Will it ever stop?
Once again, the Journal Sentinel is offering to buy out employees. A letter to employees on Monday, first reported by Jim Romenesko, says the deal is being offered throughout the company, “including the corporate IT department.” That suggests perhaps newsroom people aren’t the primary target, as newsroom union president Tom Silverstein told members the same day. (That letter is also at Milwaukee Magazine alum Romenesko’s blog.) But Silverstein noted in his correspondence that he made no predictions, “in light of previous curveballs the company has thrown at the last minute.”
Asked about the new buyout offer this week, Silverstein declined comment.
The latest offer comes amid continued labor negotiations on a contract that have been dragging on for nine months. Tensions have been mounting, symbolized by a recent campaign of desk signs that the union, Newspaper Guild Local 51, began passing out about a month ago, as Romensko reported earlier. The first installment contrasted $1 million rank-and-file employees have given up in the last three years against bonuses worth five times as much awarded to the top five executives over that same period.
“We bore the brunt of the layoffs” – the news staff is now half the size it was when the old Journal and Sentinel papers merged in 1995 – “and we bore the large part of the pay cuts,” Silverstein told me when I asked about the desk tent campaign. The last round of contract talks included a 6.6 percent rollback in wages; about one-third of that has now been restored.
Top managers “took pay cuts as well,” Silverstein acknowledges. “But the upper management has gotten all that money back through bonuses.”
The newest signs in the campaign, sent to me by a newsroom source, point to a management demand to cut severance pay in half – to one week for each year of service from the current two – while providing parting bonuses of as much as $5 million for some top executives.
They get a golden parachute and offer us a lead balloon, the sign says.
(In the union’s February newsletter, Silverstein described an initial offer that was an even more dramatic takeaway – no severance guarantee at all, leaving it to the individual worker to negotiate terms or the union in event of a mass layoff.)
Those aren’t the only concessions JS management is seeking, Pressroom Buzz has learned. Sources tell me the company also wants to eliminate across-the-board raises in favor of “merit” raises that put pay hikes entirely at managers’ discretion and to further weaken layoff language that would blur the lines of what an economic layoff is.
A flyer sent me by a JS insider also outlines another management demand that would explicitly enable the company to target higher-paid employees for layoffs. Under that proposal, the union warns its member
. . . you could be let go for making too much money. Does that sound like incentive to win Pulitzer Prizes and earn merit raises?
Company negotiators are seeking contract language that would let management target our highest-paid journalists for layoffs. They’re also suggesting that employees targeted that way might be allowed to keep their jobs if they agree to take huge individual pay cuts.
. . .
Company bargainers are trying to make it easier and cheaper for management to wreck careers and throw workers out the door with as little justification as legally possible.
Currently, sources say, the contract requires the company to offer buyouts in a downsizing before laying people off. Since the buyout proposals often are most favorable for senior – and therefore more highly paid – employees, they arguably already offer a vehicle for trimming payroll at the top. The new proposal in effect seeks an end-run around the buyout requirement – allowing the company to accomplish the same end unilaterally and for less money.
I asked JS publisher Betsy Brenner for comment. Brenner – who is guaranteed $1.7 million in cash and benefits if she loses her job “without cause” or leaves “for good reason in connection with a change in control” at the company – emailed me: “Journal Sentinel doesn’t comment on labor negotiations in progress.”
Silverstein also declined to comment on details of the negotiations when I asked about the flyer. He told me, however, that the company’s hard-nosed stance at the bargaining table was actually bolstering union strength.
As a percentage of the newsroom staff, “our membership is pretty close to the highest it’s been in years,” he says. “People have reacted favorably to the union standing up for them. They view this as an assault on the newsroom as a whole. With one or two exceptions, the only union members we’ve lost are the ones who’ve been laid off.”
The membership trend is noteworthy because under the union’s “open shop” contract with the newspaper, membership is not automatic for union-represented employees. The cost of such a provision to the union can be seen just a few hours north, in Appleton.
Earlier this year, the union representing employees, including journalists, at the Gannett-owned Post-Crescent newspaper there essentially walked away, leaving the newspaper a non-union operation. The first news of this development came to me via records at the National Labor Relations Board’s regional office in Milwaukee a couple of months ago.
I’ve now learned a bit more about how that came to pass. The union apparently was strongest among older employees who have subsequently retired. It, too, was an open shop in which union membership – and payment of dues – was not an employment condition.
That meant the union had to constantly recruit members among incoming rank-and-file employees – often younger people who felt little connection with the union, thought they didn’t need it, and figured they would just as soon keep the dues money (typically about 1 to 2 percent of pay) themselves.
It’s a bit like having the option of not paying your property taxes – yet still being able to rely on your municipality to plow your street or put out the fire in your burning home. An open-shop union is bound by law to represent the interests of all the employees covered by its contract, and the benefits it negotiates go to everyone. But only those who actually belong provide the financial support for the effort.
Gannett is known as a hard bargainer and generally hostile even to its established unions. By standing fast at the bargaining table, it’s frankly easy to make the union look ineffectual and thus undermine its support. And in Appleton, I’m told, Gannett over the years managed to reclassify jobs as outside the union contract, further weakening it. When someone filed a petition for an election to throw out the union, union officials weighed their likely chances of losing and decided it wasn’t worth the fight.
Having worked both in newsrooms where union membership was automatic and where it was voluntary, I know how hard it can be for the open-shop union to maintain support.
That Local 51 at the JS is actually gaining members may show that even the toughest management bargaining has risks all its own.
Speaking of Gannett . . . For three weeks now I’ve been planning to write something about the ongoing question of journalists who signed recall petitions, but once again, I’m putting it off. Barring breaking news in the world of news, I’ll be back next week with my thoughts on that topic . . .
And finally . . . Congratulations to colleagues at Milwaukee Magazine and elsewhere in the journalistic fraternity on their showing in this year’s Milwaukee Press Club awards. Of special note – the number of new or alternative media sources that have been recognized this year. Third Coast Digest, Wisconsin Gazette, Wisconsin Watch and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison are just some of them. Hats off to all.
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