Guild Bargaining Bulletin July 15, 2005

After months of making slow but steady progress toward a new contract with the Guild, Chronicle management negotiators today declared it was time to abandon that approach, handed the Guild bargaining team what it said was its "best offer" and gave the union until midnight July 25 to accept its proposal.

Management negotiators said that the previous record of huge losses, at times exceeding a million dollars a week, over the past three years had grown even worse in recent weeks -- to more than two million dollars a week. Company representatives said they had run out of time for extended negotiations.

The proposal includes provisions: 

- Slashing pay from 1 percent to 24.4 percent for about 400 Guild employees. Journalists and outside sales representatives are excluded from pay cuts but virtually every other employee would see their paychecks shrink. 

- Eliminating one week of vacation -- lowering the maximum to four weeks per year. 

- Eliminating five days of sick leave -- cutting the current allotment of 10 days, which is common or even low in the newspaper industry, in half. 

- Killing the popular program that allows parents of infants and toddlers to work part time until their children are in kindergarten. 

- Reducing pension benefits, including freezing the lump sum "severance pay" component. 

- Forcing all assigning editors into management positions, where they would lose job protections and overtime pay. 

- Eliminating the birthday and anniversary holidays. 

- Allowing editors to assign reporters to take photographs. 

- Prohibiting Guild members from honoring picket lines.

If there is no agreement by the deadline, company negotiators said, they will replace today's proposal with one that is even less desirable.

Since March, negotiators from the Guild and the company have been meeting to seek ways to change the Guild contract to help the Chronicle cut its costs while protecting jobs, salaries and benefits as much as possible. The company's offer reflects little of what was discussed in those sessions, includes few of the suggestions offered by the Guild, and addresses few of the concerns the Guild expressed at the bargaining table.

"I'm extremely disappointed the Chronicle decided to take this approach," said Michael Cabanatuan, Guild president. 

"Knowing that the company is sustaining huge losses, we've worked with them in a straightforward, cooperative and, frankly, very patient, manner, but they've decided to resort to strong-arm tactics. We're hoping there's still a chance for reason and a collaborative effort to prevail."

Many of the company's proposals -- such as eliminating part-time schedules for parents, cutting sick days, or ending the right to take sabbatical leaves -- do nothing to improve the company's ability to make money.

"I don't see how these cuts improve their bottom line at all" said Chronicle unit chair Kathleen Rhodes, who campaigned to keep the parental part-time schedules. "All they do is make the quality of our members' lives worse."

The Guild bargaining team is working on a detailed response to the company's proposal, and in the coming 10 days will attempt to negotiate a deal that it believes its members can accept. Any tentative deal must be approved by a majority vote at a ratification meeting -- a point the Guild has made clear to management negotiators.

Guild executive officer Doug Cuthbertson said the task for both the Guild and management is to focus on what is absolutely needed for survival and eventual prosperity rather than to strip away programs, conditions and benefits that have little or no relationship to the paper's bottom line.

The current situation is the most difficult bargaining scenario in his 35 years with the Guild, Cuthbertson said. If an agreement is not reached, he said, the alternatives include an asset sale of the newspaper under which all jobs are eliminated and the idea of union negotiations are only theoretical, or a labor dispute that would so deeply damage the Chronicle's circulation and advertising base that it would never recover.

"The choices we make are going to be tough for the bargaining team and tough for the members," Cuthbertson said. "The company has to recognize, however, that while the Guild may be willing to make extraordinary sacrifices due to the Chronicle's dire financial straits, it is not willing to embrace an across-the-board gutting of contractual provisions that have nothing to do with the newspaper's financial well being."