Guild contract job protection that prohibits The Post from subcontracting work if it directly results in Guild-covered employees being laid-off has been preserved.

* Advertising sales employees are guaranteed to receive official revenue figures that incentives are based on before the incentive payouts are made.

* Most of the truck drivers who deliver the papers will be promoted to a new job classification, Class A Circulation Driver, which will give them a significant raise as a result of our efforts.
Those hired into the newly created Community Journalist position will be paid a minimum of $37,000 per year, a substantial increase from what The Post offered last year when the job was unveiled. Under the contract, The Post can operate with up to 10 Community Journalists this contract year and up to 15 the following contract year.

NOW TO THE SOBERING NEWS:

Layoffs by Seniority (last hired, first laid off) has long been a principle of labor unions and has proven to be an effective protection against bias and age discrimination. It has long been a part of our own contract. In these negotiations, The Post demanded absolute flexibility in conducting layoffs with seniority as only a part of these decisions.

After heated discussions, we arrived at a compromise solution which would allow The Post to exclude up to 25 percent of employees in a section targeted for layoff from consideration for layout. After that, the remaining 75 percent of employees would be laid off by seniority. This largely maintains seniority protection for long term employees as well as giving shorter term employees the possibility of being excluded from layoffs.

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