Arbitrator Reverses Reporter's Suspension, Rebukes Paper

In a victory for the St. Louis Newspaper Guild-CWA, an arbitrator has revoked a reporter's two-day suspension and blasted the company's failure to comply with progressive disciplinary procedures spelled out in the Guild contract.

Post-Dispatch reporter Carolyn Tuft, who was suspended for errors in a 2005 article that the Guild argued were made in the editing process, must be paid for the two days she missed, arbitrator Daniel Jacobowski ruled.

The nearly two-year-old case drew attention from other media in St. Louis as Guild members from every department at the paper rallied, wore stickers of support, wrote letters to the publisher and otherwise stood solidly behind their colleague.

Jacobowski's ruling said further that the company's claim that Tuft's alleged errors were "serious misconduct" was overblown and in violation of the contract, which calls for discipline in most instances to begin with a written warning.

Shannon Duffy, administrative officer for TNG-CWA Local 36047, said Post-Dispatch managers have routinely "leapfrogged" over lesser disciplinary action to charge workers with "serious misconduct."

"The arbitrator said this case in no way, shape or form constituted serious misconduct," Duffy said. "This is going to help us immensely going forward with other grievances."

Tuft is an award-winning reporter at the Post-Dispatch. The story in question involved the St. Louis-based Joyce Meyers Ministries and the prominent TV preacher's compensation, among other issues. After the ministry called a late news conference, an editor working with Tuft began making changes to a front-page Sunday story.

"Revising a complex investigative piece on deadline is a setup for trouble," Duffy said. "Management nevertheless decided to go ahead with the Sunday piece, rather than simply cover the press conference and give the longer piece the time it needed."

While management tried to blame Tuft for eight relatively minor errors in the piece, the Guild argued that some of the alleged errors weren't mistakes at all and others were the result of editing.

The ministry threatened to sue the paper, which negotiated a published apology and suspended Tuft for five days. A Guild grievance reduced the time to two days, but the union continued to pursue what it argued was unjust discipline.