Important Wins On Privacy And Safety

We’re back with another update from the bargaining table. Over our last three sessions in March and early April, we put forward several new economic proposals and made progress on some non-economic issues. Now, we’re gearing up to present our final proposals, including the cornerstone of any union contract: wages.

Here are the big takeaways:

HEALTH AND SAFETY: After *months* of fighting with management, BuzzFeed has finally backed off its unacceptable language about reporters being unable to refuse dangerous assignments. This is a major victory for our union!

We’re also continuing to push management on mental health coverage. The company’s last proposal, offering counseling only to address psychological stress suffered by “a large proportion of employees” in connection with exposure to “abnormally disturbing material” is much too narrow for us. We’ll also be discussing mental health care as part of our economic proposals, so more updates to come here.

REMOTE WORK: After a year of employees successfully working remotely, BuzzFeed is still fighting the union over our proposal that employee requests to work remotely won't be unreasonably denied unless the decision would "materially impact operations."

The company's desire to control where employees work — despite the fact that dozens of BuzzFeed News staffers still don’t know whether or not there will even be an office where they live, after the closure of offices in DC, San Francisco, and Canada last year — is confusing, if not outright hypocritical. Management has also proposed that employees who relocate to new cities might have future raises restricted. We believe that the work an employee does, not where they live, should determine their salary.

HOURS AND OVERTIME: We proposed a union-standard 35 hour workweek (7 hours + a one-hour break each a day) and that any time worked beyond that be logged as overtime or comp time. We are also recommending that the company significantly expand the number of employees who are overtime eligible.

Currently, the company awards comp time in half or full day increments, but we proposed tracking it by the hour, as well as the option to have comp time paid out once per year instead of taken as time off. We also proposed double pay or comp time if people work on holidays and a clear system for time spent “on call” that tracks with our newsroom’s current practice. 

PRIVACY: We’ve finally come to an agreement that BuzzFeed will not surveil, search, or track employee-owned devices, except with employee consent This is a big victory after management pushback during previous sessions!

We’re still working out some other aspects of this proposal,  including when it is acceptable for management to monitor non-work activities. We proposed that management must be able to show “documented reasonable suspicion that the employee has engaged in or is about to engage in gross misconduct” in order to monitor someone. The company has pushed back against that, proposing a much lower standard. We need to make sure that our members’ lives outside of work stay private, and we’ll keep working towards contract language that ensures it.   

SUCCESSORSHIP: The media landscape is in constant flux, to put it mildly. A union contract can’t necessarily prevent cuts after an acquisition, as we were saddened to see last month when BuzzFeed laid off far too many of our talented new colleagues at HuffPost, but it can help provide stability — and severance. If BuzzFeed happened to be sold to another company, we’d obviously want to retain all the contractual protections we’ve fought long and hard for. So more than a year ago we presented an extensive proposal on Successorship, including provisions that the union be notified in advance about any sale, and that BuzzFeed would make it a condition of any sale that our contract would stay in place. 

But management’s first response, shared with us just this month, is simply that they don’t want to do anything beyond what’s already required by the law, and won’t make any guarantees that a buyer would have to keep current employees on staff or honor our contract. Their argument: We shouldn’t be worried, since the company is currently in “acquisition mode.” While that may be true right now, this contract needs to support us for years to come, not just when times are good.

OUTSIDE WORK: In their most recent proposal, management argued that they must approve all outside work, paid or unpaid, including personal writing not on our beat. This could mean that employees would be disciplined for doing outside work that is in no way competitive with BuzzFeed. This is a huge overreach that would have a serious chilling effect on staffers’ creative projects outside of work.

Our own most recent proposal is very reasonable: We offered to give the company approval/veto power over freelance assignments that BuzzFeed News might publish, or work for a direct competitor of BuzzFeed News. And we’ve always agreed that anything that would interfere with someone’s work for BuzzFeed News or would create a journalistic conflict of interest is off-limits. But we believe that unpaid, personal or volunteer work should never need to be approved by management. 

BuzzFeed is fighting us on this, insisting on total control over every conceivable kind of content employees might want to create.News staffers are creative people who have lives and interests outside of work — which often benefits the company, as they develop their own audiences! Overly restrictive policies on this aren’t going to work in either side’s interests — and would make people more likely to quit their jobs to start a Substack, rather than less!

BENEFITS: We proposed locking in our health insurance plans and flexible spending accounts, as well as additional perks and memberships the company currently offers. We also want a revamp to our 401(k) matching, and proposed 100% matching up to 6%. This is a major increase from the measly matching that we currently have of only 25% of up to 3% contributed (for a maximum match of 0.75%) — which is lower than almost any other media company we’re aware of, and is something employees throughout the company have raised as a concern for years

Finally, we proposed a supplemental mental health care reimbursement, which would be structured as a tax-free HRA fund managed by the company, to help bridge the gap between insurance and reality (since a lot of therapists are out-of-network and many people spend thousands every year on deductibles and coinsurance for therapy). This would allow for unit employees to be reimbursed for out-of-pocket mental health care expenses for up to $400 per month. The stress of covering traumatic news events is an unavoidable occupational hazard in any newsroom, and we hope the company is as serious as we are about finding ways to address it and support employees’ mental health.