After three months of negotiations and with the help of two federal conciliators, The Canadian Press Enterprises and representatives of the Canadian Media Guild reached a new collective agreement last week. The agreement affects the CP’s Parliament Hill bureau.
CP employees are set to see their salaries increase incrementally over the course of a new three-year agreement, ultimately receiving a four per cent increase to their pay.
But in turn, employees will take on a greater share of the cost of health benefits—an estimated $50 to $70 off of each paycheque—as well as the full cost of long-term disability benefits. The deal also maintains the company’s pension payback, but gives them temporary relief on interest payments.
“I’m glad it’s ratified,” said Terry Pedwell, CMG branch president and a veteran reporter in CP’s Hill bureau, who was at the bargaining table. “I know quite a few people were upset about some of the agreement, particularly, pertaining to employee takeover of long-term disability premiums and the short-term give to the company through no interest payments being paid on pension accruals, but it was the best we could come up with in a very difficult situation.”
Neil Campbell, president of operations at Canadian Press Enterprises, who joined the company last May, said during a bargaining process “you expect to come to some sort of compromised position” and said the company is “delighted” with the deal: “It’s a deal that will help us get to where we need to go, which is a financially viable Canadian Press.”
The CMG represents 240 Canadian Press employees across Canada, said Karen Wirsig, communications coordinator for the CMG.
On the Hill, there are 19 members of The Canadian Press who will be affected by this new collective agreement.
Excluding CP Hill bureau chief Rob Russo and deputy bureau chief Dean Beeby, who are members of CP management, there are 12 English-language reporters, two photographers, one office staff, and one technician working out of the 150 Wellington Street office in the National Press Building. In the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s ‘Hot Room’ located in Centre Block, there are two French-service CP reporters, though they’re technically members of CP’s Montreal bureau.
The 12 reporters are: Julian Beltrame, Michael Blanchfield, Murray Brewster, Jim Bronskill, Joan Bryden, Bruce Cheadle, Stephanie Levitz, Terry Pedwell, Steven Rennie, Heather Scoffield, John Ward, and Craig Wong. There are two photographers, Sean Kilpatrick and Adrian Wyld.
As well, Kevin Wiltshire, an office staffer, and Richard Paquette, a technician, are part of the Parliamentary bureau.
Additionally, there are two French-service CP reporters, Stephanie Marin and Fannie Olivier, who work out of the Parliamentary Press Gallery Centre Block’s ‘Hot Room,’ but Mr. Pedwell said they are technically members of the Montreal bureau as that is where their boss is based.
Employees had from March 22 to 26 to vote on the new collective agreement. It passed with 83 per cent support. Negotiations for the agreement began on Nov. 29, 2011, and mark the first contract negotiations between CP employees and the new ownership team, Canadian Press Enterprises, which acquired The Canadian Press in 2010.
On Feb. 7, two federally appointed conciliation officers—Jennifer Webster and Kim Beemer—were assigned to the process.
Mr. Campbell said the company asked for conciliation officers to be appointed to “put some discipline in the process” and to view it with fresh eyes, but he said at no point were they worried a deal couldn’t be reached.
However, Mr. Cheadle, the CMG’s acting president for the Ottawa local executive, said he doesn’t know that anyone is particularly happy with the deal.
“Our [employees’] actual net take-home pay is actually going to go down under this deal initially, because of the change to our benefits programs. So I don’t think anyone’s happy with the deal, [but] we’re all happy that job action was avoided and that The Canadian Press will continue to provide news on multiple platforms to our clients,” said Mr. Cheadle.
The Canadian Press, is a well-regarded news service that provides content to newspapers, radio and TV stations across the country. CP’s Parliament Hill bureau breaks stories daily and influences politics and government.
“It’s just about every paper outside of Postmedia and QMI. All the major daily newspapers outside of the National Post, and a wide range of online news services as well as several hundred radio stations and TV stations across the country. There’s also government and corporate clients that buy the news service through Command News,” said Mr. Pedwell.
In recent years, prior to coming under new ownership and while still an industry-cooperative, The Canadian Press suffered the loss of two prominent members or clients. In 2007, CanWest Global, now Postmedia Network Inc., pulled out of CP services to launch its own news service, Postmedia News. Then, in 2009, Sun Media Corp. announced it too was withdrawing from CP services.
In the fall of 2010, CP—traditionally an industry co-operative—was burdened by a reported $34.4-million deficit in its pension plans and was struggling financially, according to a Nov. 26, 2010, Globe and Mail article.
In order to lock-down the investors needed to keep afloat, employees agreed to delay pension payments.
