Ratification Vote Set for Wednesday, July 27 at 12 Noon, 1 PM, and 7 PM Meetings at Guild Office

Dear Friends,

The Post and the Guild have reached tentative agreement on a two-year contract after more than three months of negotiations. Here are the main points:

For the first time since 2008, the Post has agreed to give all Guild-covered employees a $13 per week raise. This is also the first time in memory that the Post has agreed to a raise in the beginning of the first year of the contract.

Full-time employees would also receive a $1,200 lump sum after twelve months; less than 30 hour part-timers would get $800.

All Guild-covered employees would also receive an immediate signing bonus of $500 for full-time employees and $350 for less than 30 hour part-timers.

On top of these across-the-board increases and payouts, all Class A Circulation Drivers would receive an additional wage increase of 50 cents an hour.

LAYOFFS

The Post aimed at the heart of the Guild’s job security protections by demanding the unchallengeable right to lay certain people off permanently. That is, the Post wanted to eliminate the Guild’s right to challenge layoffs that appear to be motivated by reasons other than economy and an employee’s right to return to work if conditions improved. This could have given the Post the ability to get rid of employees it simply didn’t like under the pretext of coping with a bad economy and only “reconsider” giving them their jobs back later. In effect, this would have allowed the Post to treat Guild-covered members almost like “at will” employees who have little or no job security and eroded the protections in the contract that say the company can only let someone go for economic conditions or for “just cause,” such as performance or disciplinary reasons. The Guild kept this out of the contract and preserved largely seniority-based layoffs with recall rights.

MORE FLEXIBLE OUTSOURCING — BUT WITH ENHANCED SEVERANCE

Hard as we tried, we were not able to preserve the contract provision that said the Post must offer you a comparable job if they outsourced yours. But we saw to it that employees who are laid off will receive an enhanced severance package on a par with recently negotiated buyouts, including at least three weeks’ severance pay for every year of service. Employees with more than 10 years of service would receive company-paid health care insurance for one year; those who have fewer than 10 years’ service would receive six months’ coverage. The current contract offers two weeks’ severance pay per year of service for employees—which the Post had sought to halve.

SENIORITY

The Post sought to further erode employees’ seniority rights, demanding sole discretion to exempt up to half the workers in affected areas targeted for layoffs. The Post also demanded the right to assume almost total control over the process by defining what those “work areas” would be. Instead, the Post has agreed to a minor clarification of the publisher’s existing right to exempt from layoffs up to 25 percent of the employees in an affected area: in groups of four or fewer employees targeted for layoffs, the Post would now have the right to exclude one employee from layoffs, regardless of seniority. The Guild also retained its right to challenge the Post’s definition of a “work area.”

We believe that this tentative agreement represents the best possible deal at a time when the U.S. economy is shaky, the outlook for the industry is uncertain and many former Guild members have left the newspaper. We also believe that this round of labor talks has shown that the Post appears to be moving further toward making short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival.

But this much is certain: given the Post’s initial demands, this agreement would have been much less favorable without the hard work of those Guild members who stood together, became more active, joined the pickets or simply paid their dues.

The Guild fights for everyone – do you fight for the Guild?

Further details on the tentative agreement can be found at the Guild’s Facebook page and www.PostGuild.org. The Guild will also review the provisions of the proposed contract at the Guild’s ratification meetings on Wednesday July 27. We invite all Guild-covered members to attend, but only dues-paying Guild members have the right to vote on ratification. Non-members are encouraged to join the Guild at the door.

– Guild Bargaining Committee:

Freddy Kunkle, Darlene Meyer, Nikita Stewart, Mike Gronowski, Chris Hettinger, James Crudup, Rick Ehrmann, Bruce Nelson

Come to One of the Contract Ratification Meetings and Vote

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

12 Noon

1 PM

2 PM

7 PM

At

Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild

1100 15th St, NW, Suite 350

Washington, DC 20005

202-785-3650

Guild members only are eligible to vote.

Non-members are encouraged to join the Guild at the door.

PostGuild.org

PostGuild on Facebook

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The Washington Post Guild Unit Calls on All Guild Members, Guild-Covered Employees, and Supporters to Participate in a Rally for a Fair Contract at the Main Entrance of the Washington Post on Thursday, July 14, 12:30 until 1:30.

