February 16, 2022
The News Media Guild’s bargaining team met with The Associated Press on Thursday to once again discuss the Editorial Unit Contract.
The primary focus of today’s meeting was to discuss holidays and vacation proposals.
After the company rejected the guild’s proposal to start new hires with four weeks of vacation, the guild countered with starting new hires with three weeks of vacation and then giving employees five weeks of vacation after 15 years of service. Currently, employees must be employed with AP 20 years before receiving five weeks of vacation. The guild also proposed giving employees six weeks of vacation to those who have 25 years of more experience. Examples of competitors starting new employees with 3 weeks was cited. The company said it would consider the counter offer.
On converting personal days and birthdays to vacation days, the guild and AP are on a soft agreement but only if those three days are allowed to be carried over and not constrained by the same time requirements as vacation days. Essentially, these three days could be used like a personal days/birthday but now all of an employee’s days off would be in the same “bucket.”
On holidays, the guild once again raised concerns about changing compensation for holiday pay to paid only and removing the option of getting CTO time instead. The guild had no objections to coverting carryover personal days and birthdays to carryover vacations as they are governed by the same usage rules anyway. The company says this is needed for administrative ease.
Finally, the guild once again raised its objections to employees being required to schedule all vacation time by July 1, rather than the current Aug. 1 date. The company says this is needed because of sports schedules. The guild will continue to pursue this.
The next bargaining meeting will take place February 23. There’s no set agenda yet. However, we wanted to stress that some of the high-interest topics that many have asked about lately – like parental leave and wages – are still not on the table. The guild will continue to share its policy proposals before bargaining meetings to make sure we’re getting your input.
The guild was represented by Vin Cherwoo, a sports writer from New York; John Braunreiter, a customer support specialist from Milwaukee; Kim Kruesi, a newsperson from Nashville, Tenn.; Bobby Calvan, a newsperson from New York; and administrator Kevin Keane.
The AP was represented by: Teresita Seeberger, senior director of global human resources; Keisa Caesar, human resources manager; David Scott, vice president of news strategy and operations; and attorney Patrick Collins.