Battle Against Regressions
Proposed by News Detailed

Way back in May 1996, when negotiations first began, The Buffalo News unveiled an ambitious bargaining agenda aimed at eroding union jurisdiction, slashing payroll and benefit costs and stripping the Guild of rights granted by federal labor law.

The union bargaining team had its hands full attempting to beat back the company’s assault on existing contract rights and benefits. Add to that the Guild's substantial list of bargaining goals, and it’s really no surprise that it took almost a year-and-a-half to reach a tentative agreement.

Other articles in this edition of the Frontier Reporter detail the gains the Guild won, but what happened to all the draconian proposals advanced by The News?

In its quest for total flexibility, News management spent more than four months fighting with the union to eliminate all forms of jurisdiction. The company seriously pursued proposals that would have:

• Allowed management, non-Guild employees and independent contractors to perform any of the work currently done by Guild members.

• Let the company assign any work to any Guild member, regardless of department, skill or experience. Employees could not refuse and the union couldn’t claim the new work as its jurisdiction.

• Required the union to relinquish jurisdiction over any electronic publications The News may produce in the future.

• Lifted all contractual restrictions on the use of independent contractors.

The agreement that was ultimately reached allows The News to seek volunteers to perform new work that is not the kind normally or presently done by Guild members. If the work continues longer than six months, it becomes Guild jurisdiction. The agreement also allows members to volunteer to work in other Guild departments on a temporary basis, an arrangement that has been used on occasion under the previous contract.

On the issue of electronic publications, The News and the Guild agreed to negotiate that issue if the paper ever decides to start an editorial on-line product. The Guild believes the existing contract provides a solid foundation for arguing that any electronic product is already covered by the jurisdiction clause. That belief is strengthened by recent events that extended Guild jurisdiction to on-line advertising. During the current negotiations, The News put their classified advertising on-line, and the Guild maintained jurisdiction over all its traditional ad sales work.

The company made a number of extreme proposals that ran the spectrum, from clearly unacceptable to grossly offensive. The challenge to the Guild team was to figure out what the company was really seeking and develop proposals to meet their needs.

Here are a few examples of the outrageous proposals and the agreement that was ultimately reached:

• Eliminate all restrictions on the use of part-time and temporary employees.  The new agreement provides specific guidelines on the use of these workers that states: “Where a full-time staffing need exists, the position will be filled by a full-time employee.” More than 20 proposals were exchanged before the parties reached agreement on the issues relating to part-time and temporary workers.

• Require employees who take primary care leave to use all their vacation, and then allow them to take only five days of sick leave.   The tentative agreement requires employees to use one day of vacation for every four days of sick leave, to a maximum of 32 sick leave days. The previous contract allowed employees to use 40 days of sick leave and did not require any vacation usage.

• Eliminate the requirement to share the proceeds from the re-sale of employee-produced material.    
       The tentative agreement requires that the employee receive 50 percent of the net proceeds from materials sold for re-publication.
       Many of the cost-cutting and mean-spirited proposals advanced by The News were flatly rejected by the union and ultimately withdrawn by the company. They include:

• Eliminating the requirement to pay overtime after 7.5 hours in a day, and 37.5 hours a week.

• Allowing the company to revoke merit pay at its discretion.

• Allowing the company to cut employees’ wages if they are involuntarily transferred to a lower-paid group.

• Requiring that grievances be filed within 30 days for an employee to receive back pay.

• Adopting a management rights clause that would give the company the unilateral right to make changes in policy and procedures during the life of the contract without having to bargain with the union, and adding a clause that would severely limit workers’ rights to engage in job actions to protest those changes.
  

The cherry on the sundae came in economic bargaining when the company made its insurance and wage proposals. News management demanded that flexible benefit credits be slashed by 18 to 35 percent. They also called for a wage freeze in 1996, and then four lump sum payments instead of actual  percentage increases on the base pay levels. The lump sum bonuses the company proposed ranged from 1.46 to 2.08 percent of annual wages. In 1997, the lowest-paid, full-time employees would have received only $358, while the highest-paid employees would have received $767. Keep in mind those bonuses were to substitute for percentage increases, and base wages would have stayed the same for the life of the contract.

So when you think about why this round of negotiations took so long, remember that at least half the bargaining was spent beating back management's vision of how employees would be treated if the company didn't have to deal with the Guild.

Marian V. Needham
Chief Negotiator