Imagine you’re an ad salesperson, about to drive to meet with a client and seal a deal that could earn the Times Union hundreds of thousands of dollars. You walk out into the parking lot, all excited about the great work you’ve done, only to discover….the Company has towed your car.

Or you’re a reporter assigned to a breaking news story. You’re working overtime, but no one told the security guard. You emerge after a long night after breaking an exclusive story for the newspaper that will be on Page One. Your reward is that your car is gone, and the Company expects you to pay for it.

Once again, the Times Union has violated the law. The new parking rules are a change in working conditions and a mandatory subject of bargaining. But no, as usual, the Company did not come to the union and seek to discuss it. A letter informing the Company to cease and desist has been sent. We’ve informed the Times Union that should anyone’s car be towed under this illegally imposed policy, the Times Union will be liable for the towing fees and any damages to your vehicle.

A charge is also being filed with the National Labor Relations Board over this latest failure to negotiate.

A letter sent to Guild members from MVP states that the insurance provider wants to significantly raise the costs for some drugs.

The letter states that MVP wants to change the rules for when an employee receives a brand-name drug when there is a generic version available. Rather than charge the $50 brand-name co-pay, MVP wants to charge you the generic co-pay AND the difference between the cost of the brand-name and generic drugs.

This would be a huge difference, potentially hundreds of dollars more. Often the generic drugs work fine, but many of us have discovered over the years that some do not work as well and getting the name brand is necessary.

MVP also wants to make other changes including ending coverage for any immunizations or vaccinations taken solely as a precaution if you travel inside or outside the United States. MVP also wants to raise the copayment for mail-order drugs.

The Guild will soon be sitting down with the Company and the insurance broker to discuss next year’s rates and any changes. The Company is still required to keep any plan comparable to what we already have. We will keep you posted as soon as we have information to share.

In a few days, we’ll be giving you a health-care survey (which will also be available online at the Guild Web site) to get your views on the MVP plan.

Why pay dues? Does the Guild still have any say? What can the union do next? Are we still going to party?

These are all good questions we’ve been getting from our members.

We’ve been a little focused elsewhere lately, as the National Labor Relations Board has been reviewing our legal case in response to the Times Union’s recent actions. We’ve spent our time giving sworn affidavits and getting documents to the board. We expect the Times Union to be charged shortly, frankly, with breaking the law repeatedly in its dealings with the Guild. We’ll advise you as soon as that becomes official.

We are also planning a membership meeting for early November, to be held at lunch time nearby, so that you can learn about what is happening and what it means to you. There will be a seat on the Executive Board to fill as well. We’ll provide you with information on how to run or to nominate someone as soon as we have a meeting date and place set.

As for the Guild, we continue to do what we’ve always done. We are preparing for the annual discussion with the Company of next year’s health insurance rates. We will be giving you a survey soon on your experiences with MVP (and letting you complete the survey online.)

And, yes, we are still planning to have our annual Holiday Party at the Pump Station. It’s scheduled for Friday, December 4. You can bring one date (spouses count as dates, you know) but you must be a member in good standing to attend, naturally.

If you’ve fallen behind on your dues, please do try to catch up because the amount owed will continue to increase. All of it will have to be paid at the time of a settlement. It’s unfair for some people to pay for the benefits they receive and others not to do so.

And let’s clear up any confusion: The Company cannot impose any other changes. It cannot suddenly decide to lay more people off without negotiation or without paying severance. It cannot decide to split people’s days off or to impose pay cuts. Your pension benefits are still in place, the rules for how much vacation time you get and how those weeks are assigned all still apply. Almost all of the provisions of the contract remain in effect.

 The Guild has been at the Times Union 75 years this year. We’re still here, proudly serving our members, and will be for a long time to come. If you have any questions, please call my cell phone at 466-8700. If I am working, I’ll return the call and we’ll find a mutually agreeable time to talk.

 Tim O’Brien

John Piekarski, who you all remember as a page designer in sports, is keeping up his Internet skills with his new blog, SoSara.com. You can check it out here.

Drop him a line and let him know how you like it. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

The Guild reached an agreement Wednesday that saves the internal printer’s job.

