New York Times June 30 By Abeer Allam
With their contract set to expire at midnight tonight, newsroom employees and advertising sales representatives at The Village Voice said yesterday that they were prepared to strike for the first time in the newspaper's 50-year history if they did not get the deal they wanted. Negotiations to renew the three-year contract began on June 14. They continued yesterday, but the union said it was not optimistic about reaching an agreement before the deadline. When the workers requested a wage increase, the paper's management asked them to pay more for their health insurance coverage, switch to a more limited health plan and adjust how contributions are made to their 401(k) accounts, according to the United Auto Workers, which represents 150 workers at the paper. "We are in very intense negotiations with The Voice," said Maida Rosenstein of Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers. "It is all about the money. They are just trying to pass on all the cost to their workers. They simply want a bigger profit margin." David Schneiderman, the chairman and chief executive of Village Voice Media, the newspaper's parent company, and one of the members of the negotiating team, did not return phone calls or respond to messages left yesterday on his answering machine and with his assistant. In a statement, a spokeswoman for The Voice said: "The Village Voice has a long history of being wholly committed to our staff and our union. The Village Voice management team is working with our union to resolve their issues and negotiate a mutually agreeable contract. We are confident that an amicable settlement can be reached." Salaries for entry-level newsroom jobs are under $30,000, the union said. It would not specify the salary increases it was seeking for the paper's reporters, editors, photographers and advertising sales representatives in the union. "I believe people love the paper, but really require these basic benefit levels to be able to survive," Ms. Rosenstein said. Workers also asked the management for protections against layoffs. About a dozen workers were laid off in the past few years, the union said. "We want a fair deal," said Tom Robbins, a writer who is on the union's negotiating team. "We are having a very tough time with the demands that management has put on the table for us. Those are demands that we will not accept. Many people here do not earn enough money." The Village Voice, the nation's largest alternative weekly, was one of the first workplaces in the country to offer health insurance to the partners of gay employees. It also extended its health coverage to freelance contributors. Now, the management wants to limit eligibility for health insurance, the union said. One central issue is compensation for writers who contribute to The Voice's Web site, villagevoice.com. While the union demanded restrictions on members' workloads and compensation it considers fair, the management wants to form individual deals with writers, the union said. Joshua B. Freeman, a labor historian and a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said that as the country has grown more politically conservative in the last 20 years, contract negotiations have become a source of tension between unions and employers. "It is not uncommon to have employers seek to use negotiation to reduce benefit or wages in ways to improve their economic situation," Professor Freeman said.
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050630/75a82ed5/attachment.htm>