On Wednesday, Feb. 25, about two dozen TV and radio broadcast engineers went back to the picket line to protest Journal Broadcast Group’s unfair treatment.
The members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 715 (IBEW) have been trying to negotiate a new agreement with the corporation—the owner of WTMJ-TV, WTMJ-DT, WTMJ-AM and WLWK-FM (formerly WKTI-FM).
But the union charges that Journal Broadcasting has illegally merged the IBEW with another union, unlawfully suspended bargaining and created an unacceptable settlement agreement with the National Labor Relations Board. The union has refused to sign it. The union has filed complaints with the NLRB throughout 2008 regarding Journal Broadcasting’s bargaining in bad faith.
Christopher Albrecht, IBEW Local 715 business manager, said “we didn’t sign [the settlement agreement] because it failed to rectify some of the problems we’ve had since May.”
Albrecht said the union and Journal Broadcasting held a bargaining session with the assistance of a federal mediator on Feb. 5, but nothing was resolved.
“The employer also claimed that it had terminated our old agreement, which was in direct violation of the settlement agreement, and that’s why we’ve now appealed to the NLRB in Washington and here in Milwaukee that the settlement agreement should be deemed null and void and the complaint should be once again issued against the employer for violations of the law,” Albrecht said.
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He said he’d prefer to sign an agreement in which Journal Broadcasting would, at the very least, acknowledge that it had violated the law between May and December 2008, and do more to rectify the problems it created for the broadcast engineers.
More bargaining sessions will be held in the coming week, Albrecht said.
Anne Schepp, vice president of human resources for Journal Broadcast Group, did not return a call seeking comment for this article.
(Photo: IBEW Local 715 Chad D’Acquisto)
