In mediated arbitration with the Kelowna Daily Courier in Kelowna today your Union was pleased to reach two settlements. The issues were the number of stories being reported by the Managing Editor at the Daily Courier and the amount of accounts and commission the Advertising Sales Manager was collecting. A compromise was reached in both cases.
On the issue with the Managing Editor (ME) writing too many stories, it was agreed and confirmed that reporting is considered bargaining unit work and should be performed primarily by our members. The Compromise was to put a cap on the number of stories the ME could write per year. It was agreed that they could write 24 stories on Entertainment and an additional 24 stories under exceptional circumstances per year. This second set of 24 stories has to satisfy some restrictions including ensuring offering the work to members of the newsroom first even up to offering overtime to cover exceptional events before the ME would be allowed to write one of the twenty-four stories during the year.
On the Advertising Sales Manager issue, it was agreed that there would be a cap on a maximum of $10,000 in commission that the Manager may hold per year as well as a 15 account maximum. The issue was all the top accounts were going to the Advertising Manager along with the commissions. These caps will lime the amount of money and accounts being handled by the manager with the extra commissions theoretically going to our members.
I want to thank Pat Bulmer, Mark Cameron and our counsel Murphy Fries for their hard work on this file. If we were unable to reach an agreement in mediation, we were more than ready to proceed to arbitration on these matters. While not perfect, these as good compromises and really do put limits on how much Union jurisdictional work managers can do at the paper.
In solidarity,
Brian Gibson
President
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