The Milwaukee Newspaper Guild has now reached settlements for all but three of the 19 employees who filed grievances over last year’s downsizing.
In late March, JSOnline producer Emmett Prosser returned to the newsroom, the only one of the group to date who has won back his job. Earlier this week, another employee reached a financial settlement, the 15th member of the group to do so.
The remaining three are scheduled to go to arbitration in June. All of them have lifetime job guarantees from their prior service in the composing room, but the company has refused to recognize the validity of those guarantees.
In all, 35 newsroom employees lost their jobs in the layoffs. Among the 16 employees whose layoffs were not challenged — either because they were low in seniority or because they asked us not to grieve for them — the company has canceled the layoffs of two part-time scoretakers and has rehired a full-time online producer in a different part of the company. Three other part-timers were hired as temps.