December
16, 2004
Happy
Holiday Pay at Sports Illustrated!
Shortly after Martin Luther
King Jr. Day and Presidents’ Day in 2004, then Guild Unit Chairperson John
Shostrom, a copy editor at Sports Illustrated, noticed something odd about his
pink time card receipts for these holidays.
Whereas in previous years the
supervisor had calculated straight-time overtime hours whenever Shostrom had
worked on a Monday holiday at SI, earning him extra pay, on the time cards for
these days there was no such calculation, and the “STRAIGHT HRS.” section
of the time card was blank. For employees who don’t scrutinize their
time-card receipts, this was an easy thing to miss.
Shostrom checked around at SI,
and, sure enough, no one had gotten the extra pay. Obviously there had been a
magazine-wide change in policy, but because Shostrom had been to every
Grievance Committee meeting with Time Inc. for years, he knew that the change
in pay policy had never been mentioned.
The mystery was solved at the
next Grievance meeting, on March 17, when the company showed it had a
three-pronged strategy:
1. Steal.
Take away something that was in the contract and that the employees
had been receiving for decades, because it cost the company money.
2. Deceive.
Don’t tell the Guild or the employees about the change in policy, and hope
that they won’t notice. After all, they might not like it, and then they’d
complain. In essence, the company’s thought was: What they do know
will hurt us.
3. Stonewall.
When caught out in the theft and the deceit, deny the contract violation,
refuse to go back to the long-standing past practice, and insist on getting
something for nothing in any settlement.
The Guild wasn’t buying any
of it. We insisted on going back to the old way of compensating Guild-covered
SI employees, with full retroactivity for the first two holidays of 2004 and a
promise that the pay wouldn’t be stolen again.
The company kept dangling
settlement offers, but some were very easy to refuse.
For example, before the July 4
holiday, the HR representative offered to compensate the holiday and all the
rest throughout the 2004-2007 contract “with the old-style cockamamie
pay.” That is, the company felt that the decades-old policy of giving some
kind of recognition for SI employees working on virtually all the national
holidays was bizarre. The two stolen holidays would remain stolen. You know,
the old “possession is nine-tenths of the law” argument. This offer
wasn’t worth taking seriously.
The company kept insisting
throughout numerous discussions that the Guild had “agreed” to the 2004
holidays. The Guild said that when it agreed to that schedule, its agreement
was based on its contractual rights and on the past practice of employees’
getting extra pay as well as a compensating day off. Of course it hadn’t
agreed to the unannounced, unilateral theft of the holiday pay guaranteed by
the contract’s Article IX, Section 2 (a) (iii).
HR replied with an astonishing
claim: The moment that the Guild
had agreed to Thursday compensating days off as partial compensation for
working the Monday holidays, the holidays had ceased to be Mondays and had
become Thursday holidays! And because we then didn’t work on those
Thursdays, we didn’t deserve any extra pay!
The Guild soon realized that
logic and fairness would play no part in settling this issue. The Guild filed
for arbitration on the holiday pay, hoping that the company would eventually
give in.
Luckily the Guild had a trump
card: Article XI, Section 1 (e)
states that if a holiday schedule for an upcoming year isn’t agreed upon by
Time Inc. and the Guild by October 15 of the previous year, the holidays will
be the Federal holidays. The Guild had always allowed the company to schedule
SI employees in on the holidays in return for the extra pay. Both sides got
something out of that deal, but because Time Inc. had reneged on its part of
that deal, the Guild would just refuse to agree to anything but all the
regular holidays for 2005 and for every year until we got the extra pay back.
The Guild stated this over and
over and over. Unlike the company, we weren’t hiding anything, and we
didn’t want to change anything. We merely wanted to go back to the old
system, which wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing.
Finally, after an almost
comically bad-faith Grievance meeting in which the company “modified” its
offer from compensating employees for 67% (2 of 3) of the stolen holidays to
25% (1 of 4) of them, the company moved. It would give the extra OT pay for
all of the back holidays for 2004 (four, by then) and would agree to do so for
2005 if the Guild would agree to a normal (by pre-2004 standards) 2005 holiday
schedule.
The Guild agreed, and of
course would have agreed to this at any time during the negotiations. After
about eight months, the company wound up with exactly nothing to show for its
efforts except ill-will and a lot of wasted time for both sides.
Has the company learned
anything? Who knows? The Guild will see when discussions for the 2006 holidays
start.
In the meantime, Guild-covered
employees at SI, enjoy that extra pay! Alex Blanco, the Unit Chairperson and
longtime Grievance Committee member, is going around SI to explain the
settlement to each affected employee and make sure that the company’s
numbers for hours worked on the holidays are correct.
If you haven’t talked with
Alex yet, give him a ring at 522-4187, and at the same time, sign up to join
the Guild if you’re not yet a member. The Guild gets things done, and all of
its covered employees get the benefits of its hard work. Do your part by
joining now.
Happy holidays!
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12/16/04