Update, June 10:  With our contract set to expire in November, the BANG-East Bay bargaining committee is already preparing for upcoming negotiations. That means we need to hear what your goals and priorities are for our next agreement with the company.

You may have already received a copy of a bargaining survey from your shop steward. If not, your steward will be approaching you in the coming days to fill out a copy of this short, anonymous survey. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to complete and return this to your steward, and help our unit get ready for negotiations.

Also in this update:

• Online filing
• Membership clarification
• San Francisco Chronicle bargaining update
• Sacramento Bee tentative agreement
• Hawaii Newspaper Guild merger

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Update, Feb. 23: Last Friday, MediaNews Group’s holding company announced that it is out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Here’s a short item on this from E&P.

Meanwhile, life marches on for our newsroom Guild unit, where we’re preparing to enter contract bargaining later this year. Our next general membership meeting will be:

7 p.m. Monday, April 5

at the CWA Hall

1831 Park Blvd., Oakland

Since we’ll begin negotiating for our next contract in late summer-early fall, we need your help and ideas now to shape our next agreement with management. Come by the meeting and let us know what your priorities are in the next contract, and how you think we should go about getting those things. You can also send us an e-mail or share your thoughts with a shop steward.

At our next meeting, we’ll also be assembling the bargaining committee that will be negotiating with management. If you’re interested in helping out that way, please attend next month or send us a note.

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Update, Jan. 19: Last week, we all received an email from Dean Singleton stating that MediaNews has, in consultation with its lenders, created a “prepackaged” bankruptcy filing for its holding company, Affiliated Media Inc. Filing could come as early as this week.

The official documents and the resulting hearings should provide more details of the arrangement, including the new ownership structure, and what, if any, compensation Hearst will receive for relinquishing its stake in the company. In the meantime, MediaNews has promised that neither workers nor daily operations of our newspapers will be affected by the bankruptcy, and we intend to hold them at their word.

What the Guild is doing on our end:

The Newspaper Guild has represented workers at five newspaper company bankruptcies, and in every case, employees continue to work and get paid, noted Carol Rothman, secretary-treasurer of TNG. “None of the guild properties have been affected any more drastically than anyone who is not in bankruptcy,” said Rothman.

The Guild has hired a law firm that specializes in bankruptcy to monitor workers’ interests as the filing proceeds, and representatives across the country are gathering relevant financial information.

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Bargaining bulletin, Oct. 7: Guild negotiators and Company representatives continued talks regarding a proposed wage reduction for the BANG-East Bay unit Wednesday without reaching an agreement.

The Guild offered several alternative proposals, including one that would shave 2 percentage points from the Company’s pay cut plan by requiring employees to take one week of their vacation unpaid in 2010. Details of the plan would be worked out in later discussions.

Company representatives said they would respond by Monday. Parties are scheduled to meet again at 11 a.m. Monday.

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Bargaining bulletin, Sept. 30: Guild representatives met today with company officials to further discuss the proposed Oct. 12 and January pay cuts. We received some new information and responses to some of the ideas we presented during our initial discussions last Friday.

We have reached no agreements. Under the terms of our contract, the Company had to delay any pay cuts until October, and provide at least a two-week period to discuss alternatives, even though pay cuts were implemented in June for some non-union employees. If we do not reach an agreement in two weeks, the company can implement pay cuts on the same terms announced for non-union employees.

The talks are set to resume Wed., Oct. 7 in Oakland.

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Bargaining bulletin, Sept. 26: Representatives for the BANG-EB unit of the Media Workers Guild met Friday with company negotiators to discuss pay cuts proposed by management.

Under the contract ratified by our members in June, no pay cuts could be implemented before the Oct. 12 payroll period. As expected, management has moved forward with a plan to cut the pay of Guild-represented employees under the same terms already implemented in June for unrepresented employees.

The Guild has two weeks to offer alternatives to the cuts, and committee members began to do so Friday.

We objected to the need for any pay cuts, arguing it’s a mistake to further demoralize a workforce already battered by layoffs and benefit reductions at a time when the economic climate appears to be improving.

