Posted on 06/08/2009 11:09:02 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Months of labor acrimony at The Boston Globe will come to a head on Monday, when members of the newspaper’s largest union are to vote on deep cuts in wages, benefits and job security, amid growing signs that they could well reject the deal.
The paper has said that if employees reject the package, it will cut their pay 23 percent. The union, the Boston Newspaper Guild, has vowed to challenge a unilateral reduction with federal regulators — though it may not be able to block one from taking effect — raising the prospect of continued conflict with The Globe’s owner, The New York Times Company.
Two months ago, the company said it would close the money-losing Globe, New England’s largest news organization, unless unions made painful concessions to pare expenses. In recent weeks, after settling with most of the unions, executives have played down the threat of closure, talking instead about the unilateral pay cut, though they warn that a shutdown remains an option if the company cannot achieve cost-cutting goals.
The threat raised the prospect that The Times, a longtime champion of an unfettered press, might take the momentous step of closing one of America’s most respected papers.
“It’s heartbreaking, appalling, that it would have to be The Times that would be the agent of reducing or eliminating The Globe,” said Geneva Overholser, former editor of The Des Moines Register and director of the journalism school at the University of Southern California. But newspapers are in such peril, she said, that “in 2009, you can’t equate cutting with a lack of devotion to journalism.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Globe has been publishing some basically conservative pieces of late.
Faster, please.
State run media’s “chickens are coming home to roost”. Good, die baby die.
Breaking news @ 9:18 PM:
Globe’s largest union rejects cuts
“the paper’s owner prepared to quickly impose
a 23 percent pay cut on the union’s members.”
http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2009/06/globes_largest_1.html
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