LTC staff certified as a union

Will begin contract negotiations

LOWELL >> The Lowell Telemedia Center, a nonprofit that provides local programming and broadcasts government meetings, announced its staff are now certified as a union.

After a National Labor Relations Board election Feb. 3, a majority of the station’s staffers voted to unionize with the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians Local 18, bringing them one step closer to negotiating a contract with the board of directors. The LTC Staff Bargaining Unit shared the news in an email Monday night.

This comes after six of seven staff members signed union cards in early December, hopeful that the board would voluntarily recognize them, which they did not. In the announcement, LTC staff stated the board sought counsel in Littler Mendelson, “the largest anti-union law firm in the United States.”

Kris Macneil, a municipal producer for LTC, said he was dismayed to hear about the board’s vote, but he believes they “realize the mistake they made” and will now come to the bargaining table.

“It was depressing,” Macneil said of the board’s decision. “You work for an organization and you have opinions of these people who run this organization and you think that they have the same goals as you, and then you come to realize that that might not be true. But I think they’ve seen how determined we are, how united we are, how serious we are, and how serious the people of Lowell are as well.”

Workplace conditions are the staff’s main priority in their unionization effort, Macneil said. That looks like just-cause and Weingarten rights, things that “are just common sense,” he said.

Macneil said they’ll soon put out a bargaining survey for staff to guide the direction of negotiations, which they hope will happen soon.

Before the NLRB vote, staffers reported a board member passing out “anti-union” flyers around the office. LTC Media Specialist Wednesday Klevisha said the papers contained statements citing disadvantages for joining a union, none of which were fact-checked or contained sources.

The flyer contained bullet points, stating that “first contract negotiations take 409 days on average” and “44% of the time a contract cannot be reached,” Klevisha said. The messaging was “confusing to receive,” Klevisha added, but didn’t impact the union’s vote at all.

Of the board’s vote, Klevisha, who was initially optimistic about their support, was disappointed.

“I think it was definitely sobering to see that response,” Klevisha said. “You go in with idealistic notions of, ‘These aren’t unreasonable requests.’”

Karen Sennott, an LTC board member who sits on the Executive Committee, clarified that it wasn’t a flyer but rather a fact