Why media unions are demanding to participate in management’s return-to-office planning

By Sara Guaglione

For many media unions, the latest battleground is not the fight for wage increases or promotions: It’s the return to in-person work.

Nearly two years since the pandemic began, media employees are still dissatisfied with their companies’ plans to bring them back to the office. Unions represented by the NewsGuild of New York and the Writers Guild of America, East are struggling to find common ground with management. They say the return to office plans presented to them aren’t safe enough and aren’t including unions in the process, while management believes they are doing what they can to prioritize employees’ health and safety. All of this has been exacerbated by the recent wave of COVID-19 infections spurred by the omicron variant.

“RTO and work-from-home policies are important issues in all of our current negotiations,” Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East, told Digiday in an email.

“Some companies seem to have an abstract institutional imperative to ‘get people back in the office,’ regardless of what’s happening with the pandemic,” he added. “Our members have made it clear, through mobilization and petitions and letter-writing campaigns, that they are willing to take collective action to protect themselves and their families, while continuing to do their jobs.”

Unions demand involvement in RTO discussions

At the end of last summer, the main tension between media unions and management was the issue of productivity: Management said they needed staff back in the office for better collaboration, creativity and company culture, while employees argued they were just as productive, if not more productive, working from home during the pandemic.

Now, the root of the tension is management setting what unions say are arbitrary dates for when they want employees back at their desks — and resisting coming to the bargaining table to negotiate a return with the union, according to interviews with members of the NewsGuild of New York and the Writers Guild of America, East.

Office return dates have been delayed time and time again. When unions at Meredith, Condé Nast and Hearst filed Unfair Labor Practice with the National Labor Relations Board against their respective companies’ return to office plans last summer, the Labor Board responded to Meredith Union’s charge, saying that a return to the office is a mandatory subject of bargaining. Management, in other words, cannot force employees back to the office without first negotiating it with the union. In August, Meredith Union launched a public petition to management, asking them to delay the return to office indefinitely and engage in bargaining with the union over the plan.

The New Yorker Union at Condé Nast, which is represented by the NewsGuild of New York, has a contract that contains specific language allowing employees to work from home if they feel personally unsafe returning to the office, according to Lainna Fader, director of audience development at the New Yorker and New Yorker Union steward. “So whatever the company says— and they can’t implement anything for us unilaterally anyway …read more

Source:: Digiday