4 new TNG contracts include rare maternity leave language

By Martha Waggoner, Guild International Chair

It’s a big accomplishment to get a first contract, as four recently organized units within The NewsGuild-CWA have done.

But to get contract language that’s rare, if not unprecedented within TNG, well, that’s cause for even more of a reason for celebration.

The contracts for units at Gatehouse newspapers in Springfield and Rockford in Illinois, and at Lakeland and Sarasota in Florida, include language that protect the beats of female reporters when they return from maternity leave. The language says not only do the women return to work, but they also return to their same beats.

The language came from bargaining at Springfield, where the local’s bargaining team noticed that some women were assigned less prestigious beats when they returned from maternity leave. One reporter had burst into tears in the newsroom when she learned she was pregnant because she had seen a colleague lose her beat after her pregnancy.

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