The union also agreed to allow the outsourcing of two maintenance jobs that are now vacant, but the Company agreed that it will not outsource any other jobs in that department.

“This is a great victory for the Guild and shows why it is still important to have the union to fight for us,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “Mark DeCenzo does amazingly good work, and he provided us with the information we needed to make the case to keep him here. We are so glad we were able to take this burden off Mark and Tina’s shoulders.”

You can read a copy of the agreement here.

From Tim O’Brien:

I was walking in the grocery store the other day when a former colleague who took the buyout in the spring called out to me. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “I want to write you a check.”

No one has ever said that to me before. The colleague explained that he had forgotten in the final month of work to pay his dues. I demurred, saying not to worry about it. “No, no,” he replied. “I’ve always felt guilty about it. I’ve intended to write it a dozen times. So I am glad to see you. I have my checkbook with me. I appreciate all the Guild did for me. I am writing you the check.”

And so he did. (Not made out to me, of course, but to the Guild.)

It’s moments like these that make my day and make me realize how important the Guild still is to our members. People stop and thank me, for example, for working hard to prove that our internal printer Mark DeCenzo deserves to stay at the Times Union.

I know it is frustrating right now, and sometimes it seems like the Company can just do whatever it wants and ignore the Guild. As you’ll hear more about soon, they can’t, though it takes time and patience to correct that misjudgment.

But there are lots of things the Guild still does and still protects you from. The Company cannot lay people off and refuse to pay severance, for example. It could if we didn’t have a union. It couldn’t split your days off  without your consent. It cannot cut your pay. All those things could happen without a union.

Even in trying times, the Guild is still there for its members. And I am so grateful for those moments when people express their thanks — even if it’s a surprising encounter at the supermarket.

A day after telling the Guild Thursday that the Times Union would consider and respond to the union’s proposal on how layoffs should be handled, the Company instead illegally declared an impasse in those talks and declared the 13 people walked out the door officially laid off.

The news was not a surprise, but it was a blatant violation of the law, part of a pattern of illegal behavior we’ve witnessed in recent months. First, the Times Union’s declaration of an impasse itself was illegal, as the Company sought to impose language on layoffs and outsourcing that it cannot legally implement. Next, as negotiations on the criteria for layoffs had barely begun, the Company walked the employees out the door.

Since then, the Times Union has refused to put into writing its complete criteria for how layoffs would be handled. It illegally decided who to lay off based on criteria it had developed and executed before ever sitting down to bargain. It has refused to make any changes to any of the parts of the criteria it showed us, even when admitting that people were judged based on standards that were never written down, shared with the employees or negotiated with the union. (They only move they made, knowing it would have no impact, was to drop a review of one employee by a manager who hadn’t overseen her work in two years. That review, of course, never should have been done by that manager in the first place.)

The Times Union refused to consider employee’s personnel history and failed to explain contradictions between the layoff evaluations and past performance reviews. And Publisher George Hearst, who said he would review the proposed layoffs to prevent favoritism, admitted he never looked at personnel records either.

“From the beginning, the Guild was presented not with a proposal to be considered but with a fait accompli,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said. “The Company’s approach was to simply show up at the table, refuse to move and at the end of the 45 days to declare the talks were over and its will could now be imposed.”

Fortunately, there are laws against such behavior. The Times Union’s actions are under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board.

“It is unfortunate that the Times Union shows such complete disregard for the law,” O’Brien said. “In the end, though it will take time and patience, we expect the newspaper bosses to be held accountable.”

The Guild made a new proposal Thursday that would allow the Company to lay off employees outside of seniority if they had consistent, documented performance problems.

The proposal was only applicable to this round of layoffs.

The Guild had previously proposed allowing the Company to skip employees of exceptional ability. The new proposal would still allow that, but it would also let the Company select a senior employee  for layoff if they had been notified of the performance problems, given time to meet the goals set forth for them and failed to do so. If the employee needed training, or had had insufficient training, the employee would be trained and not laid off.

“This is a significant step that would allow the Company to both keep employees who are doing exceptional work and lay off more senior workers who are less than stellar performers,” Guild President Tim O’Brien said.

You can read the proposal here.

The parties also spent time Thursday in an off-the-record discussion and will meet again next Thursday.

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.