Session 19: Labor/Management

IAPE’s collective bargaining agreement is enforced primarily in a monthly forum with Dow Jones representatives where we regularly raise workplace concerns on behalf of our members. These meetings, held on the third Thursday of each month, is also where we discuss grievances filed for violations of our contract.

At yesterday’s session, company representatives told us again that had we brought certain issues to them in the monthly meetings, they might have taken some of our proposals more seriously. 

We think this isn’t the best argument against the union’s efforts to secure meaningful protections in our contract, but we want to remind members to reach out to your rep when you think there is a problem in your group or department to see if we can present it on our regular agenda.

During bargaining, we continue to meet at “the small table,” as they’ve referred to it, and we’ve used these meetings to bring up cases of problem managers, to ask questions about compensation, and to dispute when we think a member has been fired without cause. 

We continue to think that a stronger contract will be most helpful to our members and make the items we bring monthly even more difficult for the company to dispute or brush aside. 

We have an abbreviated bargaining week and will be back to the table on Tuesday to give the company our response to its latest health care proposal. 

Buttons and stickers were distributed around most of our locations this week. We are asking members to wear your button in the office on your lanyard or bag. Laptops and notebooks are a good place to display your sticker. Check in with your union peers and make sure they’ve gotten their IAPE gear. Email Stefanie Frey at stefanie.frey@iape1096.org if you need more! And if you haven’t done so already, make sure you check out last week’s action item where we asked everyone to display support at our desks by changing your desktop & screensaver image.