Three-year extension has no
retrogressions; Guild wins guaranteed raises for all Guild employees
Last week the
Guild at Time Inc. concluded its Contract negotiations with the company in a
historic settlement that will end decades of manager-determined raises.
The Contract
also includes new language specifically stating that employees may ask for,
and managers may give, merit raises on top of the contractually mandated
raises, which will be 2% each on February 1 in 2004, 2005 and 2006. These
raises will all be applied to the Contract starting minimums for new employees
and to the one-year and two-year step-ups (see On Time #2 at www.nyguild.org
for the 2003 minimums and step increases).
The Guild’s
Negotiating Committee unanimously recommends that the Contract be approved by
the membership. A general membership meeting will be held to vote on ratifying
the Contract at a time and place to be announced.
The most
important aspect of the settlement is that, as in the 2001 Contract extension,
all other elements of the Contract will remain the same, with no
retrogressions. Traditional management targets for givebacks have included
vacation and sabbatical time, severance pay, syndication fees and night-work
bonuses. None of these would be changed under the proposed Contract, which
would run until February 1, 2007.
New York
Newspaper Guild Local President Barry Lipton, who led the negotiating team,
said, “Given the economic environment and what has been happening at Time
Inc., this is a very good settlement. Unit Chairperson John Shostrom and the
other members of the Guild’s Negotiating Committee, along with all of our
members who supported the Guild during the talks, deserve our thanks.”
The merit pool is dead
The ending of
the merit pool, which was the major cause of the Guild at Time Inc.’s only
strike, in 1976, was an important goal of this year’s negotiations. Now
every employee, no matter what her or his pay is, will get a guaranteed raise
every year. Previously only those employees below a cut-off of $61,500 were
guaranteed any kind of yearly raise, and usually half of that raise was at
management’s discretion.
But additional raises are
possible
The new wage
structure is simple: Everyone’s guaranteed raise (called the “General
Increase”) will be the same each year, and everyone will get the raise at
the same time. But remember that the
General Increase is a floor, not a ceiling:
You may ask your boss for more, and your boss may give you more.
To reinforce
this, the following language will be added to the Contract in Article VII:
“Further,
the General Increases provided for in Section 1 above do not prevent an
Employee from seeking or the Publisher, in its sole discretion, from granting
to individuals merit increases and bonuses in addition to the General
Increases.”
The Guild
encourages its covered employees to ask their managers for additional raises.
Especially as the economy improves, Time Inc. may well have to pay its workers
higher raises just to keep them from leaving. The Guild says, “Go for it!”
Guild-covered employees much
better off than others
According to
an October 6 news item in the New York
Post, Time Inc. has frozen all non-Guild salaries over $150,000, but Guild
employees in that salary range will not have to worry about this wage freeze;
their raises are guaranteed through January 2007. By contrast, according the Post
article, no manager making more than $150,000 will get any raise until 2005 at
the earliest.
What preserving the Contract
means
Time Inc.’s
wide-ranging cost-cutting is supposed to total $100 million in savings in
2003. Considering the problems since AOL’s purchase of Time Warner in 2001
(massive debt, consumer and federal lawsuits, and erosion of AOL’s
subscriber base, to mention just a few), and looking at the way that Time Inc.
has gone after things that aren’t
guaranteed in the Contract (cafeteria hours, sodas, snacks, plants,
expensing tickets and cable TV, etc.), it is frightening to contemplate what
the giveback list would have contained this time.
Crucial to
our new Contract is what isn’t in
it: retrogressions. This year’s Contract extension contains no reductions in any of our rights or the company’s obligations.
Management did put one on the table -- to have the Contract conform to any
future change in the federal overtime law (which is currently being discussed
in Congress) -- but the Guild vetoed that potentially disastrous proposal.
Here is a
small sampling of what management threatened in our last full negotiations, at
a time when the economy and the company were both doing very well:
*Vacation
reduction.
*Sabbatical
reduction.
*Severance-pay
reduction.
*Night-work
bonus reduction.
*Tuition-reimbursement
reduction.
*Elimination
of all syndication payments.
And there
were many more of these kinds of proposals on the table. The Guild Negotiating
Committee feels it is a huge victory for all Guild-covered Employees to have
preserved our Contract unblemished for another three years.
A side note: medical benefits
remain unchanged
Medical
benefits will remain unchanged for current employees throughout 2004,
management has told the Guild. While not a subject of these negotiations,
medical-insurance premiums continue to rise rapidly for the company, and this
fact was stated forcefully by the Time Inc. negotiators during the Contract
talks.
The
Guild is very happy that the company is going to absorb the cost increases for
the coming year. While it’s not money in our pockets, it’s also not going
to be money out-of-pocket.
Guild recommends ratification;
meeting to be announced
Our
Contract, of course, must be voted upon and approved by you, the Guild’s
membership, before it can take effect (the current Contract expires on
February 1, 2004). The Negotiating Committee members urge you to find out more
about the new Contract by talking with Guild representatives. We encourage all
of our members to come to the meeting and vote to ratify the agreement.
A
future On Time will be sent to announce the time and place for the
ratification meeting.
Haven’t joined the Guild yet?
For
membership information, contact Membership Chairperson Alex Blanco at
212-522-4187 or Unit Chairperson John Shostrom at 212-522-3965.
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11/04/03