The parties reached an agreement today on the newsroom reorganization plan dubbed Prometheus.

For more than 20 Guild members, it will mean a boost in pay. The Guild also preserved two longstanding union positions, the assistant photo editor and the deputy design editor, that the Company had sought to turn into exempt jobs.

There will be eight team leader positions that are exempt, a concession on the union’s part. The Guild had first sought to make the jobs union-covered, with those currently exempt able to remain so as long as they stayed in those positions.

“We still believe the newspaper is top-heavy with management, and that will continue to be a topic in our ongoing contract negotiations,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “By making all the Content Editor and Page Designer positions Class A, however, we will see a significant increase in people paid in the top tier rather than the virtual elimination the Company had first proposed.”

The Company had originally proposed those positions as Class B. The move from Class A to Class B will mean a $13.99 raise each week for about 20 workers. Page Designer Artists will move  up from Class C to Class B, a boost of more than $25 a week under the current contract.

The agreement also eliminates seven exempt titles from the contract, some of which are empty and others which will become team leader positions. Besides that title, there will be two other new exempt titles: Systems Editor and Senior Editor/News and Information Service Desk, which are being filled by current exempts.

Seven other exempt titles will be changed.

The agreement also stipulates that the changes will require new duties and skills, and the Company will take that into consideration in evaluating employee performance during the initial implementation.

Guild members came to the table Tuesday to stake their claim to the future of newspaper jobs.

An impressive number of staffers from advertising art joined the session in support of the Guild’s proposal on video on the Web. As part of that proposal, the union argued the advertising art staff should get the same training their newsroom counterparts receive. As the publisher has said in his recent town meetings, the Internet will become a larger and larger part of what we do.

Advertisers are seeking Web video that will enable them to place a video commercial on the newspaper’s Web site. If such videos are to be done, the Guild said, workers in advertising art want to do them and are eager to be trained. This would not only give the Company more control over the product than using an outside contractor, it would enable the Times Union to offer a consistent look to the various products it offers customers now: print and online ads, direct-mail appeals and other products.

“It’s a matter of efficiency,” said Advertising Artist Bill Blais. “Some folks have gotten their feet wet already with video post-production. Graphic artists are the right folks to prepare advertising video.”

Artist Linda Pinkans said she and her colleagues recognize this is the work of the future, and they want to do it.

“We all have an interest to further our careers,” she said.

General Manager George Hearst said it was “inspiring” to hear from the staff that they want to embrace this work.

“The Times Union takes the position that education is the cornerstone of our business,” he said. “You guys are focused on the right stuff.”

Photographers Skip Dickstein and Paul Buckowski also came to the table to discuss the Guild’s proposal. While the Guild would agree to let reporters and photographers both shoot video, the union made clear this did not replace the need for professionally trained and experienced photographers.

But the photographers also addressed the Company’s proposal to eliminate the bar on using reporters regularly as photographers and photographers regularly as reporters.

In the Internet age, the quality of photographs will be more important than ever, Dickstein and Buckowski said.

“When we get our new presses, any image that goes on that page is going to have to be high quality,” Dickstein said. As with a high-definition TV, any flaws will show. “The thing we bring that helps the Times Union brand is the quality we bring,” Buckowski said. “If you look at the photographs out of Saratoga, no one beats the images Skip brings. I don’t think you should look at it as: ‘We can send a reporter who can do the story, shoot the video and we’ll pull a still (photograph) from there.’ “

The result would be a poor story, shaky video and a weak photo, he said: “It’s not just images but great images that are going to keep people looking.”

Company officials said they might want to create a position of a “mojo” journalist who would be expected to do all of those things well, but they said they expected the need for professional photographers to remain.

Peter Rahbar, the Company’s attorney, said the final agreement on the issue might be a “hybrid” of the Company’s proposal to eliminate the prohibition on using reporters regularly to shoot photographs and the Guild’s proposal on Web video. The Guild responded that the Web video language did not require altering the longstanding language that recognizes that photography and reporting require different skill sets.

Guild members came to the bargaining table Thursday with three revamped proposals, but the Company’s only suggestion was it might want to stop allowing seriously ill or injured workers to take advantage of unused back sick time.

Guild President Tim O’Brien noted revoking that policy would not just hurt employees who are on disability. It could unintentionally push some people to decide to take all 10 sick days a year rather than save them in case they are someday needed.

Currently, we are not  able to cash out unused sick time when we retire under the current contract, though the Guild has made a proposal to allow people to bank some hours.

Pressed  by Guild bargainers on the importance of that protection, Company officials said they may make a proposal to alter the simple, single-sentence agreement The letter was signed in 1994, but it memorialized a practice in effect long before then.

The union changed its idea for Community Service Leave, reducing the number of people who could take the leave from 5 in each department to 5 total. The union also specified that the leave could be taken as a single week or one day at a time.

The Company leaders worried that they might have to replace workers for those missing hours, but the union noted they do not replace absent workers now. Guild bargainiers also noted that the total numbers of hours employees lost because they didn’t take vacation they earned in time last year was 1,286.75 — equal to 171.57 days of work. The result: The Company is gaining more in hours than it would ever lose by letting people assist in the community.

The union also revamped its proposal on interns, asking only that the union be provided information about how many interns there are, where they would work, what they would do and what their compensation would be. The union welcomes the ability to mentor potential future colleagues, but internships should be of limited duration and not used to replace or displace existing staff positions.

The final change was to a proposal to allow Jewish and Muslim employees to take their holiest days off a year without having to take personal days. As the Company had suggested, we made the proposal specific as to the days.

The parties also went through each of the side letters at the back of the contract, discussing which ones are still needed.

The parties will bargain again from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, July 31. The two bargaining teams also agreed on subsequent dates: all day Aug. 18 and 19, 2-5 p.m. Sept. 3, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sept. 4, all day Sept. 9, 2-5 p.m. Sept. 10 and 2-5 p.m. September 24.

Employees can attend the sessions on their own time.

The Newspaper Guild in Seattle is suing Hearst in Seattle after the newspaper created an online-only reporter position and claimed it was exempt from the contract. This is an important fight. As we heard from our own publisher, the newspaper will become only part of the work done at the Times Union in the future as more and more readers migrate to the Internet.

For the same reason, our local is pursuing a grievance over the hiring of a “design director” for the new At Home magazine as an exempt position. (Not a soul on the lengthy masthead is Guild-covered, though ad sales people sell into it and business office workers handle billing.) As these niche products become more and more part of what we do, we need to make sure that work is done by Guild members. Our very livelihood is at stake.

We’ve heard a lot about the need for flexibility. We offered to make the design director position exempt from overtime for a two-year trial basis and to exempt the position from the seniority language on layoffs for that same period. (The Company argued it could not be sure the magazine would last.) The Company rejected our willingness to be flexible, instead proposing we just let the position be exempt for two years and then talk. In the meantime, the Company is gearing up to start several other new niche magazines…

You’ll also note that the Guild in Seattle did an excellent job of letting the reporter feel welcome and making it clear the issue was not her at all. It was the Company’s effort to get around the contract.

Here’s an interesting tale of a reader fed up with the cuts being made to his newspaper. His only relation to our own Mark Hempstead appears to be in a shared philosophy.