Hot Bargaining Summer

In between beach trips and park hangs, our unstoppable bargaining committee continued the hard work towards winning us our first contract. August and September saw us come closer to an agreement with BuzzFeed on some important issues — but our work isn’t done yet.

Expenses

This was a proposal we made in the early days of bargaining that management only recently responded to for the first time. We presented some new language to address issues that some of our unit members have had in recent months, including creating a process for signing affidavits for lost receipts. Additionally, we proposed a $150 ongoing stipend for remote employees, and stuck with our previous proposal of a $100 stipend for all non-remote employees for phone bills and laptops.

Training

There is one last major sticking point with this proposal: The use of traffic and revenue goals in employee performance reviews.

We continue to argue that traffic should never be considered an indication of poor performance for employees, but management responded by saying that would preclude them from even discussing traffic with employees. That is not true, and not what we’re proposing in any way.

Successorship

This is another area where management threw out about 95% of our proposal. 

In our most recent counter, we made some movement in management’s direction, taking out a section that included the union’s right of first refusal to buy the company if management was looking to sell. But we stuck to existing language for the most part, including provisions about notice to any purchaser about the union and our contract, notice to the union about any sale, and a new provision about keeping our work available in a public format as a condition of any sale. (We don’t want our hard work to just disappear!)

Outside Work

Management has continued to dig in on their stance that all “content-related work” that unit employees do must be approved by BuzzFeed. And this doesn’t just apply to work that could conflict with the newsroom’s journalism but all of BuzzFeed’s (very expansive!) business as a whole. This is more strict than the current practice of right of first refusal for journalistic works.

In our proposal, we made a differentiation between all outside work and “competitive work” and applied some of the proposed approval process from management’s counter to competitive work, including extending the timeline for management’s response from three to five days and accepting their offer for a written explanation should management deny the request.

Hiring

We’ve had the most back and forth on this proposal , as well as repeated actions from the unit demonstrating how serious we are about it, and that tenacity seems to be paying off! Management finally gave us a percentage commitment: While the union has pushed for 50% of candidates who make it to the second round of interviews be from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, management has refused for months. In their latest counter, though, they proposed that that figure be 35%.

In our latest counter, we accepted a few tweaks they proposed, including moving off our proposal that the company pay bonuses to people on on the diversity committee who help with hiring and for unit members who sit on hiring panels, though we reiterated to them that this remains incredibly important to us and we plan to continue to push them on it outside of bargaining.

Remote Work

We’ve come to an agreement that employees who request to work remotely in a state where BuzzFeed currently has approved remote work will not have that request unreasonably denied. Employees who want to work in other states can still request to work remotely, but there will be a different standard of approval for these requests because of the added logistics of setting up taxes in a new state.

We’re still going back and forth about the distance an employee would have to travel to have their expenses covered. Management proposed 120 miles, which is quite a hike — for context, under their proposal, an employee required to come to the NYC office from Philly (just 94 miles away) would have to pay for their own travel. We proposed 75 miles in our last counter, and are confident we can soon come to an agreement on this important proposal.