Current board members picked Amur, a JSOnline producer, to fill Journal Sentinel copy editor John Schumacher’s seat as an at-large board member. Schumacher has been appointed treasurer, to replace former deputy business editor Bob Helbig, who left in last fall’s buyout but agreed to remain in office during the transition to a new treasurer.

Both the Schumacher and Amur appointments take effect Feb. 1 and last until the next membership meeting, when Guild members will have an opportunity to vote on filling the seats through the Sept. 30 end of the board term. The date of that meeting has not been set, but will be in the first quarter of this year.

Amur has served as the Guild’s human rights coordinator since October.

The board also named investigative reporter Gina Barton as Good & Welfare Committee chair.

Barton replaces Amy Rabideau Silvers, a metro reporter who left the newspaper this week to take another job. Silvers, a former board member, was the first person to chair the committee, created last spring.

The Guild’s Executive Board has picked Schumacher, a Journal Sentinel copy editor, to succeed Bob Helbig in the treasurer’s post, effective Feb. 1. Helbig, a former deputy business editor, took a buyout last fall but remained a Guild member and agreed to continue in office during the transition to a new treasurer.

Schumacher was elected as an at-large board member in September and later was appointed as health and safety coordinator. He previously served as a steward.

His appointment as treasurer will last until the next membership meeting. At that time, Guild members will vote on filling the treasurer’s post through the Sept. 30 end of Helbig’s term. If Schumacher is elected, the membership also will vote on filling his board seat for the remainder of the term. That meeting has not been set but likely will be in the first quarter of 2012.

Helbig is a former local president who has been our longest-serving treasurer, racking up nearly eight years in three non-consecutive stints. His most recent tour of duty started in May, when he traded his at-large board seat with then-Treasurer Amy Hetzner, a former metro reporter who later took a buyout.

Greg Pearson is back in the leadership ranks of the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild.

The Guild’s Executive Board has named Pearson, the local’s former president, as a steward leader.

Pearson, a Journal Sentinel copy editor who served most recently as a steward, now oversees stewards, contract enforcement, membership and mobilizing for the sports, features/entertainment and opinions staffs. He replaces metro reporter Tom Held, who left in the buyout.

The board reappointed the other two steward leaders: copy editor Russ Maki, to a fourth term serving the copy, design, graphics and national desks and the photo and JSOnline staffs, and business reporter Tom Content, to a second term serving the downtown metro and business news desks and Wisconsin news bureaus.

Other new appointments include PolitiFact Wisconsin reporter Dave Umhoefer as wage data coordinator, succeeding deputy business editor Bob Helbig, who left in the buyout; metro reporter Mike Johnson as benefits coordinator, succeeding business reporter Kathleen Gallagher; copy editor John Schumacher as health and safety coordinator, succeeding Umhoefer; and JSOnline producer Jenn Amur as human rights coordinator, a previously vacant position. Schumacher is also a board member.

Reappointed were page designer Zeina Makky as communications chair, feature writer Jan Uebelherr as social chair, metro reporter Amy Rabideau Silvers as good and welfare chair, copy editor Jen Steele as newsletter editor, online producer Craig Nickels as Webmaster, metro reporter Larry Sandler as posting and exclusions coordinator and assistant features/entertainment editor Stan Miller as tech coordinator. Uebelherr and Makky are also board members.

All of those appointed will serve one-year terms, until next October. The steward leaders and Vice Presidents Mary-Liz Shaw and Karen Samelson are now selecting stewards.

Journal Sentinel Inc. management has not announced the total number of positions eliminated throughout all newspaper departments, but some sources indicate it could be more than two dozen. The staff reductions were completed during the past week.

The latest cuts mark a return to what had become a troubling trend. During 2009 alone, buyouts and layoffs cut the newsroom work force by one-third. But no downsizing had touched our bargaining unit since then.

“I’m hoping we can keep our current numbers stable, but as we’ve seen the company is willing to squeeze the newsroom any time it feels like its financial numbers aren’t up to snuff,” Guild President Tom Silverstein told members. “I remain dismayed that, with few exceptions, the newsroom cuts have been aimed at bargaining-unit employees and not management.”

The most recent staff reductions started with the August announcement that the company was offering buyouts to newsroom, production and circulation employees. Managers did not indicate the buyouts were a prelude to involuntary cuts. But when the buyouts fell short of a target that had never been announced, the buyout window was extended for newsroom employees only, with a warning that layoffs could follow.

Most of those who left the newsroom took voluntary buyouts. The Guild contract requires the company to offer buyouts to our bargaining-unit members before sending out layoff notices, and the buyout packages must be no less favorable than the contractually required severance deal of two weeks’ pay for each year of service.

