Picking up where they left off abruptly last week, representatives of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and all five unions that have been on strike since October met for bargaining over a health care plan that could get strikers back to work.
On Friday morning, the leaders of the production unions (pressmen, mailers, typos, transportation) gave the company a proposal for a health care plan that would work for all of them. On Tuesday morning, again starting around 10 a.m., two company lawyers handed back to the unions’ lawyer, Joe Pass, proposals for each union that would be that plan, which guarantees benefits and costs for two years, but with some modifications.
Attorney Richard Lowe said the company could not accept language allowing trustees of the plan to “change anything they want to anytime they want to. … That’s what you guys are complaining about in our proposal for all these years.” So the proposal he presented did not include the company signing a plan participation agreement.
Pass said he would have to talk to the plan administrators on that and that he’d “get back to” them. He asked whether the company would give the workers a disputed 8% of wages that previously went toward workers’ health care.
“That’s not an economic concession we’re willing to make,” Lowe said several times, a response also repeated later by his colleague Michael Oesterle.
“We appreciate the proposal,” Pass said, but he added, “We don’t know why we can’t get our money back.”
On behalf of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, the newsroom workers’ union, Pass presented Lowe with a document comparing the company’s last contract proposal with the guild’s, highlighting language on which the two sides agree and disagree, in order to move the bargaining process. He said the guild is expecting a counterproposal “because everything we’ve given you, you’ve rejected.”
“I’ll look at it,” Lowe said, asking, “Will you have a new proposal for us?”
Pass reiterated that the union expects a proposal from the company.
The bargaining session lasted for about an hour and 15 minutes, shorter than the transit time for some of the 14 participants. They did not immediately set a date to meet again.
Bob, a feature writer and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is currently on strike and serving as interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Contact him at bbatz@unionprogress.com.
