A day after telling the Guild Thursday that the Times Union would consider and respond to the union’s proposal on how layoffs should be handled, the Company instead illegally declared an impasse in those talks and declared the 13 people walked out the door officially laid off.

The news was not a surprise, but it was a blatant violation of the law, part of a pattern of illegal behavior we’ve witnessed in recent months. First, the Times Union’s declaration of an impasse itself was illegal, as the Company sought to impose language on layoffs and outsourcing that it cannot legally implement. Next, as negotiations on the criteria for layoffs had barely begun, the Company walked the employees out the door.

Since then, the Times Union has refused to put into writing its complete criteria for how layoffs would be handled. It illegally decided who to lay off based on criteria it had developed and executed before ever sitting down to bargain. It has refused to make any changes to any of the parts of the criteria it showed us, even when admitting that people were judged based on standards that were never written down, shared with the employees or negotiated with the union. (They only move they made, knowing it would have no impact, was to drop a review of one employee by a manager who hadn’t overseen her work in two years. That review, of course, never should have been done by that manager in the first place.)

The Times Union refused to consider employee’s personnel history and failed to explain contradictions between the layoff evaluations and past performance reviews. And Publisher George Hearst, who said he would review the proposed layoffs to prevent favoritism, admitted he never looked at personnel records either.

“From the beginning, the Guild was presented not with a proposal to be considered but with a fait accompli,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “The Company’s approach was to simply show up at the table, refuse to move and at the end of the 45 days to declare the talks were over and its will could now be imposed.”

Fortunately, there are laws against such behavior. The Times Union’s actions are under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board.

“It is unfortunate that the Times Union shows such complete disregard for the law,” O’Brien said. “In the end, though it will take time and patience, we expect the newspaper bosses to be held accountable.”

The Guild made a new proposal Thursday that would allow the Company to lay off employees outside of seniority if they had consistent, documented performance problems.

The proposal was only applicable to this round of layoffs.

The Guild had previously proposed allowing the Company to skip employees of exceptional ability. The new proposal would still allow that, but it would also let the Company select a senior employee  for layoff if they had been notified of the performance problems, given time to meet the goals set forth for them and failed to do so. If the employee needed training, or had had insufficient training, the employee would be trained and not laid off.

“This is a significant step that would allow the Company to both keep employees who are doing exceptional work and lay off more senior workers who are less than stellar performers,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said.

You can read the proposal here.

The parties also spent time Thursday in an off-the-record discussion and will meet again next Thursday.

The Times Union was buzzing today as the official Albany Newspaper Guild fly swatters were handed out.

Since the TU started making everyone empty their own trash, we’ve noticed an abudance of fruit flies throughout the building. With the Times Union now wanting to turn good jobs in maintenance into outsourced poverty-level ones, we expect we’ll be seeing even more flies.

Don’t call a Swat team. Just use your handy new Albany Newspaper Guild fly swatter. And please, obey the instructions: Do not use on colleagues, bosses or even corporate attorneys, no matter how great the temptation.

If you didn’t get your fly swatter, let us know and we’ll get you one.

Employees at the Journal News, a Gannett-owned newspaper in Westchester County, were recently told they all had to re-apply for their jobs. They were marched into offices where they had to explain to corporate executives they had never met, despite working at the paper for years, why they should be “hired.”

There is an excellent story on this and other awful examples of lousy bosses handling layoffs in unconscionable ways here. Here is our favorite line: “Experts also say that sometimes, the bosses doing the firing aren’t uncomfortable. They’re just plain mean.”

We in the Guild certainly think that would apply to bosses who decided the proper way to handle layoffs is to walk up to employees in front of their colleagues and march them off to the personnel office while not one but two security guards sit in the hall, all while the Company is supposed to be negotiating criteria. All we can ask is: Would you want your son or daughter treated that way?

Fortunately, there are limits to what bosses at the Times Union can do because we have a union, even with an illegally imposed contract. The TU could not do what was done in Westchester and it could not decide, as other places have, that it won’t pay severance or provide health insurance. Because we have a union, we still have rights, an ability to negotiate and the ability to challenge the Company’s actions through the legal process.

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.