In 2010, The Canadian Press was bought by Canadian Press Enterprises Inc.
CPE is jointly owned by the publisher of The Globe and Mail, Torstar Holdings Inc., which is a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation, a subsidiary of CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc., and Square Victoria Communications Group. It is now a for-profit company.
Mr. Campbell said the company’s financial situation “hadn’t actually improved” between the time when CP came under new ownership and when he was brought on, alongside co-president Jim Jennings, in May 2011.
“We were in a deep financial hole when we got here,” said Mr. Campbell. “We have looked very closely at our cost structure and we have made some adjustments there and we are in better shape…we’re not quite where we would like to be but we’ve made significant progress, and Jim Jennings and I are quite confident about where this company is headed.”
Prior to negotiations, CP Enterprises was making cuts. In addition to eliminating a number of management positions last fall, the company set up a voluntary departure program, which ultimately led to the exit of 10 more employees.
Mr. Campbell said the company also reduced the size of its Toronto headquarters from four floors to two by moving people around, which he described as “a very significant savings.”
Said Mr. Campbell: “We’re doing a lot of things like that. We reduced the size of our management team, we’ve had some success with some new business ventures, so you know, it’s a brighter situation than it was this time a year ago.”
And while the company is in a better financial direction according to Mr. Campbell, in a Dec. 1 CMG news release, CMG reported that the employee bargaining team was told “that current revenues fall well short of what CP is spending to maintain operations.”
Once at the bargaining table, Mr. Campbell said CP Enterprises presented the union with a “menu” of options to get the company “where we need to go” in terms of finances. It’s important to note, said Mr. Campbell, that the company wasn’t asking for all of their proposals to be included in the deal.
According to a CMG news release, the company suggested that employees would have to essentially choose between cuts to jobs or cuts to their pay.
But Mr. Campbell said no such ultimatum was given.
While the company did propose a 10 per cent base salary rollback and cuts to jobs, Mr. Campbell said they were presented as two “of a long list of options that would get us there [financially].”
A Feb. 6, release from the CMG outlined proposals put out by both of the bargaining teams as of December.
According to the release, CP Enterprises proposed a number of possibilities. The company suggested a 10 per cent base salary rollback for employees, the reduction of “an unknown number of jobs,” and a two-tier salary structure for new hires, an option which would give lower pay for future new ‘Group 3’ employees—that is any reporters/editors, photographers, foreign correspondents, or photo editors—moving them to a salary range of $40,782 to $64,090.
CP Enterprises also proposed that employees could take on a bigger share of the cost of benefits, suggesting a 65/35 employer/employee split, and proposed the elimination of premiums of night, weekend and overnight work, as well as double-time premiums for IT employees.
In addition, the company proposed employees take over the total cost of long-term disability premiums, an estimated $90 each month, and suggested a reduction in vacation time, from six to four weeks per year.
The company proposed that part-time and temporary employees wouldn’t get any benefits.
CP Enterprises also suggested a cancellation of their pension payback program.
Mr. Campbell said these were all options initially put on the table by CP Enterprises as conversation starters.
But from CMG news releases, employees appear to have seen things differently.
“The company has threatened that we have to accept the deep wage concessions or face layoffs in order to bring the overall wage costs down,” read the Feb. 6 release.
According to that same release, the CMG proposed employees receive a “reasonable,” though unspecified, across-the-board salary increase, suggested a 72/25 employer/employee division of the cost of benefits, and suggested re-examining the applicability of shift premium.
The CMG also proposed part-time employees keep their benefits and receive a commitment minimum number of hours each week, and suggested that temporary employees receive pay instead of benefits. Additionally, the CMG bargaining team said while they would discuss making pension payback “less onerous for the company,” they firmly ruled out the possibility of cancelling the company’s debt.
In multiple news releases, CMG representatives voiced concerns over the potential impact of the company’s proposed changes. Two-tier pay scales, they said, “would lead to conflict in busy newsrooms and undermine the collaboration necessary to produce quality content.”
“The company’s proposals would have a cumulative negative impact on how The Canadian Press operates. Asking staff who are already working all-out to do even more work for less money will undermine morale and the quality of the content we produce,” read a Jan. 20 CMG news release, which also called the company’s position an “unrealistic” and “short-term” bottom line.
“We refuse to be treated as second-class citizens to journalists at The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and La Presse who already earn more than we do,” read a Feb. 23 statement by CMG members of the CP Ottawa bureau.
“We now cart around video cameras with our notebooks and digital recorders, a major new task shouldered without any additional compensation,” read a Feb. 23 statement by CMG members of the CP Ottawa bureau.
