TNG-CWA Locals Win Key Legal Battles

TNG-CWA members are keeping up the fight for job rights — and winning:

• A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld $5 million in damages for Chinese Daily News workers who faced harassment, threats and firings while trying to organize with Local 9400 beginning in 2001. The battle led to a lawsuit over unpaid overtime and no breaks. TNG-CWA called the ruling a “great precedent,” confirming that most reporters are covered by wage and hour law.

• A three judge panel from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of The Newspaper Guild of New York, Local 31003, to arbitrate grievances filed since its contract with Thomson Reuters expired on Feb. 28, 2009. “Simply put, we won the battle with Thomson Reuters about our right to fight for our members,” Local 31003 President Bill O’Meara said. “This is a clear repudiation of a cornerstone of Thomson Reuters legal strategy.”

• An NLRB judge in Puerto Rico found that El Vocero unlawfully fired 107 circulation workers, members of UPAGRA, TNG-CWA Local 33225, in order to move their jobs to a non-union shell company. “The credible evidence reveals that El Vocero’s financial situation was improving when the company announced its decision to close the circulation department in July 2009,” the judge wrote.

• An administrative law judge said the Albany, N.Y., Times Union newspaper illegally dismissed 11 workers in 2009 when it was supposed to be negotiating lay-off criteria with TNG-CWA. The publisher is appealing the ruling and hasn’t followed the judge’s order to rehire the workers, but the union is optimistic. “We won the case and they have an uphill battle now, because the judge’s decision is very solidly in our favor,” TNG-CWA Local 31034 President Tim O’Brien said.

• A federal judge in St. Louis has ruled that Post-Dispatch retiree medical benefits are a vested right and that the company must arbitrate. “This isn’t over, we know that,” Local 36047 Business Representative Shannon Duffy said. “But we’re going to keep fighting until we win this thing for once and for all.