Management: Read our lips, no new money

The big news out of Tuesday's meeting between the Guild and the company is actually pretty big:

"We're proposing a two-year status-quo agreement with respect to wages," management negotiator Chris Biencourt said. "That's the pattern."

Translation: If you make anything above scale, you wouldn't get a raise under the company's proposal. Apparently, the status quo to which he referred was the pattern the company has established while bargaining with other unions this year.

Somehow, this bit of wage-freeze information was supposed to have been implied in the proposal management gave to the Guild team last month. That proposal included no wage language at all. The "skinny" file, indeed.

We have not presented our economic proposal. We expect to present it later.

Guild chief negotiator Liz Brown asked if the company was trying to hold down Guild wages so it can give increases to managers. Liz mentioned that many managers already receive a higher level of pay, and thus are better able to weather tough economic times. Said Biencourt: The company is asking the same thing of the Guild that it's asked of the managers and other unions.

We're not sure that is a compelling reason to accept a wage freeze.

Vacation
The company also skimmed dismissively over our proposal to increase maximum vacation time to 5 weeks and accelerate the accrual rate. It claims an additional week of vacation would add 2 percent to the cost of the contract. We all know that the costs of employees taking vacation are rarely traded one-for-one; we cover for each other most of the time. It also lamented the "opportunity costs." Guild bargainer Paul Morgan replied that opportunities can also be lost if employees are ragged. "It can cut both ways," Paul said. Biencourt agreed.


Flexible schedules
We spent a lot of time discussing people working flexible schedules. The Guild's position is that some employees feel compelled to accept compensation time in lieu of overtime, and then end up "banking" that comp time when the opportunity to use that time off evaporates during the pay period. Banking comp time might sound like a good idea, but it can lead to problems because that time lives off the books. And if it's off the books, you might never see it again.

In essence, you've just worked free overtime. If you work more than 40 hours in a week, you should either use the comp time before the end of the pay period or take the overtime pay. (You take comp time in a one-for-one exchange within the same week, or at the rate of time-and-a-half in the next week of the pay period. Didn't use it by the end of the pay period? Take the OT pay.)


Some things we learned:
1) Defined by the company, a flexible schedule means employees can be required to work, say, 10 hours on Monday and then six hours on Tuesday. As long as an employee does not work more than 40 hours in a week, no overtime/comp time will be paid.
2) Most people in Guild-covered positions in advertising, circulation, and news are considered to be on flexible work schedules.

The company claims it needs this flexibility and uses it judiciously to keep costs down. We think a clearer policy communicated well would go a long way toward helping solve this problem. We are close to an agreement on language that states clearly the right of employees to take overtime pay instead of comp time.


Sick Leave
The company presented the Guild team with the official sick leave policy but does not want to put it in the contract, saying it is a "discretionary policy." The Guild wants to lock it down in the contract so the company can't change it without first consulting its employees. Biencourt said the company does not intend to change the policy and want to leave it out of the contract for "flexibility" reasons. Then he offered to reference the policy in the contract, which does not solve the above problem.

"I think it does give comfort" that the policy is in writing, Biencourt said. Unit chair Gene Balk said he thought employees would be more comfortable if the policy were in the contract.


Exempt positions
The company has proposed making editorial writers and the editorial cartoonist exempt positions, saying that, as the "management voice" of the paper, they have a conflict of interest. Liz said that editorial employees were not unanimous in their desire to move out of the bargaining unit. Yoko Kuramoto-Eidsmoe, local prez, asked if it's the company's position that simply being in a union would preclude someone from writing as the editorial voice of the newspaper.

We believe that journalists have all kinds of conflicting points of view and still manage to put them aside to write news stories. Likewise, an editorial writer can pontificate for the ed board without completely agreeing with an argument.