Newsletter of the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild
Membership meeting
WHEN: Noon, Thursday, Aug. 22.
WHERE: Turner Hall
AGENDA: NewsGate and digital-first issues (including new workday start times and changing expectations) top the agenda. With raises coming down, we’ll all also review contract terms on that score. But feel free to bring up anything else that’s bugging you.
Lunch — a pizza buffet with salad and fried chicken — will be served.
Part-time parking rate established
Part-time bargaining unit members who want to park in Journal Sentinel Inc. lots will now be charged half the monthly rate paid by full-time employees, under an informal agreement between the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild and Journal Sentinel management.
Part-time employees who wish to park in the gated Kilbourn Ave. lot at night, or in the garages during the day, are now eligible for a lower rate – $26 per month.
Both full-time and part-time employees who do not pay the monthly fee can park in the back lot for a $3 daily fee.
A Feb. 2 incident in which a Journal Sentinel employee was robbed at the corner of 4th and State streets after she ended her shift at 10:30 p.m. prompted the Guild to initiate discussions about employee safety with Journal Sentinel management.
The lowered rate for part-time employees is a shift from the company’s previous policy, in which part-timers were required to pay the full-time parking rate, even to use the gated lot at night.
Full-time employees who pay about $52 monthly for a parking spot in one of the parking garages and who work at night are allowed to park in the gated back lot of the Journal Sentinel building after 3 p.m.
Newsroom suffers losses
The newsroom and the Guild suffered a shocking loss soon after the departure of several longtime employees in another round of buyouts.
Longtime feature writer Jackie Loohauis-Bennett died unexpectedly of heart failure on July 18, not quite seven weeks after she took the latest buyout. She was 62.
Jackie joined The Milwaukee Journal in 1981 and over the years covered everything from Ernest Borgnine and the Great Circus Parade to Summerfest to Cleopatra (in the form of a museum exhibit), as well as all things animal. But she also had a nose for hard news and was part of the team covering the aftermath of the Sikh temple shooting.
She was “a skilled and playful writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of local lore,” according to her obituary, and was also a keen Anglophile.
Her strong sense of justice brought her to the Guild in recent years, and she had told several board members she wanted to become an associate member after she left the paper.
In her post-Journal Sentinel life, Jackie was intending to freelance feature stories and write a children’s book. The Guild extends its condolences to her husband, Brian Bennett, and is making a contribution in her memory to the Wisconsin Humane Society.
Jackie was one of four newsroom employees whose skills and institutional memory were lost in the buyout.
Copy editor Russ Maki, a former assistant local news editor among other things, took the buyout after close to 20 years. Russ was known for his knowledge of the state – and cars. He was an active union member and was serving his fourth term as steward leader at his departure in early July.
This round of buyouts was the second in the past year, following the loss of five newsroom employees in a buyout last September. The company has posted job descriptions for replacing two of the recent departees.
Guild celebrates spring with fish fry
Newsroom employees and their guests enjoyed a fish fry at Buck Bradley’s in April.
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Guild ensures interns get paid
From the president
If you’ve picked up the Journal Sentinel in the last month or two, you’ve undoubtedly seen bylines you don’t recognize on some pretty impressive stories. Those bylines belong to what appears to be yet another outstanding class of interns who are spending their summer with us.
Here’s something to know about each and every one of those talented college interns: They’re getting paid for their work.
Thanks to the Guild contract, all college interns are paid for their services either by Journal Sentinel Inc. or another organization. They are guaranteed the federal or state minimum wage, must be reimbursed for business expenses and are eligible for overtime if the Journal Sentinel pays their salary (they are compensated in time off if another organization pays their salary).
The company has asked us in recent years to consider internships for college credit only, but we have refused.
Here is our rationale:
- We don’t believe anyone should do bargaining unit work without being paid. Using unpaid workers only makes it easier for the company to get by without a full staff.
- Internships are no longer education-based experiences. They are full-time jobs in which college students perform the work of vacationing employees. Our interns are thrown right into the thick of it and perform the duties of temporary employees.
- If nonpaying internships were allowed, it would make it more likely that students from higher-income families would fill those positions since financial support would be necessary to spend a summer away from home. Lower-income students need to earn money to continue their education. If we truly believe in diversity in the newsroom, this can’t happen.
The Guild’s position on paying interns has been validated by a U.S. District Court ruling that Fox Searchlight violated minimum wage and overtime laws through its use of interns. The ruling stated that whatever knowledge the interns received on how the job should be done was the result of simply doing the work other employees would normally be doing. These positions weren’t created just for the benefit of the intern; they benefited the employer.
The Department of Labor has issued a fact sheet to determine what is an internship.
Among the points defining what an internship is: the internship is for the benefit of the intern; the employer derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern (such as filling in for vacationing full-time employees); and the experience the employer provides is similar to training one would receive in an educational environment.
In this day and age of rampant wage theft, it is critical that we protect this part of the contract and make sure that our interns not only have a positive experience with the Journal Sentinel, but also get paid for it.