The New York Times: Union Busting Thugs ;-)

The Coffee Shop
1

I guess when it comes to survival, even the Gray Lady is willing to take a recalcitrant newspaper guild (that’s the industry or profession’s name for a union in the paper business) down like an elevator in a burning office building. It seems the “absentee owners” of the Boston Globe (read: the folks at the NYT) have demanded massive Globe union concessions or the paper’s going to be shut down for good:

Below post, courtesy of my good friends over at AoSHQ (http://ace.mu.nu/archives/285736.php)

Heartless Corporation Demands Workers Give Up Salary and Guarantees, Work Longer Hours, Just to Meet Its Almighty So-Called “Bottom Line”

The New York Times, which I’m certain stands against efforts by GM and Chrysler to force the UAW to make major labor concessions, plays hardball with the union representing the workers at its Boston Globe affiliate.

By the way – the Globe will almost certainly be shuttered. Or will be merged with the NYT, with only a skeleton crew to handle local issues while the rest of the Globe publishes AP articles and stuff from the Times.

The New York Times Co. wants Boston Globe unions to remove lifetime job guarantees and agree to sweeping layoffs with slashed severance - while increasing work hours for those who survive, workers were told last night.

But the president of the Boston Newspaper Guild insisted the union will hang tough and refuse to give in on the lifetime job perks.
“That’s a nonstarter. We will not give up seniority and the lifetime job guarantee,” said Dan Totten, addressing his membership at a Boston union hall.
He said union leadership would fight as “loud and long” as necessary against $10 million alone demanded from the Guild as part of $20 million in overall concessions by the Times.
For the first time, workers represented by the Newspaper Guild were given stark details of draconian cuts being demanded by the paper’s out-of-town owners under threat of shutting down the Globe.
The meeting in the Boston Teachers Union hall was marked by an angry confrontation between some union members who are willing to give up the job guarantees and the union’s top leaders, all of whom have the lifetime perk but have been resisting calls to make that concession, sources told the Herald.
…
Times executives last week threatened to shutter the Globe on May 1 unless all the newspapers’ unions cough up the $20 million in concessions.
…
Another reporter called the cutback plan “a union-busting tactic.”

Pat Daly, a retired advertising sales representative who worked at the Globe for 35 years, said the paper’s executives are asking Guild employees to cut too deep, without making sacrifices themselves.
**“To see these people who got bonuses ask for concessions, it’s sickening,” **he said.

Given all of the above, how much is it worth to an individual to have the benefit of a good paper-and-ink newspaper these days? I have a figure in my own mind, beyond which I won’t go. So, when do papers become extinct?

T.

2

So, when do papers become extinct?

I’ve been wondering this for some time now. I love reading the paper, but I only have time to read the Saturday one in print. The rest of the time, I just get snippets online. I love having the paper in my hand to read it, but I don’t get it daily because I know I wouldn’t have time to read it.

This is sad about the Boston Globe. I grew up in the Boston area and my parents got it every day. In fact, I don’t know anyone in my extended family that doesn’t read the Globe. It’s too bad that with a demand that high, they can’t make it work.

In this day and age, no one should be 100% for or against unions. It is not black and white. Sometimes they are useful and necessary and sometimes they get too much power and bring a business to its knees. The NYT needs to make sure they know the difference.

3

I don’t think the demands are that bad.

“Topping the list of Times-proposed cutbacks, according to Totten: a onetime “reduction in force without regard to seniority,” meaning the 435 Globe staffers with jobs guaranteed for life could face the ax.
Totten also ticked off a list of potential concessions that includes cutting wages by 5 to 20 percent, reducing severance payments to laid-off workers, eliminating paid sick days, expanding the workweek to 40 hours from 37.5 hours and freezing contributions to retiree pensions.”

  1. Jobs for life are a bad thing.

  2. Cutting wages 5-20%. I am fine with this IF the executives are taking bigger paycuts and not accepting bonuses.

  3. Reducing severance payments. It depends on how much they are going to reduce them. If like I said above the executives take a pay cut they could move some of that money to fully funding the severance packages.

  4. Eliminating paid sick days is a bad idea. Are the executives doing this also?

  5. Expanding the work week to 40 hours. Is this still the 1940s? Please catch up with the times.

  6. Freezing contributions to retirement pensions is another bad idea.
    So in all I think most of the demands from the NYTs are resonible IF the executives are also taking a hit.

4

The times are indeed changing. My wife and I watched a movie from the 70s last night. Three Days of the Condor. Classic Redford and a damn good spin. Anyway, it closed with the protagonist’s disclosure that he’d given his whole story to the New York Times, which he (and all of us back then) looked at as a bulwark against the more threatening tendencies of our government.

There’s something to be said about a free traditional press, but there’s also something to be said about the changing nature of news dissemination in our digital millennium. Just look at what Totten did in running down parts of this story, much of which we might never have learned from a reporter running the story through a departmental editor and such.

Who knows what the “new” news media will end up looking like? I certainly don’t, and I’m somebody who’s trying to figure out a way to participate in it.

T.