After long and rancorous
bargaining, the union representing Journal
Sentinel writers, copy editors, photographers and other non-management
newsroom employees approved a new three-year contract Wednesday, with members
voting 2-1 in favor.
In politics that would be a
landslide, but as Milwaukee Newspaper Guild Local 51 president Tom Silverstein notes, the 46-23 tally
was “the closest vote on a contract in our local’s history,” and second only to
an even narrower mid-contract vote cutting wages by 6.6 percent in 2009.
“It’s not a good deal,” Silverstein
tells me. “It’s a deal in which the union was able to stave off a company
determined to take as much away from its employees as possible, if not break
its union. They came in from the very beginning looking to settle whatever
financial issues they had through their employees. From the beginning it was an
extremely adversarial relationship.”
The vote reflects “significant
misgivings,” he notes. In the face of the hardest bargaining by negotiators for
the parent company, Journal Communications, in memory, the union gave back a
lot. Severance pay for laid-off workers – historically two weeks of pay for
every year on the job – was cut in half, to one week per year of service. A
requirement that employees get 60 days’ notice or 60 days’ pay in a downsizing
was abolished. A 35 percent cap on what employees would have to pay for their
share of health insurance premiums was eliminated. There is, Silverstein says
in a statement put out by the union, “no guarantee that Guild-represented
employees will ever again be paid as much as we earned in early 2009.”
The upside? Union-represented
employees will get a 2 percent across-the-board increase in pay, retroactive to
July 8. Along with a 2.2 percent across-the-board increase in 2011, the result
will leave minimum pay scales still down 2.4 percent from where they were
before the 2009 wage cut.
Additionally, a handful of
discretionary “merit” raises (from a pool of 0.5 percent) will be handed out.
“Any future raises in 2013 and 2014 would be linked to raises for
non-represented employees and would be divided between across-the-board and
merit raises, with a growing share of the pot tilting toward the merit side,”
the Guild statement says.
The other upside is that it wasn’t
worse. Silverstein says the union managed to turn back demands for even larger
concessions. Company negotiators wanted the ability to “target the highest-paid
journalists for layoffs,” the union says. They also wanted to eliminate a
requirement to show an economic justification before downsizing staff. And
management was denied in its bid to make all raises subject to management
control.
The newspaper business, of course,
has been in continued turmoil. Although in its most recent quarterly report
Journal Communications posted
a 24 percent increase in profits, that was driven largely by its
broadcasting unit, and in turn, by the spike in political advertising this
year. Meanwhile, the publishing arm saw revenue fall 7 percent in the most
recent quarter on continued weakness in classified, national, and retail
advertising.
Silverstein insists the union
hasn’t been naïve about the newspaper industry’s troubles, pointing, among
other things, to the 2009 temporary wage cuts.
“We gave, understanding that the
publishing industry is not flourishing, that the newspaper business itself is
down,” he says. “But they took our concessions and then they reached farther
beyond anything that was even necessary and threatened, basically, impasse
unless we agreed to this deal.”
A declaration of impasse would have
meant the company could impose whatever terms it wanted and possibly would have
set the stage for a lengthy and expensive legal battle before the National
Labor Relations Board.
The bargaining also reflected a major shift to a far more combative
union-management relationship at the Journal
Sentinel, Silverstein says.
To be sure, the Guild and the
newspaper never showed the sort of deep labor-management engagement that was
made famous in the 1980s and ‘90s at places like Harley-Davidson.
Even so, says Silverstein, the
Journal Communications history as an employee-owned company – before it went
public earlier this decade about a decade ago – helped foster a greater sense of unity even amid
the normal give and take between union and management.
“The history in this company is
that the employees and management have been sort of woven together through the
employee stock program for many years,” Silverstein says. “For many years we
invested our own money into the company. There was a feeling that we were all
in it together. But since the layoffs in 2009 and the pay cut, the company has
been on the attack against its employees.
“It’s been seeking concessions, it
has pretty much treated us as a commodity and ignored the fact that we’ve done
some pretty amazing things, including winning Pulitzers and other major awards.
At the same time, Silverstein says,
top company executives got “huge bonuses.” The newspaper also took for it the
rare move of hiring an outside law firm to bargain on its behalf – Littler
Mendelson, a national employment law firm routinely castigated by labor
activists (as a brief Internet search quickly reveals) as an aggressive
“union-busting” operation.
Given that approach, Silverstein
says, the union’s bargainers “did a great job of playing goalie and protecting
whatever rights we had and live to fight another day.” The new contract runs
through 2014.
The outcome, Silverstein warns, is a newsroom demoralized and a
union hardened. “From now on there’s an adversarial relationship between the
employees and the executives, newsroom management. They’ve made it clear that
they would prefer to treat us in an adversarial relationship. And it’s their
doing, not ours.”
Silverstein emphasizes that none of
these problems will detract from the day-to-day performance of the union’s
members on the job. “Even with the concessions, our people aren’t going to be
any less committed to the product we put out, because we’re dedicated
professionals. There won’t be any drop-off in commitment to journalism. I think
the company knew that and took advantage of it.”
Yet despite – or perhaps because of
– the dispiriting concessions and the conflict, membership in the open-shop
union is approaching 70 percent. “That is a really high number,” says
Silverstein, a 27-year-veteran of the Journal
Sentinel newsroom.
“Our union is sort of a fraternal
group. It’s people who are not just in it because they’re staunch unionists,
but because they feel like we’re in this together and we want to be connected.
They don’t feel connected to the company; they feel more connected to the
union, I believe.”
In a recent internal awards
ceremony at the paper, “one of the winners thanked the Guild,” Silverstein
says. “That blew my socks off.”
I’ve reached out to management representatives of the Journal Sentinel. If any of them get
back to me, I’ll update this post.
*
Follow Pressroom on Facebook or on Twitter.
