Grievance Update

In April, the Guild reached tentative agreements with the Buffalo News on 12 grievances filed in January of this year.

There are still several issues outstanding that the Guild is seeking resolution .

An arbitration hearing will take place on June 12 over the termination of an Inside Circulation employee. (In this month’s Frontier Reporter, the minutes record that the hearing was set for May 26, the date has been changed since the April meeting). The Guild contends that the employee was fired without just and sufficient cause. The employee applied credits for starts that he initiated in Circulation to his wife’s independent distributorship during a Circulation contest. The company contends that this was a fireable offense.

On May 6, the Guild filed a grievance seeking to make whole employees who work out of classification and are entitled to a $6 differential. In Circulation, the differential was prorated hourly. This grievance also affects certain employees in Editorial. For those who receive the differential, the Guild believes that they should be made whole back to the date of the contract, Aug. 1, 1996. The News feels that the employees are entitled to the differential only from the point of ratification which was Oct. 5, 1997.

The Guild is in the midst of discussions with The News over three grievances related to District Managers who were subjects of a unilateral wage freeze by the company.

The News, in a partial settlement, did pay the three district managers back money that was unlawfully deducted from their wages in November 1997 as a result of a discrepancy over their retroactive pay.

We’ve yet to settle a grievance on the unilateral transfer of a Division Lead Clerk in Circulation. The News has also not settled the grievance over the creation of a second Assistant Single Copy Manager where the contract only allows for one exclusion.

The Guild also submitted a grievance in January over The News assigning several Homefinder distributor routes to one independent contractor, KMF., Inc. This action infringes upon the jurisdiction of District Managers in Circulation Single Copy Sales who coordinated the work of the Homefinder distributors. The Guild is waiting for a meeting with the company to further discuss the implications of this action.

The grievances over the Division Lead Clerk, the Assistant Single Copy Manager and KMF. Inc., were among those forwarded, per local approval, to TNG-CWA headquarters in Washington D.C. for assistance through the International’s Legal Service policy.

If no satisfactory resolutions are reached on these three issues in the coming weeks, the Guild will pursue arbitration through the International.