The Newspaper Guild has scheduled meetings for people to hear about the Company’s proposed criteria for laying off outside seniority.

The Guild will meet at 12:30 p.m. Friday in the cafeteria with the marketing media specialists. It will meet at the same time Monday in the cafeteria with the advertising artists. (If it’s nice, we can sit outside.)

Since there is a far larger group in editorial, we will hold two meetings Tuesday at the Best Western on Wolf Road. One session will start at noon and the second at 5. (Space at the town library is hard to come by, sadly, now that schools are out and summer programming has begun. We also looked into the meeting room at the Crossings Park, but that was unavailable.)

We want to hear your thoughts on the Company’s proposed criteria for layoffs, which you can find in our earlier post.

Please join us at one of these very important sessions. The information you provide will be useful as we meet with the Company on Wednesday, July 1.

Come join your colleagues and help us figure out what this means: “Does the Editorial Assistant have the appropriate sense of urgency and understand the importance of deadline meet standards?” (Seriously, that’s one of the questions in the newsroom’s performance evaluations.)

There will be no names or numbers on layoffs this week.

In most departments, the Company said layoffs would be done in reverse order of seniority. Exceptions would be made for almost all of editorial as well as for advertising artists and marketing media specialists.

The Company must negotiate the criteria first before it can announce the names of people who will be laid off, but department managers all said they had done a “test run” of their criteria by applying it to individual names. In other words, they’ve got their lists but want to go through the motions of appearing to negotiate.

The Company also said it would accept further buyout applications if anyone wanted to step forward. It also said it would reconsider at least some of the four buyout applications from Guild members it rejected.

In a moment, we’ll share with you the Company’s documents outlining what they said would be the criteria for layoffs for each of 11 job titles. We had thorough discussions of all of them that ended after 6 p.m.  Tomorrow, Guild President Tim O’Brien will be on leave and will work out a schedule for people in those job categories to meet and discuss the proposed criteria with Guild leaders.

The two sides are scheduled to resume negotiations at 10 a.m. Wednesday, July 1. The company contended today’s meeting started the 45-day clock on layoff notices, meaning that employees would be let go effective Monday, Aug. 10. The Guild believes the 45-day notice begins when a list of employee names is produced.

For the titles of advertising artist and marketing media specialist, the list of eight criteria is identical. In these two instances, the Company said it would rank employees in each of the first seven areas with a score of one to three. It would then add up the scores. In the event of a tie between workers, seniority would then be used to decide who stays and who goes.

In editorial, the Times Union produced an 18-page document that was riddled with typos, punctuation errors, missing words, and words in nonsense order. O’Brien called it “an excellent example of why you need content editors.” He said it was stunning to realize the people responsible for presenting such a document would be judging others’ performances.

Sample question: “Arre the reporter’s language skills — spelling, grammar and vovabulary — sufficient?”

Fortunately for you, the document was e-mailed to the Guild as nine different two-page documents, one for each of the affected job titles. We’ll share those in a second. Now we’re going to try to explain to you how the Company would use this form.

(You might want to get a couple of Tylenol and a glass of water ready.)

First, it would use the two-page questionnaire to evaluate each employee, with employees rated by a score of zero, one or two points for each answer. A zero would mean an employee doesn’t meet expectations, a one would mean the worker meets expectations and a 2 would mean the employee exceeds expectations.

Different questions would be weighted differently, again on a scale of 1 to 3. For example, the answer to the question “Does the reporter’s work regularly make it to the front page and section front positions?” would be weighted with a factor of two. The employee’s score would be the points multipled by the weighting. (An employee who meets expectations for getting work out front would get a score of 1 times 2 or 2.)

In another example, the question “Is the reporter reliable or punctual?” would have a weight of 1. So an employee who met that criteria would get a score of 1 times 1.)

(Hey, don’t blame us. We didn’t come up with this system.)

But that’s unfortunately not it. The Company would then use your score on the evaluation and apply it to six other areas to make a final decision.

We realize if you’re not confused by now, there is either something wrong with you or you have a great future in management. This is why we will schedule meetings with individual groups. There is only so much clarity you can provide in a blog, and at this hour after a long day, we’re not entirely sure we’re up to the task.

But before we go, here is the last bit of information we’d like to share with you. These are the nine editorial titles and the two-page questionnaires the Company proposed for each:

• Content editor
• Page designer/artist
• Page designer/editor
• Reporter
• Photographer
• NIS Coordinator
• NIS Associate
• Editorial Assistant
• Wire Editor

And the Company said on the reporter evaluation form, it gave the wrong numbers (and in one instance no number) for the weight factors. The first four factors on page one of the reporter form are supposed to have a weight factor of 2. The top factor on the second page is supposed to have a factor of 3, and the second question is supposed to have a weight factor of 2.