CP Enterprises asked that a federal conciliation officer be assigned in mid-January.
While Mr. Pedwell said it wasn’t a very long negotiating period, “by normal standards,” negotiations between the two groups “was very intense and very concentrated and very difficult from the outset, given what was put on the table.”
Mr. Cheadle said CP reporters had “pretty much a uniform response across the country” to the company’s proposed changes.
“The company’s initial offer was for dramatic cuts to the salary and benefits, pensions, to the point where it really, it felt like a breach of that collegial effort, common effort, we’ve had to keep this enterprise alive through a decade of tough times, and there’s been a lot of give by the unionized employees here for a long time,” said Mr. Cheadle. “And then the very first act of our new owners is to make really stiff demands for a much greater give-back, so it really caused quite a bit of ill-feeling in the workplace.”
Mr. Campbell said the negotiations were a “very constructive process” and said with a three-year deal now settled, “we have some labour certainty and some cost certainty in that period of time, which we think is very important.”
Meanwhile, Carleton University Journalism professor Christopher Waddell said such cuts and circumstances are a “common trend in all media outlets in the last decade or so.”
Mr. Waddell said as news organizations cut back employees, the depth and breadth of reporting is impacted as less people are assigned to specialized beats.
“What you lose is the expertise that comes from covering a beat area for a long period of time, and that’s one of the biggest changes that’s gone on Parliament Hill, and in lots of other news organizations as well over the last few years,” said Mr. Waddell, a former CBC TV Hill bureau chief. “You can’t bring that expertise to the stories you write so the stories you write may be more superficial.”
Mr. Waddell said in the mid-1980s there were around 30 to 35 people working at the CP Parliamentary bureau.
But Mr. Waddell said, despite the cutbacks, CP still plays a very big role in breaking stories and having an influence: “I think it’s better now than it was five or 10 years ago, because they’re pursuing different types of stories, they’ve been very aggressive over the last few years in pursuing access to information issues, and that’s produced a lot of good stories for them.”
Overall, however, Mr. Waddell said he thinks coverage of Canadian politics has suffered as a result of reductions.
“We’ve lost almost all the reporters that reported to individual news organizations, and what we have now is almost all reporters working for national news organizations,” said Mr. Waddell.
Original Article
Source: Globe hill times
Author: LAURA RYCKEWAERT
CP employees are set to see their salaries increase incrementally over the course of a new three-year agreement, ultimately receiving a four per cent increase to their pay.
But in turn, employees will take on a greater share of the cost of health benefits—an estimated $50 to $70 off of each paycheque—as well as the full cost of long-term disability benefits. The deal also maintains the company’s pension payback, but gives them temporary relief on interest payments.
“I’m glad it’s ratified,” said Terry Pedwell, CMG branch president and a veteran reporter in CP’s Hill bureau, who was at the bargaining table. “I know quite a few people were upset about some of the agreement, particularly, pertaining to employee takeover of long-term disability premiums and the short-term give to the company through no interest payments being paid on pension accruals, but it was the best we could come up with in a very difficult situation.”
Neil Campbell, president of operations at Canadian Press Enterprises, who joined the company last May, said during a bargaining process “you expect to come to some sort of compromised position” and said the company is “delighted” with the deal: “It’s a deal that will help us get to where we need to go, which is a financially viable Canadian Press.”
The CMG represents 240 Canadian Press employees across Canada, said Karen Wirsig, communications coordinator for the CMG.
On the Hill, there are 19 members of The Canadian Press who will be affected by this new collective agreement.
Excluding CP Hill bureau chief Rob Russo and deputy bureau chief Dean Beeby, who are members of CP management, there are 12 English-language reporters, two photographers, one office staff, and one technician working out of the 150 Wellington Street office in the National Press Building. In the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s ‘Hot Room’ located in Centre Block, there are two French-service CP reporters, though they’re technically members of CP’s Montreal bureau.
The 12 reporters are: Julian Beltrame, Michael Blanchfield, Murray Brewster, Jim Bronskill, Joan Bryden, Bruce Cheadle, Stephanie Levitz, Terry Pedwell, Steven Rennie, Heather Scoffield, John Ward, and Craig Wong. There are two photographers, Sean Kilpatrick and Adrian Wyld.
As well, Kevin Wiltshire, an office staffer, and Richard Paquette, a technician, are part of the Parliamentary bureau.
