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Current News

Last Updated: July , 2010
Current News gives you just that — a first, capsulized look at current stories and photos from around the Joint Board which have not appeared anywhere else. In most instances, you'll find the full version of each story, and often additional pictures, in the next issue of "Reflections", the Joint Board's quarterly newspaper.

Local 14-A win job guarantee, secure wages, retains health plans

Local 14-A members working at Xerox have ratified a new, three-year pact that includes a job guarantee for all employees on board at ratification; secure base wages; and retention of current medical, dental and 401K plans.

Gary Bonadonna

“This is a very significant achievement for our members, especially in view of today’s economic climate,” according to Joint Board manager Gary Bonadonna — the chief negotiator — and business rep Roger LaDue. Bonadonna emphasized that “in many manufacturing contracts across the country, union members have seen wages slashed, and have been forced to pay substantially more for health care — often reduced care at that. Many companies have also cut or entirely dropped their 401K matches. In addition, job guarantees are virtually unheard of today.”

Bonadonna and LaDue both noted that this marks the 30th year and the ninth consecutive contract covering 14-A members with a job guarantee — a record that is the envy of American labor.

Bonadonna stressed, “I’m proud of what the negotiating team has been able to win for our members. Yes, there are concessions, some of them painful — but, in the final analysis, there is nothing more important to our members than job security, good wages, good health care, and a continuing strong company match to their 401K plans.”

Roger LaDue

LaDue said he has talked with “scores of members, and most of them recognize just how much this contract protects them on the bottom line — wages, health care and their 401K plans. It is also important to say that the shop reps were an integral, vital part of the talks, providing crucial input about how decisions would actually impact members on the factory floor. Gary took that information and did a superb job of crafting the best possible contract out of the circumstances we faced.”

Bonadonna noted that the Joint Board initiated reopener talks because “it had become apparent that the company would take a hard line in negotiations at the existing contract’s expiration next March. If we had waited until then, the company indicated to us that it would eliminate maintenance, distribution, custodial, and certain manufacturing operations, and the individuals in those areas would have been vulnerable to layoffs without job guarantee protection. Knowing that it would have been difficult or impossible to preserve all of our contract protections and the job guarantee, it was clearly in our members’ best interest to be proactive and take on the issues immediately, before the company made decisions between now and March which would have been irreversible.”

LaDue noted that Bonadonna and the negotiating team successfully defeated a raft of negative company demands that included across-the-board pay cuts; eliminating funding for the Hillman Health Center Fund; changing to far less desirable health and dental plans that would have meant substantially higher costs to members; and drastically altering the company’s financial contributions to members’ 401K plans.

Others on the negotiating committee besides Bonadonna and LaDue were 14-A shop reps Ross Clark, Pete Storath, Doug Roemer, Ron Taccone and Ray Correll. Clark is also president of the Local and Roemer its financial secretary.