By contrast, in some departments where employees are not represented by unions, the company moved directly to involuntary cuts without offering buyouts.

In contract negotiations now under way, the company is seeking to eliminate all severance pay guarantees, while the Guild is seeking to preserve the current severance level.

The local’s members elected Shaw, a Journal Sentinel feature writer, as 1st vice president, in charge of contract enforcement, for a one-year term starting Oct. 1. She succeeds metro reporter Meg Kissinger, who chose not to seek a third term. Shaw is a steward and a member of our Good & Welfare Committee.

Guild members also chose metro reporter Annysa Johnson as secretary. Johnson, a steward, succeeds metro reporter Erin Richards, who also decided not to run for a third term.

Also joining the board as at-large members are page designer Zeina Makky and copy editor John Schumacher. Makky chairs our Communications Committee, and both she and Schumacher are stewards. They succeed PolitiFact Wisconsin reporter Tom Kertscher, who chose not to run for a fourth term, and metro reporter Amy Hetzner, who left in the buyout.

Members re-elected sportswriter Tom Silverstein, to his second term as president; copy editor Karen Samelson, to her fourth full term as 2nd vice president, in charge of membership and mobilizing; deputy business editor Bob Helbig as treasurer, a job he has held for a record seven full terms and two partial terms in three stints over the past 20 years; and feature writer Jan Uebelherr as an at-large board member, for a fifth full non-consecutive term.

In other action at our annual meeting Tuesday, members:

• Approved bylaws changes to formalize the Good & Welfare Committee as a standing committee; give the board the option of naming a human rights coordinator, instead of a Human Rights Committee; and eliminate the Organizing Committee as a standing committee, providing instead for the president to name a committee to help if an organizing drive starts.

• Renewed the rebate provision that keeps our dues at 1% of pay.

Amy Hetzner, a metro reporter, stepped down as treasurer, after about five years in that job. Former president Bob Helbig, a deputy business editor who served as treasurer for a record seven years in two prior stints, was elected to serve the four months remaining in Hetzner’s term.

That left a vacancy in Helbig’s seat as an at-large board member. Hetzner was elected to fill that position.

In other recent leadership moves:

• The board has named business reporter Kathleen Gallagher as benefits coordinator. Gallagher is now our point person on health care, 401(k) accounts, pensions and other fringe benefits. The post was previously vacant.
• Metro reporter Amy Rabideau Silvers has been appointed to chair the local’s newest committee, the Good & Welfare Committee. Silvers and her committee members — metro reporter  Gina Barton, page designer Nick Lujero and feature writers Mary-Liz Shaw and Jan Uebelherr — provide support to colleagues facing life changes, from the death of a parent to the birth of a child.

The local’s Executive Board has named Umhoefer, a Politifact Wisconsin reporter, to deal with any concerns about ergonomics, air quality or other health and safety issues affecting union-represented workers in the Journal Sentinel’s downtown newsroom and Wisconsin bureaus. He fills a post that has been vacant since metro reporter Susanne Rust left the paper in 2009.

As an immediate result, members of our bargaining unit will be able to take two key changes into account when scheduling their 2011 time off: (a) All full-timers will now have three floating holidays, a net gain of two extra days off each year, and (b) all employees will now have an extra three months to take each year of vacation, so 2011 vacation can be used as late as the first quarter of 2012.

The latter point is of particular importance this year for employees who were hired between 1995 and 2006 and who may have time remaining in their transitional vacation accounts, or TVA. Because the TVA is supposed to be scheduled before the end of 2011, the change will allow affected employees to use up TVA first and roll over some 2011 vacation to early 2012. Guild representatives have personally contacted each affected employee to be sure they know how much TVA they have and how it must be used.

Another feature of the deal will restore a fifth week of vacation, after 20 years of service, for full-time employees hired in 2006 or later. Because all employees hired before 2006 were already eligible for the fifth week, part-timers hired from 2006 on will be the only newsroom employees who wouldn’t qualify for it.

The tradeoff for these improvements: Employees hired from 1995 on, who are on the “earn-as-you-go” vacation system, would have to pay back the company if they left the paper after taking more vacation than they had earned. However, management has given the Guild on-the-record assurances that this provision would not apply to those who take buyouts or are involuntarily downsized.

Most of the proposed changes are improvements — two extra days off each year for full-timers; three more months to use our vacation; and restoration of the fifth week of vacation, after 20 years, for new full-time hires. But we would have to give up a bit of contractual protection for people leaving the company. And we were not allowed to negotiate any substantive changes to the package.

