Milwaukee Newspaper Guild members ratified a new contract with Journal Sentinel Inc. by a vote of 54-10 on Thursday.
The pact, which runs through 2011, preserves several key protections from previous contracts, including our severance and notice pay in case of downsizings and our cap on the percentage of health care costs we must pay, although the company gains more control over who to lay off and over how our benefits are structured. The contract also keeps much of our current wage and differential structure in place, and outlines how — but not exactly when — our wages would be restored to where they were before last year’s 6.6% pay cut.
In short, it’s a contract that falls short of what many of us had hoped for, but that is nonetheless the best our bargaining committee believed we could get, and in some ways better than some of the others we’re seeing at other Guild locals across the country.
Guild and management representatives will now proceed with signing and implementing the contract.