Additionally, there are two French-service CP reporters, Stephanie Marin and Fannie Olivier, who work out of the Parliamentary Press Gallery Centre Block’s ‘Hot Room,’ but Mr. Pedwell said they are technically members of the Montreal bureau as that is where their boss is based.
Employees had from March 22 to 26 to vote on the new collective agreement. It passed with 83 per cent support. Negotiations for the agreement began on Nov. 29, 2011, and mark the first contract negotiations between CP employees and the new ownership team, Canadian Press Enterprises, which acquired The Canadian Press in 2010.
On Feb. 7, two federally appointed conciliation officers—Jennifer Webster and Kim Beemer—were assigned to the process.
Mr. Campbell said the company asked for conciliation officers to be appointed to “put some discipline in the process” and to view it with fresh eyes, but he said at no point were they worried a deal couldn’t be reached.
However, Mr. Cheadle, the CMG’s acting president for the Ottawa local executive, said he doesn’t know that anyone is particularly happy with the deal.
“Our [employees’] actual net take-home pay is actually going to go down under this deal initially, because of the change to our benefits programs. So I don’t think anyone’s happy with the deal, [but] we’re all happy that job action was avoided and that The Canadian Press will continue to provide news on multiple platforms to our clients,” said Mr. Cheadle.
The Canadian Press, is a well-regarded news service that provides content to newspapers, radio and TV stations across the country. CP’s Parliament Hill bureau breaks stories daily and influences politics and government.
“It’s just about every paper outside of Postmedia and QMI. All the major daily newspapers outside of the National Post, and a wide range of online news services as well as several hundred radio stations and TV stations across the country. There’s also government and corporate clients that buy the news service through Command News,” said Mr. Pedwell.
In recent years, prior to coming under new ownership and while still an industry-cooperative, The Canadian Press suffered the loss of two prominent members or clients. In 2007, CanWest Global, now Postmedia Network Inc., pulled out of CP services to launch its own news service, Postmedia News. Then, in 2009, Sun Media Corp. announced it too was withdrawing from CP services.
In the fall of 2010, CP—traditionally an industry co-operative—was burdened by a reported $34.4-million deficit in its pension plans and was struggling financially, according to a Nov. 26, 2010, Globe and Mail article.
In order to lock-down the investors needed to keep afloat, employees agreed to delay pension payments.
In 2010, The Canadian Press was bought by Canadian Press Enterprises Inc.
CPE is jointly owned by the publisher of The Globe and Mail, Torstar Holdings Inc., which is a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation, a subsidiary of CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc., and Square Victoria Communications Group. It is now a for-profit company.
Mr. Campbell said the company’s financial situation “hadn’t actually improved” between the time when CP came under new ownership and when he was brought on, alongside co-president Jim Jennings, in May 2011.
“We were in a deep financial hole when we got here,” said Mr. Campbell. “We have looked very closely at our cost structure and we have made some adjustments there and we are in better shape…we’re not quite where we would like to be but we’ve made significant progress, and Jim Jennings and I are quite confident about where this company is headed.”
Prior to negotiations, CP Enterprises was making cuts. In addition to eliminating a number of management positions last fall, the company set up a voluntary departure program, which ultimately led to the exit of 10 more employees.
Mr. Campbell said the company also reduced the size of its Toronto headquarters from four floors to two by moving people around, which he described as “a very significant savings.”
Said Mr. Campbell: “We’re doing a lot of things like that. We reduced the size of our management team, we’ve had some success with some new business ventures, so you know, it’s a brighter situation than it was this time a year ago.”
And while the company is in a better financial direction according to Mr. Campbell, in a Dec. 1 CMG news release, CMG reported that the employee bargaining team was told “that current revenues fall well short of what CP is spending to maintain operations.”
Once at the bargaining table, Mr. Campbell said CP Enterprises presented the union with a “menu” of options to get the company “where we need to go” in terms of finances. It’s important to note, said Mr. Campbell, that the company wasn’t asking for all of their proposals to be included in the deal.
According to a CMG news release, the company suggested that employees would have to essentially choose between cuts to jobs or cuts to their pay.
But Mr. Campbell said no such ultimatum was given.
While the company did propose a 10 per cent base salary rollback and cuts to jobs, Mr. Campbell said they were presented as two “of a long list of options that would get us there [financially].”
A Feb. 6, release from the CMG outlined proposals put out by both of the bargaining teams as of December.
According to the release, CP Enterprises proposed a number of possibilities. The company suggested a 10 per cent base salary rollback for employees, the reduction of “an unknown number of jobs,” and a two-tier salary structure for new hires, an option which would give lower pay for future new ‘Group 3’ employees—that is any reporters/editors, photographers, foreign correspondents, or photo editors—moving them to a salary range of $40,782 to $64,090.
