Company managers said Wednesday they never examined employees’ personnel records before deciding which to lay off. Even Publisher George Hearst said he never looked at employee’s performance reviews in reviewing managers’ decisions.

The Company also said one manager reviewed the work of an employee he does not oversee, and a top manager in editorial said he had no idea why one employee’s review said the person was “abrupt” with editors when there is no personnel history to substantiate such a claim and the employee denies it.

The Times Union also wants to take its  first step toward outsourcing our work. The TU proposes to hire an independent contractor to clean the building, resulting in three additional lost jobs.

The Company’s answers came during questioning by the union over the criteria used in out-of-seniority layoffs. So far, the Company has let go 13 workers, 12 of them out of seniority, and says one more person has yet to be notified. While the Company claims the employees are on a paid 45-day leave, the union maintains that they have effectively laid them off.

The union is continuing to meet with the Company over these two issues but is challenging the out-of-seniority layoffs in front of the National Labor Relations Board. The parties next meet Thursday, July 30.

In preparation for Wednesday’s meeting, the Guild reviewed the personnel files of all the people on the Company’s layoff list. In many cases, the union found sharp contradictions between what was said in recent performance reviews on file in employee’s personnel records and what was said in the Company’s process for determining who got laid off.

For example, one supervisor said an employee lacked a “gung-ho attitude.” That worker’s most recent review said the person “is extremely resourceful and takes prides in her work. … No matter what she is asked to do, she will find a way because it is the right thing to do for the customer.”

One employee laid off was named Page Designer of the Year in this spring’s editorial award ceremony and twice received merit raises. One of the reporters let go was named the Young Journalist of the Year. Both were laid off outside seniority.

In its annual Best of Edition, Metroland named the Times Union’s horrific treatment of its employees as the “best media meltdown.”

The Capital Region’s finest alternative weekly excoriates the Times Union for its  recent behavior. Metroland states that the Guild has “waged an admirable campaign to retain local jobs and editorial credibility.” It also says the newspaper’s bosses have been “employing heavy-handed negotiations to advance its demonstrably bad agenda.”

(The alt weekly also praises the TU’s blogs, but does not mention that many of its participants have stopped blogging in support of the Guild, with some like Corey Ellis and Shawn Morris stating their support and others like Jerry Jennings and Neil Kelleher simply stopping all posts until we get a fair contract. Metroland does single out Brendan Lyons as outstanding reporter, and we heartily agree.)

Metroland laments it appears Hearst is winning the battle over the newspaper’s future and its editors shudder to think what the newspaper will look like when the dust settles. To which we kindly reply: Don’t count ol’ BB out, friends. As you will soon see, this fight isn’t near over.

What a difference a coast makes.

In San Francisco, the Hearst-owned Chronicle  did not treat employees the awful way that Times Union workers were treated. There were no added security guards, no tap on the shoulder and no forcing people to leave the building.

Michael Cabanatuan is the president of the Northern California Media Guild, the Guild local that represents workers at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle. Michael also works at the Chronicle.

When he learned what had happened here, he said: “I’ve heard of nothing this absurd. In San Francisco, they notified people in mid-May that they would be laid off — some immediately, some at the end of June, July and August. But they were not escorted from the building and were, in fact, were/are expected to report to work.”

Guild President Tim O’Brien has a next-door neighbor who just was laid off from Albany International.

“He knew for months what his last day was going to be,” O’Brien said. “He still reported to work every day and did his job. He was not escorted from the building like he was going to attack the place. This is a horrible way to treat employees, many of whom had worked for the newspaper for a decade or more. This was not treating employees with fairness, kindness, dignity or respect, the motto the Company once used to describe its approach to workers. No one should ever be treated this way again and those who were are owed an apology.”

The Guild is pursuing charges before the National Relations Board over both the illegal declaration of impasse and the layoff of employees before negotiations over criteria were complete.

Pope Benedict says that labor unions are more important than ever in this global financial crisis. Read about it here.

Reached for comment, the Pope also stated that the Times Union’s treatment of its workers this week is a mortal sin which won’t easily be forgiven.

It’s hard to know where to begin to describe Wednesday’s bargaining session with the Company, which came after nine people were walked to the door this week and the TU has said another four will be similarly targeted.

The Company continued to insist these were not layoffs, despite Editor Rex Smith’s unequivocal remarks to dozens of people in the newsroom (where most of the layoffs occurred) and the Times Union’s own story — vetted by at least one manager — that called the actions layoffs.

The TU claims that the employees are on paid leave for 45 days while the Company continues to negotiate with the union. If the criteria somehow changes, they contend, people could get their jobs back.

“It is the height of hypocrisy for a company to pretend it is bargaining with us and execute a plan,” International Representative Jim Schaufenbil told the company’s bargainers. “The cloak of ‘technically’ being on paid leave as the newspaper continues ongoing negotiations with the union is a farce.”

Since the Company is claiming these employees are not laid off, he said, the TU cannot then claim that the 45-day notice clause has been invoked. “You can’t have it both ways,” Schaufenbil said.

“You can, actually,” was the Company negotiator’s reply.

Schaufenbil said it was particularly deplorable that the Company brought in extra Wackenhut guards, stationing them in the hallway and outside the Human Resources Department and then marched employees into that office. “The audacity in which the Company carried it out and the lack of respect for individuals, escorting them out of the building with guards, just blows my mind,” he said. “I cannot think of another newspaper who has treated employees so poorly in a layoff situation.”

The Company also Wednesday added a job title in advertising to the list of those where employees could be laid off outside seniority. In other words, a worker who thought his or her job was safe is about to find out otherwise.

Of the 13 people targeted for job cuts, the Company contended all but two were outside seniority.

A week after getting an information request from the union on its proposed criteria — which the Company had used to frogmarch employees out the door — the Company let union leaders sit waiting in a conference room all day while they collected the reviews they had done of each employee using that criteria. They did not produce the first set of rankings until after 3 p.m., and most of them, the ones done in editorial, were not produced until after 5 p.m.

And in the end, they still hadn’t produce everything. And despite ranking editorial employees, those reviews were then funneled through a list of six other criteria (from versatility to market demands) to come up with the final layoff list. Oddly, the Company had no record of how the final conclusions on who to let go were reached.

“They did it orally but there is no record of it,” attorney Mark Batten said.

In addition, the Company’s attorney said the “standards” mentioned repeatedly in the Company’s reviews of editorial employees were never written down, never negotiated with the Guild and never formally communicated to employees yet they were used  to target people for losing their jobs.

The Guild will take time to review those documents to make sure they are complete. (Mike Jarboe, who was sitting in to take notes for Mary Fultz, found his own review was left out.)

The documents revealed that the Company performed most of the employee reviews in editorial on June 9, before the TU declared impasse or began negotiating the criteria for layoffs.

“It is increasingly clear the Times Union has failed to bargain in good faith and that the newspaper’s bosses developed and executed criteria for layoffs without even beginning to negotiate it,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said.

The parties are next scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Wednesday, July 22. Company bargainers — who are more concerned with meeting than providing information — pretended to be outraged the union won’t meet before then, but O’Brien will be tied up next week providing a sworn affidavit to the National  Labor Relations Board over the Company’s illegal declaration of impasse. The union also needs time to examine the files it was handed and to compare them to the employee’s past performance reviews.