Dow Jones union approves new contract

A majority of the members of IAPE The NewsGuild-CWA Local 1096 have voted to approve a new, three-year collective agreement with Dow Jones.

Polls closed on Sunday at 11:59 a.m. EST and 91.2 percent of voting members approved the new agreement while about 8.8 percent chose to reject the deal. Seven hundred forty members voted.

The union represents business journalists at The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch.com and Barron’s.

The deal calls for a 2 percent raise increase in 2019 and a $700 bonus. In 2020, the raise increases to 2.25 percent and a bonus of 0.5 percent of salary. In 2021, the raise increases to 2.5 percent and a bonus of 0.5 percent of salary.

In addition, IAPE members will no longer have to re-apply and will have the automatic right to a job when it moves between departments or locations, avoiding situations like the layoffs and reapplications that resulted from the 2015 reorganization of the Wall Street Journal’s Personal Finance section and Greater New York the year after.

The union also negotiated a 12-month limit on temporary workers hired through staffing agencies, with an extension to 18 months in limited cases for certain projects.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.