CP Enterprises also proposed that employees could take on a bigger share of the cost of benefits, suggesting a 65/35 employer/employee split, and proposed the elimination of premiums of night, weekend and overnight work, as well as double-time premiums for IT employees.
In addition, the company proposed employees take over the total cost of long-term disability premiums, an estimated $90 each month, and suggested a reduction in vacation time, from six to four weeks per year.
The company proposed that part-time and temporary employees wouldn’t get any benefits.
CP Enterprises also suggested a cancellation of their pension payback program.
Mr. Campbell said these were all options initially put on the table by CP Enterprises as conversation starters.
But from CMG news releases, employees appear to have seen things differently.
“The company has threatened that we have to accept the deep wage concessions or face layoffs in order to bring the overall wage costs down,” read the Feb. 6 release.
According to that same release, the CMG proposed employees receive a “reasonable,” though unspecified, across-the-board salary increase, suggested a 72/25 employer/employee division of the cost of benefits, and suggested re-examining the applicability of shift premium.
The CMG also proposed part-time employees keep their benefits and receive a commitment minimum number of hours each week, and suggested that temporary employees receive pay instead of benefits. Additionally, the CMG bargaining team said while they would discuss making pension payback “less onerous for the company,” they firmly ruled out the possibility of cancelling the company’s debt.
In multiple news releases, CMG representatives voiced concerns over the potential impact of the company’s proposed changes. Two-tier pay scales, they said, “would lead to conflict in busy newsrooms and undermine the collaboration necessary to produce quality content.”
“The company’s proposals would have a cumulative negative impact on how The Canadian Press operates. Asking staff who are already working all-out to do even more work for less money will undermine morale and the quality of the content we produce,” read a Jan. 20 CMG news release, which also called the company’s position an “unrealistic” and “short-term” bottom line.
“We refuse to be treated as second-class citizens to journalists at The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and La Presse who already earn more than we do,” read a Feb. 23 statement by CMG members of the CP Ottawa bureau.
“We now cart around video cameras with our notebooks and digital recorders, a major new task shouldered without any additional compensation,” read a Feb. 23 statement by CMG members of the CP Ottawa bureau.
CP Enterprises asked that a federal conciliation officer be assigned in mid-January.
While Mr. Pedwell said it wasn’t a very long negotiating period, “by normal standards,” negotiations between the two groups “was very intense and very concentrated and very difficult from the outset, given what was put on the table.”
Mr. Cheadle said CP reporters had “pretty much a uniform response across the country” to the company’s proposed changes.
“The company’s initial offer was for dramatic cuts to the salary and benefits, pensions, to the point where it really, it felt like a breach of that collegial effort, common effort, we’ve had to keep this enterprise alive through a decade of tough times, and there’s been a lot of give by the unionized employees here for a long time,” said Mr. Cheadle. “And then the very first act of our new owners is to make really stiff demands for a much greater give-back, so it really caused quite a bit of ill-feeling in the workplace.”
Mr. Campbell said the negotiations were a “very constructive process” and said with a three-year deal now settled, “we have some labour certainty and some cost certainty in that period of time, which we think is very important.”
Meanwhile, Carleton University Journalism professor Christopher Waddell said such cuts and circumstances are a “common trend in all media outlets in the last decade or so.”
Mr. Waddell said as news organizations cut back employees, the depth and breadth of reporting is impacted as less people are assigned to specialized beats.
“What you lose is the expertise that comes from covering a beat area for a long period of time, and that’s one of the biggest changes that’s gone on Parliament Hill, and in lots of other news organizations as well over the last few years,” said Mr. Waddell, a former CBC TV Hill bureau chief. “You can’t bring that expertise to the stories you write so the stories you write may be more superficial.”
Mr. Waddell said in the mid-1980s there were around 30 to 35 people working at the CP Parliamentary bureau.
But Mr. Waddell said, despite the cutbacks, CP still plays a very big role in breaking stories and having an influence: “I think it’s better now than it was five or 10 years ago, because they’re pursuing different types of stories, they’ve been very aggressive over the last few years in pursuing access to information issues, and that’s produced a lot of good stories for them.”
Overall, however, Mr. Waddell said he thinks coverage of Canadian politics has suffered as a result of reductions.
“We’ve lost almost all the reporters that reported to individual news organizations, and what we have now is almost all reporters working for national news organizations,” said Mr. Waddell.
Original Article
Source: Globe hill times
Author: LAURA RYCKEWAERT
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