Because this would require amending our contract with a side letter, in a way that affects our benefits, our Executive Board has decided to put this question to a vote of our membership. The board is recommending members vote “yes.”

Both the meeting and the balloting will begin at noon in the Abert Room. During the meeting, members will have an opportunity to discuss the agreement and hear updates on our other activities, including our preparations for bargaining. Lunch will be served. Voting will continue until 2 p.m., then resume from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Members who need to make arrangements to vote absentee should contact Karen Samelson or, in her absence, Greg Pearson.

The full text of the vacation agreement has been distributed to members and posted on the main Guild bulletin board in the newsroom. Here are the key points:

Overview: Journal Communications wants to have the same vacation policy for everyone in the corporation, both publishing and broadcast, to save the downsized payroll and human resources departments the trouble of worrying about the nuances of different contracts and policies when they calculate how much vacation everyone has coming. Ours still wouldn’t be identical to everyone else’s, but it would be a lot closer. Rather than drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator, the company is offering several improvements that we sought unsuccessfully at the bargaining table.

Floating holidays: We used to have one floating holiday for full-timers. A couple contracts ago, at the request of corporate accountants, we agreed to turn that into a vacation day. Since then, every full-timer with three weeks of vacation, for example, has had three weeks and one day. Now the company wants to turn that day back into a floating holiday and add two more, so we would have three floating holidays every year. In bargaining, we sought to add several personal days every year but wound up only with those the company was trading for a pay cut. Management has not connected these two new days to the pay cut in any way.

Fifth week: Most of our unit members get five weeks of vacation after 20 years. In the 2004-’08 contract, we reluctantly gave up the fifth week for those hired in ‘06 and later. We tried unsuccessfully in bargaining last time to get it back. Management is now ready to give it back, but only to full-timers.

Short-term rollover: Realizing that our short-handed staff has a lot of trouble scheduling vacations, especially in December, management is now willing to let us take our vacation as late as March of the following year. So, for example, we could take our unused 2011 vacation sometime in the first quarter of 2012. The rollover would not apply to the floating holidays.

Payback: When we went to the earn-as-you-go vacation system, several members said we shouldn’t agree to anything that required people to repay the company if they left after taking more vacation than they had “earned.” We successfully negotiated language that flatly bans such paybacks. This has been a source of friction and several grievances, and management tried and failed to eliminate that language in bargaining. This change would require payback in all cases. After our board voiced concerns about docking departing employees who had not planned to leave, management gave us on-the-record assurances that they never had done this to anyone who was downsized or took a buyout, and they didn’t intend to do so in the future.

Part-timers: Although our part-timers would not get the fifth week back, they would continue to get more vacation than those in any other department. Newsroom part-timers earn vacation on the same schedule as full-timers. The rest of the company’s part-timers must work here five years before they get any vacation, and then they’re capped at 52 hours (slightly more than two weeks for those who work 24 hours a week). We would keep exactly what we have now — including no fifth week for part-timers hired in ‘06 or later.

Earn-as-you-go effective date: We use the earn-as-you-go system for full-timers hired in 1995 or later. For everyone else, it took effect for those hired in 1994 or later. We would keep our effective date. Along with the part-timer policy, that would be among the only vacation policy differences between us and the rest of the company.

The process: If we say no, everything stays as is, at least through 2011, but we can come back to the issue in bargaining this spring. If we say yes, we could still try to renegotiate the terms in regular bargaining, when everything else will be on the table as well. With a positive vote, the language would be retroactive to Jan. 1.

Content, a Journal Sentinel business reporter, replaces Mary Louise Schumacher in overseeing stewards, contract enforcement, membership and mobilizing for the business news, features/entertainment, photo and opinions staffs. Schumacher, the newspaper’s art and architecture critic, did not seek reappointment to a second term.

The board reappointed the other two steward leaders: copy editor Russ Maki, to a third term serving the copy, design, graphics and national desks and the sports staff, and metro reporter Tom Held, to a second term serving the downtown metro desk, Wisconsin news bureaus and JSOnline.

Also reappointed were page designer Zeina Makky as communications chair, feature writer Jan Uebelherr as social chair, copy editor Jen Steele as newsletter editor, online producer Craig Nickels as Webmaster, metro reporter Larry Sandler as posting and exclusions coordinator, deputy business editor Bob Helbig as wage data coordinator and assistant features/entertainment editor Stan Miller as tech coordinator. Uebelherr and Helbig are also board members.

All of those appointed will serve one-year terms, until next October. The steward leaders and Vice Presidents Meg Kissinger and Karen Samelson will now select stewards.