Guild reaches agreement on three-year pact

The Newspaper Guild and S&P Wednesday came to a tentative agreement on a contract, which calls for a 2.25% salary increase in the first year, retroactive to April 1, of this  year.

The three-year agreement, which is subject to ratification by the membership, calls for a 2% general increase on April 1, 2011, with another 0.75% of the total Guild payroll being put into a merit pool and a 1.5% general increase on the same date the following year with another 1% being placed into a merit pool. All Guild-represented employees would be eligible for merit increases, which would be applied to their salaries. Recipients of those merits increases and the amounts of those increases would be at management’s discretion, but no less than 25% of the pool will be doled out to individuals at the top or above of their respective pay scales.

The Guild is attempting to set ratification meetings for Thursday, July 29, the times and place of those meetings to be announced when they are set. The parties are working on language for a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) and the date of the meetings is contingent on that memorandum being agreed upon, signed and distributed to members in advance.

‘Very respectable’ settlement

New York Guild President Bill O’Meara, who came into the talks to lead them in their final stages, said: “Is the wage settlement everything we would have hoped for going into these negotiations? Certainly not. But when you look at settlements, not only Newspaper Guild settlements, but settlements, in general, across the country, I think this is a very respectable one. When you take into account the uncertainty S&P is facing in the courts and from drastically changing government regulations, not only here in the United States, but overseas as well, I think we did a good job.”

The tentative agreement was the culmination of 21 difficult negotiating sessions, five of those “off-the-record” and those five dealing almost exclusively with the subject of salary increases. There was one non-economic agreement that came out of those off-the-record sessions and that was for the formation of a Partnership Committee.

The Partnership Committee will be made up of three Guild and three management appointments and will be charged with meeting quarterly to discuss non-contract, “work-life” issues. The first three of those meetings will address the issue of telecommuting and the possibility of expanding it for Guild-represented employees.

The MOA will, of course, include all the tentative agreements that were reached previously and reported to you in prior Spotlights. There was the improvement in severance payments that was part of a package that included several other adjustments in the job-security sections of the contract reported in an April 30 Spotlight. There was also a six-part package that included additional payments for a loss of jobs due to subcontracting and management’s right to set policies regarding compliance and ethics issues without first negotiating them. That package was reported in a June 21 Spotlight.

Indemnity plan stays for those who have it

What you won’t find in the MOA is an agreement to give S&P the right to eliminate the S&P Indemnity Plan option for those employees who have been “grandfathered” in it. Although it was proposed by management and never officially withdrawn, it was never agreed upon, so it won’t appear in the MOA and that option will remain for those employees who currently have it.

The tentative agreement was recommended for ratification by the negotiating committee which, in addition to O’Meara, consists of Local Representative Bob Townsend; Unit Chairperson Ed Fannon; Randy Gilliam from Issuer Services; Leo Larkin and Joe Agnese, Equity Research; Peter Burke, Public Finance; Lan Lecour, Leverage-Commentary-Data, and Joycelyn Brathwaite, Client Relations.