Members' powerful, silent protest outside a Dayton Daily News editors' meeting in June may have been a turning point in contract talks.

Nearly 26 years since negotiating the local’s last contract, the never-say-die Dayton Newspaper Guild has reached a tentative agreement with the Dayton Daily News.

“Wow,” summed it up Tuesday afternoon for local President Lou Grieco as he and his co-negotiators shared a bottle of champagne after the talks wrapped up. “We’ve been close for a week, but it still hasn’t quite sunk in.”

Tuesday night, Grieco presented the proposal to about 14 of the 50-plus members who will soon be asked to vote on it. But first, Grieco wants time to talk with everyone, explaining that it’s not perfect, that there are concessions, but overall it’s a victory – one that the members made possible.

“The company kept trying to do things to divide us, and they could not divide us,” Grieco said.

For all of Grieco’s 19 years as a reporter at the paper, the local has lived according to an expired contract and, later, posted work rules. While not the same as having a contract, the rules provided structure and certain benefits: a grievance procedure, progressive discipline, seniority in layoffs and up to 46 weeks of severance pay.

For the tentative contract, the Guild agreed to some of the rollbacks the company wants in seniority language, and agreed to reduce severance pay to a maximum of 26 weeks, which is closer to an industry standard. But significantly for workers, the contract calls for arbitration rights.

“Without arbitration, we could go to the NLRB, but they wouldn’t always take our cases,” Grieco said. “Now we’ll have a way to enforce our contract, and that’s the biggest thing of all.”

Until this week, bargaining sessions came and went for years, with the company making concessionary demands the Guild refused to meet. Last year, members voted down a pay raise – a 61- 3 landslide -- because it came with so many strings attached.

Still, it seemed the News and parent company Cox Media Group couldn’t see that their divide-and-conquer strategy was failing. Grieco said management “has this delusion that the Guild is a third party” and that the company could persuade workers that “they’re being led astray by an ‘international’ and a ‘outside’ group.”

In fact, the number of dues-paying members has soared in Dayton in the last decade and members have grown more vocal and active. For management, Grieco thinks a turning point came in June when members took action on their own while most of the union leadership was on vacation.

Dayton Daily News editor-in-chief Jana Collier sent a letter to Guild members criticizing their leaders as “short-sighted and selfish” for drawing attention to the paper’s plans to outsource advertising and newsroom work.

The union had written to advertisers about outsourcing, and was prepared to pursue an advertising boycott. Grieco said even advertising sales people who could be affected – and who aren’t part of the bargaining unit – “were saying ‘Go for it.’”

Angered by Collier’s letter, members packed an area outside the editors’ 4 p.m. news meeting June 22, holding signs that made it clear they and their leaders were one and the same: “I am a Guild leader,” the signs read.

“I found that so moving, that they did this when most of the leadership was out of the state,” Grieco said. “It was a big symbol.”

Seeing that solidarity and fearing a boycott ,“The company would deny it, but I noticed a change in tenor around the table,” Grieco said.

Another powerful factor also came into play around the same time: the independent Springfield (Ohio) Newspapers Editorial Association voted unanimously to merge with the Dayton Guild. The SNEA brought 12 new members into the unit who work at the Springfield News-Sun, also owned by Cox.

If the tentative contract is ratified, it still won’t be the end of bargaining this year for the local. The newspaper’s copy editors have been moved into a bargaining unit that represents a newly consolidated Cox Media Group copy desk located in Dayton. A date for contract talks hasn’t been set.

The contract for the larger unit, a one-year agreement, includes a merit pay increase in 2013, maintains other pay rates and benefits and prevents the company from using freelancers in place of laid-off workers.

Grieco said he believes the good outweighs the not-so-good in the contract, and that despite what some people say, concessions can be restored.

“Many people have said over the years, ‘You will never get a contract,’ and I never believed they were right,” he said. “If you believe that, then you’re saying it’s futile to keep going, and I refused to believe that. And I refuse to believe that some of the concessions can’t be won back if we continue to strengthen ourselves and work hard.”