The Company has moved today’s bargaining session to 1 p.m., rather than the original 11 a.m. start time. Members are free to attend on their own time.

Bargaining Committee members will meet in the cafeteria at noon if you want to stop by, wish us luck and ask any questions you may have. When we have information, we will share it with you as quickly as we can — though it will likely require a drive back to the Guild office. If you’re not sure we have current contact information for you, please feel free to e-mail us at office@albanyguild.org.

As we prepare for Wednesday’s meeting, people naturally have questions. The Guild intends to answer them as quickly as we can and to share information as rapidly as we are able. We intend to have a membership meeting later this week to discuss these issues with you directly. We will let you know as soon as that is scheduled.

We want to share our thinking with you as we await that date.

First, many members have asked if we will tell them if they are on the proposed layoff list. While we believe the Company should tell you whether you are on their layoff list, we do not keep secrets from our members. We will tell people if they are on the list (or if they are not.) To protect people’s privacy, we will not publicly publish the list on our Web site or share it with the media. We will detail the numbers and what departments they come from.

Now much of what will happen is a matter of dispute, and we will be filing legal charges against the Times Union next week.

First, we do not agree that we are at a legal impasse. In fact, we believe we have a strong case and can show that the Company bargained in bad faith, and sought to subvert prior rulings of the National Labor Relations Board that bar companies from imposing the kind of vague language on layoffs and outsourcing the company pushed to obtain. The language they added about negotiating for 45 more days if an impasse occurred, we do not believe, negates the prior rulings. In fact, it is a blatant attempt to avoid complying with them.

We also did not agree to the company’s language on negotiating these issues for an arbitrary and limited period of time during an impasse so while we will meet and discuss their proposed criteria and layoffs, we are not bound to any timetable the Times Union has set.

Since we are not at a legal impasse, the only way the Company can legally proceed with layoffs is by reverse order of seniority. We had offered language that would have enabled the company to make some exceptions, but the Times Union refused to negotiate anything other than a blank check. Absent an agreement, the Company cannot legally lay off anyone outside seniority. We expect they will do so anyway, and we will legally challenge it if they do. This may mean having to fight the layoffs after the fact with the Company risking that it will one day have to rehire those laid off and give them back pay. This has happened at other companies that improperly laid off workers.

It is unfortunate that cases such as these take a long time to work their way through the National Labor Relations Board. And yet we believe it is better to continue to legally challenge the Company over its behavior than to allow it to get away with what we consider attempts to subvert the law. We do so knowing that this means the union may have to go without dues collection until it legally compels arbitration on that issue, and  that employees may not have the ability to take their disputes to an independent arbitrator for a long period of time.

“We know all of this is very traumatic for our members,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “The Company could have handled this all so much more gracefully. It could have negotiated a fair agreement that would have made some exceptions on layoffs and outsourcing. Instead, from day one, this company has been hellbent on imposing language its employees found unacceptable and legal precedent shows they cannot legally impose. We are in for a long fight, but we cannot allow the company to get away with such disrespect for the law, its employees and its community.”

As soon as we have additional information, we will share it with you. Please feel free to e-mail any questions to us at office@albanyguild.org or call there at 482-9218.

Tim O’Brien here, blogging live from Washington, D.C.

I am down here with Ken Crowe for the annual Newspaper Guild sector conference. As you can imagine, it’s not a happy crowd. I sat through a meeting  today where a panel discussed the awful givebacks that were demanded of them.

One of them was Michael Cabanatuan, president of the California Media Workers Guild. He leads the union at our fellow Hearst paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, you know the one George Hearst cited as giving up seniority rights when he demanded we do it too.

Michael, a great guy who has been through hell and still smiles, said that in 2005, the newspaper let the union see the books. The Chronicle was losing $52 million a year. It’s gotten worse. The newspaper said it was give back or the paper would close.

In Albany, George Hearst said the Times Union is still profitable. Got that? The Company thinks we should take the same hit as a paper that is losing more than $50 million a year. And, by the way, the Chronicle staff can still take grievances to arbitration.

I asked Michael and others at that session a lot of questions about handling layoffs. They had great advice about compassionate ways to help people cope. It’s been painful listening to their stories, and imagining what we’ll be facing next week, but I am so proud to be with these people. They are kind, giving of their time, dedicated to their colleagues and willing to put up with criticism from management and even sometimes their union members as they cope with the unimaginable pain some of these companies are inflicting, often in the most callous ways possible. (At one newspaper, they told everyone to stay home on a Monday morning and they would call to tell you whether to report to work.)

I’ve spent plenty of time too talking to Guild officials and the union’s attorneys, who are dealing with horrible situations day in and day out but are always generous with their time and advice.

You wouldn’t know about these wonderful folks from reading the news media, of course. That’s who employs them, and that’s who is cutting their jobs and benefits.