Company brings in contractor without agreement

The Times Union began using an independent contractor to clean the building this week, despite ongoing negotiations over whether the work can be outsourced.

The Guild’s discovery follows a sadly predictable pattern of the Company implementing what it wants while claiming it is negotiating.

And while the Company presented a proposal that would have 1.47 full-time equivalents cleaning the building, the firm is actually using three people to do so, one of the Company’s two out-of-town attorneys said Thursday. They claimed the firm was brought in “temporarily” because the two Guild members who did the work had “resigned” after being told their jobs were being outsourced.

Language in the Guild contract that remains in effect requires the Company to post all temporary positions, and the Company was at a loss to show that it had done so.

“It’s been very difficult to examine the Company’s proposals on outsourcing because the numbers change every time we meet,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “We were told today the Company was withdrawing its first two cost analyses of outsourcing  the print shop because it could not provide documents to back them up. And then we were told today that the Danbury, Conn. shop is adding a fee of $15 to $25 a job that had not been calculated in the Company’s third cost comparison.”

That cost comparison also claims Mark DeCenzo’s employment costs the Company more than $8,000 in medical premiums when in fact he is covered under his wife’s insurance.

“We continue to believe that an unbiased look at the facts shows that keeping the print shop here is both economical and vastly more convenient,” O’Brien said. “We fear that if the Company outsources the work to Connecticut, it will soon find it can’t get all it needs printed in a timely manner and will end up spending far more to outsource some of the work to local printers.”

The parties are scheduled to meet next on Thursday, Sept. 10.