Guild sets vote on vacation deal

Milwaukee Newspaper Guild members will vote Tuesday on a package of vacation changes proposed by Journal Sentinel management. We'll hold our quarterly membership meeting the same day.

Most of the proposed changes are improvements -- two extra days off each year for full-timers; three more months to use our vacation; and restoration of the fifth week of vacation, after 20 years, for new full-time hires. But we would have to give up a bit of contractual protection for people leaving the company. And we were not allowed to negotiate any substantive changes to the package.

Because this would require amending our contract with a side letter, in a way that affects our benefits, our Executive Board has decided to put this question to a vote of our membership. The board is recommending members vote "yes."

Both the meeting and the balloting will begin at noon in the Abert Room. During the meeting, members will have an opportunity to discuss the agreement and hear updates on our other activities, including our preparations for bargaining. Lunch will be served. Voting will continue until 2 p.m., then resume from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Members who need to make arrangements to vote absentee should contact Karen Samelson or, in her absence, Greg Pearson.

The full text of the vacation agreement has been distributed to members and posted on the main Guild bulletin board in the newsroom. Here are the key points:

Overview: Journal Communications wants to have the same vacation policy for everyone in the corporation, both publishing and broadcast, to save the downsized payroll and human resources departments the trouble of worrying about the nuances of different contracts and policies when they calculate how much vacation everyone has coming. Ours still wouldn’t be identical to everyone else’s, but it would be a lot closer. Rather than drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator, the company is offering several improvements that we sought unsuccessfully at the bargaining table.

Floating holidays: We used to have one floating holiday for full-timers. A couple contracts ago, at the request of corporate accountants, we agreed to turn that into a vacation day. Since then, every full-timer with three weeks of vacation, for example, has had three weeks and one day. Now the company wants to turn that day back into a floating holiday and add two more, so we would have three floating holidays every year. In bargaining, we sought to add several personal days every year but wound up only with those the company was trading for a pay cut. Management has not connected these two new days to the pay cut in any way.

Fifth week: Most of our unit members get five weeks of vacation after 20 years. In the 2004-’08 contract, we reluctantly gave up the fifth week for those hired in ‘06 and later. We tried unsuccessfully in bargaining last time to get it back. Management is now ready to give it back, but only to full-timers.

Short-term rollover: Realizing that our short-handed staff has a lot of trouble scheduling vacations, especially in December, management is now willing to let us take our vacation as late as March of the following year. So, for example, we could take our unused 2011 vacation sometime in the first quarter of 2012. The rollover would not apply to the floating holidays.

Payback: When we went to the earn-as-you-go vacation system, several members said we shouldn’t agree to anything that required people to repay the company if they left after taking more vacation than they had “earned.” We successfully negotiated language that flatly bans such paybacks. This has been a source of friction and several grievances, and management tried and failed to eliminate that language in bargaining. This change would require payback in all cases. After our board voiced concerns about docking departing employees who had not planned to leave, management gave us on-the-record assurances that they never had done this to anyone who was downsized or took a buyout, and they didn’t intend to do so in the future.

Part-timers: Although our part-timers would not get the fifth week back, they would continue to get more vacation than those in any other department. Newsroom part-timers earn vacation on the same schedule as full-timers. The rest of the company’s part-timers must work here five years before they get any vacation, and then they’re capped at 52 hours (slightly more than two weeks for those who work 24 hours a week). We would keep exactly what we have now — including no fifth week for part-timers hired in ‘06 or later.

Earn-as-you-go effective date: We use the earn-as-you-go system for full-timers hired in 1995 or later. For everyone else, it took effect for those hired in 1994 or later. We would keep our effective date. Along with the part-timer policy, that would be among the only vacation policy differences between us and the rest of the company.

The process: If we say no, everything stays as is, at least through 2011, but we can come back to the issue in bargaining this spring. If we say yes, we could still try to renegotiate the terms in regular bargaining, when everything else will be on the table as well. With a positive vote, the language would be retroactive to Jan. 1.