Assuming that some cost cuts may be needed, we made several suggestions on how to mitigate or avoid the salary reductions. The company has agreed to respond to the Guild’s suggestions by Wednesday.

Some of the alternatives we raised include:

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Bargaining bulletin, May 28: Negotiators for the Bay Area News Group-East Bay Guild Unit reached a tentative agreement with company management Thursday for a new labor contract.

The proposed labor agreement would be the first for the 180-member BANG-East Bay Unit, which organized in June 2008.

Guild members now get to vote whether to ratify the accord.

Two meetings are scheduled Tuesday June 2:

• 11 a.m.-1 p.m. in Conference Room 202 at the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, and
• 5-8 p.m. at the CWA Hall, 1831 Park Blvd., in Oakland.

Ballots will be collected at both locations, but results will not be announced until after the Oakland meeting.

We strongly encourage all members to study the proposed contract, consider the views of bargainers and your colleagues, and participate in this vote — so critical for the sake of our jobs, our new union and our company. Any bargaining unit members who have not yet joined the Guild may still do so. Contact any shop steward or unit officer, or call 415-421-6833, for an application form.

The negotiations were complicated by an unprecedented downturn in the economic fortunes of the newspaper industry, which has led to ongoing layoffs, pay cuts and benefit losses around the country. In the Bay Area, Guild members at the San Francisco Chronicle recently endured 150 job cuts after the Hearst Corp. threatened to close the paper, while the San Jose Mercury News Guild Unit is facing paycuts and other concession proposals in a separate contract proposal scheduled for a membership ratification vote on Monday.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we think this proposal is a strong starting point to build our future relationship with the company,” said Sara Steffens, unit chair of the East Bay Guild unit. “There are some things in this contract that nobody’s had before at BANG-East Bay.”
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Update, March 26: As we noted in our bargaining bulletin Tuesday, talks exploring the possibility of merging the BANG-EB bargaining unit with the unit representing the Mercury News have failed to reach agreement.

So all parties now return to expedited bargaining to secure separate contracts. In our case, that means we’ll be back at the table with the company next week, continuing to negotiate a first contract for BANG-East Bay.

At the request of both the Guild and the company, David Weinberg, a federal mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, will remain involved in the talks.

We look forward to continuing our productive relationship with management. Our top goal is to reach agreement as soon as possible on a tentative contract, which must then be ratified by a vote of our members. Previous bargaining sessions have led t tentative agreement on many non-economic items, and our bargaining team also has offered comprehensive proposals on pay and benefits.

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March 24: Bargaining committees representing the two largest MediaNews Group Guild units in the Bay Area will resume expedited negotiations for individual contracts after talks about a proposed merger of the units failed to produce an agreement Monday.

A meeting of the Guild and management committees was held Monday with David Weinberg, a federal mediator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

Negotiations for a Guild contract with the Mercury News will resume Thursday, while talks for a contract covering BANG-EB employees will resume next week. Weinberg will remain involved at the behest of both the Guild and the company in order to help us reach separate contracts as soon as possible.

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Update, Feb. 26: Our bargaining bulletins are usually brief, but Tuesday’s contained some pretty big news: Company representatives are proposing that we explore merging our new BANG-EB Guild unit with the established Guild unit at the Mercury News.

What does this mean exactly? In a consolidated Guild unit, we would share the same contract with our coworkers at the Mercury News, and managers likely would have more leeway to coordinate operations across our newsrooms.

We’ve always used the term “One Big BANG,” and we think the idea of formally creating a seamless Bay Area News Group deserves a serious look amid our current financial crisis. So our bargaining team and its counterpart from Merc have agreed to talk about the idea. With the help of federal mediator David Weinberg, we’ll enter talks with the company in early March to begin discussing what a merged unit could look like, and how employees might be affected.

This is by no means a done deal: A merger would be a complex undertaking, requiring support from members of all the affected units, and involving separate votes of our members and Guild members at the Mercury News. It won’t happen unless all sides see evidence that it’s in the best interest of our company and its workers.

So we want to hear from you: How would you feel about sharing a union contract with our colleagues in San Jose? What concerns or questions do you have?

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