Casper News Guild

With a vote of 10 to 0, with two blank ballots, the Casper News Guild has ratified its first collective bargaining agreement with Lee Enterprises after eight months of negotiations.

Negotiations concluded on Friday, Dec. 7, but the union needed a majority of its members to approve the proposed contract. Overall, we are pleased with this first agreement, which will run two years. It secures more severance, better layoff provisions, improved overtime requirements and guaranteed raises for the entire unit this year and next year. It sets a minimum salary and provides a number of benefits for workers across our newsroom. For Lee Enterprises, the company maintains control of our health insurance and 401(k) and is still given flexibility in
running the Star-Tribune.

The negotiations lasted much of this year and were often contentious. But we appreciate Lee Enterprises bargaining in good faith, and we look forward to working with local management to further strengthen the Star-Tribune in the years to come. As we have said from the beginning, we hope to protect the Star-Tribune’s strong journalistic reputation and work to make this a paper that doesn’t force its talented employees to leave for economic reasons.

We know as well as anyone the difficulties of our industry. But there is a reason companies continue to buy newspapers, why hedge funds are increasingly interested in print journalism, why executives are able to command seven-figure salaries and six-figure bonuses. We firmly believe that this industry can thrive if companies invest in their workforce. This contract is a step in that direction.

Thank you to the many unions, both media and otherwise, who have supported us throughout this effort. Special thanks to our brothers and sisters of the Denver Newspaper Guild 37074 for their guidance and support, help that began with our first conversations about unionizing in January and extended throughout bargaining.

“The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor.” – Thomas Donahue, AFL-CIO

Casper News Guild Begins Formal Negotiations With Lee Enterprises

Thursday, April 19, 2018, Casper, Wyo. — The bargaining committee of the Casper News Guild began negotiations with Lee Enterprises today, taking the next step toward securing an initial contract. Our hopes for the negotiations are consistent with our originally stated reasons for choosing to form a union. We want to ensure that the working conditions at the Casper Star-Tribune meet a high enough standard that those who join the newspaper view it as a destination, not a mere bullet point on their resumes. We know these two truths of newspapers firsthand: Journalists that are established in their communities do their jobs more thoroughly and efficiently, and readers prefer journalists who are more invested in their communities than future job opportunities.

In order to keep Star-Tribune journalists in Casper, we intend to improve wages and benefits with our first contract. We also plan to establish a safety net for anyone who might be subjected to layoffs in the future.

We are not naive to the challenges that face those trying to make a living in today’s journalism industry. Just this month, three Star-Tribune employees were laid off, including the 2017 Wyoming Young Journalist of the Year. However, as we argued in complaints filed to the National Labor Relations Board, we believe these moves stemmed more from anti-union sentiment than economic reality. Again, our desire to unionize is very much in line with the desire to make the Star-Tribune a more profitable institution. As company executives themselves told us not long ago: Content is king. And there is no content source more sustainable than a newsroom that is both well-staffed and incentivized to make a long-term commitment to that newsroom.

To reduce a newspaper to a dollars-and-cents operation is, at best, a disservice to the community it represents. That does not change the fact, however, that investing in the journalists of the Star-Tribune is investing in the long-term profitability of the Star-Tribune. We expect that Lee Enterprises would be amenable to such an idea.