The main issues still remain: salaries and job security. The Guild has proposed a 5% increase for all employees each year of the three year contract and is eager to continue negotiating, but Post management has not budged off its single $800 lump sum payment and no increase for a two year contract. In exchange for the $800, management still insists on removing from our contract any protection from layoff if they decide to outsource your job, eviscerating the layoff rules so that if you are laid off, you would no longer have the right to be called back to work if your job or a comparable job opening occurs, and on cutting contractual severance pay in half. Push back!

Join us at lunchtime on Thursday, July 14, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.

PostGuild.org

PostGuild on Facebook

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About 60 dedicated souls braved oppressively hot weather on Wednesday afternoon (June 22) to rally outside the Washington Post to protest the company’s offer of an $800 lump-sum payment in lieu of a raise for Guild workers.

Guild workers at the Post have been without a contract raise for more than three years. Guild negotiators are seeking a 5 percent contract raise.

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A Newspaper Guild official representing Washington Post employees expressed concern today about the paper potentially moving away from using professional journalists.

Fredrick Kunkle, co-chair of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild and a Post reporter, spoke in response to the Post asking readers to help review the 24,000 Sarah Palin e-mails being released today.

He said the union did not specifically object to the Post asking readers to look through e-mails. But he said it raises a larger issue about how much the paper plans to use inexperienced journalists and non-journalists in the future.

“We are more concerned about sort of a long-term shift to a different model of covering the news, the region, and those things,” Kunkle said Friday. “In that sense, we are concerned where the Post is contemplating a model where they eliminate more professional journalist positions in favor of a model like the Patch or Huffington Post, where essentially we turn over coverage of some areas of the news to unpaid or underpaid bloggers, community journalists, people with very little experience in order to save money but to continue to create content. That bothers us or worries us.”

The Post and The New York Times raised interest on Thursday when they asked readers for help in reviewing the Palin e-mails being released by the State of Alaska today.

While the Times had asked readers to review the emails online and send in their thoughts, the Post had originally asked for 100 “organized and diligent” volunteers to go through the emails and highlight those they found of interest.

The Post’s original offer online stated, in part:

We are looking for 100 organized and diligent readers who will work alongside Post reporters to analyze, contextualize, and research the e-mails. Think of it as spending some time in our newsroom.

But a few hours after the initial request, Post Spokesperson Kris Coratti told Media Matters in an e-mail that the plan had changed:

We’ve reconsidered and revised our approach and are now inviting everyone to send us their comments. We will cull the responses and post selected comments in annotations of the e-mails.

The Post then posted this update to the request:

UPDATE: We have had a strong response to our crowdsourcing call-out on the Palin e-mails. We’ve reconsidered our approach and now would like to invite comments and annotations from any interested readers.

Asked to explain further about why the change had been made, Coratti sent an email Friday to Media Mattersstating:

It was an internal decision after a second look at how the idea was presented.

Kunkle’s comments came three days after the Guild’s last two-year contract with the Post expired on June 7. He said the two sides remain in contract talks, with the paper seeking more power to reassign and terminate employees.

“The Post very clearly is trying to make it much easier to lay people off and pay them less severance or even re-classify jobs and by reclassifying jobs, paying you less, at their total discretion. That is what we are really fighting against.”

The Post guild unit represents more than 900 newsroom and non-newsroom employees, Kunkle said. He claims most have not had a raise since 2008.

Kunkle said the latest management offer was an $800 lump sum raise as part of a two-year contract, while the guild wants a 5% raise per year for each of three years.

Coratti did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the contract talks.

The guild local drew attention last month when it publicly criticized the newspaper for failing to give its members the same 16.4 % raise that Publisher Katharine Weymouth received.

Kunkle stressed that signs of the Post reaching out for non-staff help and seeking more power to cut staff in the contract talks has sparked worry:

“What does bother us and what seems from our view clear in these contract talks is that the Post clearly wants to shrink further, wants to make it easier to eliminate positions and what we worry about is that they will replace experienced professional journalists with unpaid bloggers, underpaid bloggers, contract writers, community journalists and inexperienced writers. That’s how they will try to continue providing content under the brand of The Washington Post. That is what concerns us.

“This is all new territory, this is crowd-sourcing and sort of involving readers in a new way. It also is related, in some ways, to this era of citizen journalism, where we’re also concerned. Are they going to the next step, where we use more and more citizen journalists in place of experienced journalists?”

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You’re invited to participate in one of the following Guild meetings to discuss the status of contract negotiations.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

12 Noon

1 PM

7 PM

At the Guild Office, 1100 15th St, NW Suite 350

(Next to Post – corner of 15th and L)

WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE NEWSPAPER GUILD

1100 15TH ST, NW, SUITE 350 (202) 785-3650

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