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.

The Guild made a comprehensive package proposal on Wednesday to settle the entire contract.

You can read it here.

The proposal makes a number of significant changes.

On wages, the Guild proposed a $750 bonus upon signing and another one on August 1, 2010. Previously, the union had proposed a $1,500 signing bonus (essentially raises for 2009 and 2010) and a 3 percent raise in 2011.

The Guild proposed to eliminate a cap on the number of employees who could be laid off outside of seniority.  The Company would have to show the people they skip have demonstrable skills or exceptional ability.

Language that would have required outsourced work to remain in the Capital Region was struck. The union proposal calls for limiting layoffs to no more than six percent of the staff, or roughly 12 positions, in a year, which is quite a lot. No one could be laid off to effect outsourcing.

The union dropped its proposed increase in the pension contribution from $1.05 to $1. The current contribution has been at 85 cents for more than 20 years. With fewer employees and a weakened stock market, it is not too much to ask the TU to make the first increase in contributions in decades.

The Guild also proposed to agree to the increased share of health insurance costs the Company proposed. In return, however, the Company would agree to keep the deductible cap at $750.

The Guild eliminated all the upgrades it had proposed except for the title of niche salesperson, the lowest paid job in  the union. The commissions these workers once got, which made up for their low wage, are much harder to come by now.

“This was a significant move by the Guild, offering substantial concessions and demonstrating our ongoing willingness to negotiate,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said.

Sadly, the Company refused to respond on any of the issues. The Company’s refusal to bargain in good faith and illegal declaration of an impasse led the union to file charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

The Times Union is trying to turn a good-paying job with benefits to a poverty-level one with no health insurance, dental care or pension benefits.

According to information provided by the Company, the work of cleaning the building would go to a firm, GCA Services Group, that would pay cleaning staff $9.97 an hour. While that’s slightly more than minimum wage, it is not a living wage. Workers earning that little, if they had children, would be eligible for free school lunches.

In a building full of confidential documents, where reporters’ desks hold notebooks full of sources who do not wish to be publicly identified, the Guild expressed concern about having the building maintained by people from an outside contractor who likely would have high turnover.

“As a leader in the community, we do not think the Times Union should be trying to convert good union jobs into low-wage nonunion ones,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “We don’t think a newspaper that describes itself as still profitable should be letting go good employees to be replaced by people who will be able to barely make ends meet. That’s not a message that makes the Times Union look very good in the community’s eyes.”

The Guild also continued to press its case for keeping the internal printing coordinator. On Wednesday, the Company acknowledged that it had sharply underestimated the number of jobs Mark DeCenzo has performed. After the union showed Mark had done 284 jobs last year, not the 180 the Company counted, the TU’s attorney returned with its third sheet calculating the alleged “cost savings” of moving the work to the Hearst paper in Danbury, Conn.

International Representative Jim Schaufenbil said the Company was engaging in “fuzzy math” and constantly trying to fix its numbers to get to the same result.

The union also provided telling information to the Company. This past Friday, the TU attempted to send a print job of 31,000 fliers for the circulation department to Danbury hoping to get them returned by Wednesday. On Monday morning, the print shop in Danbury sent a note saying it would be unable to fill the order in time. A second e-mail was sent, asking the Danbury shop if it could provide the material by Thursday instead. This time, there  was no reply.

“One of the very first times the TU sought to get printed material from the Danbury shop, they not only were unable to do the job but they didn’t even reply to an e-mail,” O’Brien said. And while the TU has said they could use the Danbury shop to print four-color documents, a recent attempt to do so was rebuffed by Danbury, whose staff said its four-color press was too backed up.

The Company acknowledged that the information discovered by the union was true, but they were still arguing that outsourcing the print shop work there made sense.