Providence Guild members line the hallway outside a meeting room where a bargaining session regarding GateHouse Media’s ownership transition is held. The members, targeted for layoff in early 2015, each hold signs marking his or her individual layoff date. Most will be losing employment in connection with GateHouse’s plan to outsource their jobs to the company’s central Design House in Austin, Texas. State Journal-Register employees in Springfield, Illinois, already have gone through this sort of downsizing related to Design House. The switch to Design House has resulted in many reader complaints and professional challenges related to deadlines, layout, copy-editing and other quality-related issues.
Members of the Providence Guild already have faced layoffs and are facing more after the Providence (R.I.) Journal’s acquisition by GateHouse Media, the owner of The State Journal-Register.
The SJ-R Newspaper Guild, in negotiations for its first contract with GateHouse, is seeking job protections, fair treatment in the workplace and a fair pay scale. We support our union brothers and sisters in Providence, Rhode Island, in their fight for many of the same things. Check out the Providence Guild’s website for more details.
Below is the text of the Providence Guild’s bargaining bulletin after its initial negotiating session with GateHouse:
GateHouse Talks Begin
Sept. 12, 2014
Guild, Company Trade Lists of ‘Hot Button’ Issues
Negotiating teams for the Guild and LMG/Gatehouse met for more than an hour this morning, with each side laying out its points of greatest concern as bargaining begins.
The Guild’s list of most serious issues were the potential 2015 layoff of as many as 40 people in pre-pub and the copy desk; the need to set up a grievance an arbitration process, the sharp increases for health care coverage, the 40 percent cut in mileage reimbursements, the need to include sales force opinion in developing commission plans and the need to set up a graduated pay scale for new hires.
The Guild cautioned it has other issues, but those were, for now, the most important.
The company was represented by Ali M. Zoibi, GateHouse Media LLC’s director of labor relations and Thomas McDonough. Zoibi said the company’s top priorities included the 2015 layoffs and a ‘smooth transition’ to outsourcing that work, the two-tiered wage system it imposed at the time of sale and overtime calculated on a weekly, not daily, basis.
Zoibi was insistent that the effective elimination of pre-pub and the local copy desk go through, calling the issue “a show stopper for us.” He said the layoffs were needed to free up money that could be invested elsewhere in the business, such as in technology and new hires.
He said, in the company’s opinion, copy desk and ad makeup consolidation had served GateHouse and Gannett papers well.
Guild negotiators observed that the Journal’s reputation for quality in the Rhode Island market was due mostly to the work of its employees who know Rhode Island. Shipping work out of state would only diminish that Rhode Island specific knowledge and lessen quality that will reduce circulation and ad sales.
At the start of the meeting Zoibi noted the presence of Guild members in the outside hallway, asking if they were members of the bargaining committee. We told him many were there before the start of their 9 or 10 a.m. shifts and a good number had come in on their days off or before their scheduled night shifts.
If you were present and your manager asks you about being there, request Guild representation for the rest of the meeting and call the Guild office at 421-9466. The company may be looking for ways to intimidate us and stop us from expressing our concerns.
Zoibi appeared to have read our past Guild Leaders, as he asked about references to our reaching out to the Rhode Island community, asking if those statements were intended as a ‘veiled threat.’
The Guild advised him that those statements weren’t threats but an intention to keep our members and the state at large informed about what is happening here.
He also took issue with a Guild Leader statement that he said implied the Guild taking credit for GateHouse’s giving those Guild members it kept time to consider their new job offers, saying that was a decision GateHouse made on its own, not because of any Guild input.
“We knew that was the right thing to do,” he said. “… I guess no good deed goes unpunished.”
Springfield Unit, United Media Guild 