26 January 2009

Solid rejection of contract offer,
plea to resume talks,
sparks return to table in Montreal

Montreal Newspaper Guild | CWA Canada Local 30111

The Gazette agreed today to return to the bargaining table after employees on Sunday resoundingly rejected the company's latest contract offer.

A resolution passed by members of the Montreal Newspaper Guild (MNG) instructing their bargaining team to meet with the employer and achieve an agreement was sent to the conciliator, who won the company's approval to set up a meeting for this Wednesday.

David Wilson, the CWA Canada staff representative who has been leading the negotiations, says of the membership: "They're pumped!" He notes that "this is the furthest this Local has ever gone in standing up for itself — and they mean it."

The 181 employees in three bargaining units — Advertising, Editorial and Reader Sales & Service (RSS) — have been without a contract since June 1, 2008. Yesterday afternoon, Editorial voted 80.5 per cent and RSS 73 per cent, to reject the company's offer. Earlier in the day, Advertising voted 65 per cent in favour of accepting the deal.

The lobby of the hotel where the MNG meetings and votes took place was jammed with journalists from every news outlet in the city, says Wilson. Labour strife in the media had hit the headlines a day earlier, when the Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal locked out 250 editorial and office employees.

Although both sides at The Gazette have been in a legal strike/lockout position since early last summer, and the union voted 86 per cent in favour of a strike mandate in September, "We've told the employer and the public that we have no intention of striking at this time," says Wilson. "We hope to conclude a fair agreement at some point in the near future."

Management at the CanWest-owned daily wants language removed from the three collective agreements that gives the MNG jurisdiction over work performed by its members. Without that language, the company would be free to ship the employees' work to other company facilities that are not unionized.

Guild jurisdiction has been a critical issue ever since Gazette management laid off 45 RSS employees in June and exported their work to a CanWest call centre in Winnipeg.

The MNG is also grieving the transfer of other work — layout of some pages and the Driving section, electronic photo desk functions, business office duties — to non-unionized CanWest facilities in Hamilton and Winnipeg. That grievance is scheduled to go to arbitration next month.

The MNG maintains that contracts for all three bargaining units "clearly prohibit the assignment of such work either to employees of the same employer not covered by our collective agreement or to employees outside The Gazette."

Meanwhile, an online petition against CanWest's job outsourcing that was set up in October, had garnered 7,152 signatures as of today.