Birmingham 121C won a major arbitration related to electronic prepress jurisdiction.

The case involves Stevens Graphics' use of non-union workers to perform what the company claimed were "preflighting" functions.

Preflighting applies to the limited function of opening up a digital file supplied by a customer solely to check whether the file "fits" the shop's computer software and hardware capabilities.

Local 121C Pres. Charles Watt filed a grievance against the company, charging that the non-union workers were doing much more than just "preflighting" and were actually performing prepress production work that fell under the bargaining unit's jurisdiction under the contract with the company.

Attorney Thomas D. Allison of Allison, Slutsky and Kennedy said Arbitrator Michael Pecklers found that the company told the union that it was not doing any preflighting.

In fact, the arbitrator found, the company began to assign so-called preflighting operations to non-union computer employees. Pecklers found that these non-union employees eventually did substantial amounts of color corrections, font changes, type changes, and corrections, stripping, proofing, and changing application files to PostScript and PDF formats for production reasons.

Pecklers said the company's claim that this was simple preflighting work was simply not true. ". . . [T]he preflighter and his non-unit colleagues have gone from confirming the flight plan to flying the airplane," Pecklers said. "Production work that was clearly within the unit's jurisdiction in the conventional process is now done by these non-unit individuals and supervisors with sophisticated hardware and software. . . ."

At the same time that non-union employees were assigned to do this work, bargaining unit employees were being laid off.

Pecklers found that all the so-called preflighting work was bargaining unit production work.

Allison called the decision important because "it confirms the GCIU's jurisdiction over all production functions in an electronic pre-press environment. The company cannot avoid the GCIU's jurisdiction by claiming that certain production functions are only 'preflighting.' Like many other arbitrators before him, Arbitrator Pecklers stressed the importance of going behind the company's rhetoric and looking at what the employees are doing in fact."

Watt said the decision "is going to help the GCIU's jurisdiction over the preflighting process." During the 18-month process of grievances and company stalls that forced the issue into arbitration, he said, "the support of the International has been very important." He also praised the assistance of Allison and GCIU Organizer Rod Queen throughout the pursuit of case and current negotiations with the company over the implementation of the arbitrator's ruling.