Local Will Consider
Committee’s Recommendations

by Robert J. McCarthy
Chairperson, Strategic Planning Committee

The Strategic Planning Committee has submitted its final report to the Buffalo Newspaper Guild with recommendations outlining ways to strengthen the union as an institution and to shift more leadership roles to its members.

The 10-page report stems from a series of meetings held throughout the winter and spring by the committee that I chaired. The 17-member committee analyzed the results of the 1996-97 bargaining, sought recommendations from throughout the local, surveyed the entire membership, and distilled a number of recommendations.

Perhaps the key result of the committee's work was discovering a local-wide feeling that the Guild needs to return to its roots.

"The group firmly agreed that many of our core problems could be at least controlled through better communication, through establishing common goals...," the report states.

The report acknowledges the committee's findings are neither earth-shattering nor revolutionary.

"They represent a series of small steps we hope will bring the Guild back into the lives of the ordinary members," the report says. "The Buffalo Newspaper Guild must rebuild on its most basic level if it is ever to succeed in the face of growing management intransigence."

Some of the key recommendations include:

• Eliminating the unit chairman post, and creating the new positions of vice president for contract administration and vice president for mobilization.
• VP/contract administration will assume the duties of grievance chairman with a new emphasis toward processing and publicizing our increasing problems of contract enforcement.
• VP/mobilization will administer an enhanced steward system, including their training and function. The person will also oversee a new and enhanced communication system.
• Generous stipends for these new positions as a way of emphasizing their importance to our function and to impress upon applicants that much is expected.
• A return to the concept of "service representative" for the person running our Guild affairs. The person will still have enough professional skills and knowledge to serve as an adviser and administrator, but who will not serve in an all-encompassing position.
• "The position should return to the idea of service to Guild leadership," the report states. "In turn, it is now incumbent on union members to re-embrace the concept of "leadership."

• Other recommendations include:

• Overhauling the present steward system.
• Instituting a new communication system based on the highly successful "bargaining bulletin" concept. These communications will be personally delivered with personal messages from shop stewards.
• Distribution of a "new member kit," already under way by Guild leadership.
• Departmental social gatherings to foster the new sense of communication.

A host of other new recommendations also stem from the report, which will be considered by the Executive Committee at its July 22 meeting, and at a later meeting by the full Guild membership.