Memphis Guild Slams Newspaper with Unfair Practices Charge

by James Parks, Jun 24, 2008

The Memphis Newspaper Guild Local 33091 has filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against the Commercial Appeal newspaper after management laid off 30 employees in the middle of negotiations with the union over proposed layoffs.

In a bargaining session with the company on June 10, Guild representatives asked for more bargaining time before layoffs began. Management said at that meeting there was no final list of who would be laid off. Yet, just two days later, 30 people lost their jobs and were escorted out of the building. The company is saying the workers were terminated, not laid off. But either way, the workers are jobless.

Local 33091 Vice President Dakarai Aarons, an education reporter at the newspaper, says the union hopes the unfair labor practices charge sends “a clear message to management that these regulations are there for a reason.”

They need to bargain in good faith on this issue and on a fair contract. When you have things like this going on, you need to keep your word.

Aarons says the company not only is going back on its word on layoffs, it has yet to make a full faith effort to reach a fair contract with the workers. The current contract expired in 2004, and negotiations for a new pact have gone on now for nearly five years.

As for the fired workers, the Commercial Appeal has so far only offered the former employees health insurance until the end of June, no severance pay beyond the accrued pension benefits and no bumping or re-employment rights beyond that any member of the public would have. 

Last month, the newspaper, which is owned by E.W. Scripps Co., announced it was cutting 55 jobs because of slow advertising sales. The newspaper, which has 700 employees, said the cuts would be completed by July 1.

The Commercial Appeal terminations are part of ongoing turmoil in the newspaper industry. Corporate media conglomerates are slashing jobs and shrinking the size of the news pages. The bloodletting has been so extensive that Advertising Age reports U.S. media employment has fallen to a 15-year low, “slammed by the slumping newspaper industry.” Newspapers, by the trade magazine’s calculations, account for half of all media jobs lost—82,800, of 167,600 total—in just the past seven years. In fact, one in four newspaper jobs has disappeared since 1990.

In March, members of Local 33091 dramatized another aspect of their struggle to keep good jobs. Guild members hit the sidewalk March 12, posing as sleazy company travel agents. As employees arrived for work at the Commercial Appeal, the union members handed them “career travels” brochures and asked if they had ever considered working in India.

Their point was simple: The work of 21 advertising graphic artists at the newspaper were shipped to India last year, and those artists now are teaching people in India to do their jobs. Although the Guild successfully relocated those employees to different positions at the paper, it was not able to keep part-time transportation workers from being fired when their jobs were sent to a nonunion Indiana company. Additionally, more customer service calls to the newspaper are being routed to a nonunion operation in Buffalo, N.Y.

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