Boston Globe Shutdown Averted (For Now) But No Deal With Guild

[meegbear]

Source: Washington Post

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) has backed off its threat to file notice today to close the Boston Globe despite failing to reach agreement with the Boston Newspaper Guild. The company says it has reached agreements with six of the paper's seven unions but that it is exploring alternatives "under both the Guild contract and applicable law to achieve as quickly as possible the workplace flexibility and remaining cost savings we need to help put The Globe on a sound financial footing."

Globe management said late Sunday night that it was prepared to file notice today that it would close the paper in 60 days unless its unions agreed to $20 million in cuts. The original deadline was May 1; that was extended through the weekend because progress was being made. In response last night, the Guild said it had offered more than $10 million in cuts as the company demanded when it threatened in early April to close the paper. But the paper and its largest union appear to be far apart on one major sticking point: the right to fire hundreds of employees at will rather than only for cause.

According to the Boston Globe, the union contends the so-called lifetime guarantees were paid for by earlier concessions when "no layoff" language was struck from the contract; roughly 450 veteran employees, 200 Guild employees are still covered by the provision.

$10 million not enough: Guild president Dan Totten told the Globe the union delivered $10 million in concessions "plus an extra $7,000 for good measure." The concessions across 20 categories included a 3.5 percent pay cut for most Guild employees, an unpaid furlough, the elimination of some employee holidays. The management response was swift, he said: Not enough. Other unions agreed to modify some of the job language, certain that was the only way to get to an agreement. Totten says there already is a way for the company to challenge the provision, but it requires arbitration and opening the books.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/04/AR2009050401846.html

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Dodged the bullet (again).

[hedgehog]

1. How much of the pressure on the Boton Globe employees is actually

aimed at NYT employees?

[HopeHoops]

2. Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly pro-union - but I worked on-site at the Globe with these union people

This is both funny and sad, but keep in mind I am primarily pro-union.

I installed and did tech support for a computer system at The Globe some years back. Because of union agreements, the old "hot metal" people were retrained for these systems.

Here is where it gets sad. They had to have step-by-step instructions for EVERYTHING they did. If ANYTHING unexpected happened, they would sit in their chairs quietly until a supervisor noticed they weren't working and came over to help. This was true no matter how many times the same "unexpected" event occurred. If it wasn't in the instructions they followed every time, they couldn't adapt. Union rules allowed them to just sit there.

Now for the funny part. The application was on a Mac. One particular version of it had a tendency to get corrupted (fixed in next release, no explanation). The solution was to drag the icon on the desktop into the trashcan and drag a fresh copy from the shared volume off of the server - easy fix. We were on a tech support call on speaker phone with one of these "hot metal" holdovers and told him to drag the icon into the trash. We heard a loud crash followed by some shouting and eventually his supervisor got on the phone and was yelling at us. The guy had thrown the mouse and keyboard in the physical trashcan next to his desk.

This is not a joke - I was on the phone when this happened. There are times when unions aren't that helpful.

[WriteDown]

3. Wow.

:rofl: