Doing the numbers

Journal Sentinel management has started telling Guild bargaining-unit members what our lump-sum bonuses will be, so this is a good time to review how those bonuses were calculated.

At management's insistence, our new contract calls for those bonuses instead of the discretionary ("merit") raises we would have received in 2005. We'll go back to the regular system of raises to our base wages for discretionary pay this year and the next two years. Also at management's insistence, the discretionary pool has been cut from 1.5% to 1%, and that's not changing during the life of this contract.

Each full-time employee should receive a sheet that shows the bonus as a percentage of weekly pay, multiplied by 52 weeks. (The calculation is a bit more convoluted for part-timers, but it still comes out the same.) The idea is that the bonus therefore comes out to the same amount that a similarly sized merit raise would produce in the course of one year, with the obvious difference that a raise keeps giving you the same amount in future years.

In the past, when the pool was 1.5%, a lot more people received merit raises that were below 1.5% than above it, and as a result, the median -- the point that half of us are above and half of us are below -- was actually less than 1.5%, but a few really big raises pulled the average up to the contractually required 1.5%. That could happen again with these bonuses. As with a regular merit raise, each of us should have a conversation with our supervisor to determine what message management is sending about our performance through this particular bonus, if the supervisor has not made that clear.

One other point about wages: We have discovered a couple of errors in back pay for the 2005 across-the-board raises. With few exceptions, everyone should have received a full year's worth of a 1.5% across-the-board raise on the Jan. 19 paycheck. (Some people received more because of changes in minimum wage scales or because they moved up a step on the scale.) Please check to make sure you received the right amount, and please contact a Guild representative right away if you find anything wrong.