York Daily Record, Oct. 17

York Daily Record/Sunday News, NLRB settle

By Sean Adkins
Of the Daily Record/Sunday News

The National Labor Relations Board has inked an agreement with the York Daily Record/Sunday News that includes reinstating reporters' bylines and permitting employees to discuss guild business while on the clock.

The deal calls for the company not to refuse to print bylines that management withheld from workers based on their union activities or membership, said Wayne R. Gold, regional director of the NLRB's Region 5 office in Baltimore.

"The union got everything they would have gotten if they would have won in a trial," he said.

Michele Canty, president of Local 38218, said the agreement is good news for union members.

"It's a shame that we had to go through all this," Canty said, "and that our members had to go to the NLRB to get the company to take them seriously and bargain in good faith."

As part of the settlement approved by the company, the union and the NLRB, the newspaper did not admit to having violated the National Labor Relations Act, Gold said.

For more than a year, the York Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America has been negotiating a contract with Denver-based MediaNews Group for the Daily Record/Sunday News.

Currently, guild members are working under a contract that expired Sept. 30, 2005.

Earlier this year, the union filed charges with the NLRB against the York Newspaper Co. that claimed the company had engaged in unfair labor practices. The company publishes the York Daily Record/Sunday News.

After an investigation, the NLRB sought an order against the company that it restore leave time taken by employees who are members of the negotiating committee, require management to bargain in good faith and arbitrate a particular grievance.

The settlement will allow negotiating members unpaid leave to attend negotiating sessions or for the guild and the company to meet when members are not slated to work.

In addition, the company has agreed to restore personal, vacation and compensation time to members of the union's negotiating committee who had spent those hours in bargaining sessions.

"It's a very, very impressive settlement," said Carrie Biggs-Adams, the union's representative in local contract talks. "... The guild was pleased to sign it."

According to the settlement, the company has agreed to rescind rules and policies that prohibit workers from wearing printed union messages to the office prior to 5 p.m. or from discussing matters related to the union while on the clock.

Fred Uffelman, publisher of the York Daily Record/Sunday News, said that discussions related to the NLRB had become a distraction to the goal of settling a contract.

"We were happy to take the opportunity to get these things put aside so we can sign a contract," he said. "We want to get to the business of negotiating a contract."

Biggs-Adams said the settlement reaffirms the process of working out labor relations by agreement rather than by enforcement of the law.

"I can smell (a contract)," she said. "I think it's getting close."

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