Tentative Guild Pact in Rochester After 16 Years

Nearly 16 years after their last contract expired and 19 months after management declared impasse, newsroom employees at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in upstate New York have a new tentative agreement.

Steve Orr, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA Local 31017 during the entire struggle, said the gains are modest but that having any contract after so many years is a victory.

"I think for those of us in the leadership of the local, it's more a sense of relief," said Orr, an investigative reporter. "I don't think anybody is unrealistic about it. We know that a lot of what we sought we weren't able to get, but we have some fundamental job protections, fundamental benefits, the right to arbitration — a lot of things we'd been lacking for years. Having this contract is far better than having no contract."

The local represents about 90 newsroom employees who are expected to vote on the contract as soon as next week.

Members of the Rochester Newspaper Guild rallied over the years to build support for their long contract fight at the Democrat and Chronicle in upstate New York. They are expected to vote in the next week on a tentative contract reached after 16 years of bargaining.

Bargaining had gone on for 14 years when Gannett declared impasse in late 2006. Employees were working under the terms of the imposed contract when Gannett last month announced it was freezing its company-wide pension plan, opening the door to new talks.

Orr and his coworkers learned about the pension freeze via a Gannett memo leaked to a journalism website. The company was offsetting the freeze with an enhanced 401(k) plan that the Rochester workers had never been offered.

Gannett itself realized the employees would now have no retirement plan, and offered to bargain the terms of a 401(k). The union "saw this as an opportunity to get back to the table and see if we could wrap things up," Orr said.

In short order, he said they "were shaking hands" on the tentative agreement. "We sought to get some additional improvements from what they had imposed," he said. "We got very modest improvements in layoff language and discipline language. It wasn't what we'd wanted, but we felt it was better to have a contract with so-so protections in it than to have no contract with no protections."

The 401(k) plan includes a 5 percent company match and an additional 2 percent contribution, with no matching funds required, for veteran employees. Wage increases continue to be linked to a merit play plan that the local agreed to long ago. Health care coverage is also unchanged, though Orr said employees' out-of-pocket costs will rise as the company's grow.

The Rochester Guild stood strong over the years, even as Guild units at some Gannett papers were persuaded to decertify when management dangled the 401(k) plan in front of them.