Boston Globe Union Accepts Wage Cuts

After rejecting an earlier offer, The Boston Globe's largest union voted overwhelmingly Monday to approve a new contract that would give the financially struggling newspaper $10 million in concessions.

The Globe, on its Web site, reported that the Boston Newspaper Guild voted 366-179 to accept the deal that was hammered out after the union narrowly voted down a similar package last month.

The Guild represents editorial, advertising and business employees at the Globe.

The newspaper's parent, The New York Times Co., imposed a 23 percent wage cut after the union — which represents about 700 editorial, advertising and business employees — voted down a new contract that called for an 8.3 percent wage cut, unpaid furloughs, benefit cuts and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for nearly 200 staffers.

The new contract cuts salaries by nearly 6 percent. It also includes unpaid furloughs, a pension freeze, a reduction in health care benefits and the elimination of lifetime job guarantees.

The Globe is projected to lose $85 million this year.

"We are very pleased that the members of the Boston Newspaper Guild ratified their agreement. With this vote, all of the Globe's major union contracts are now settled," Boston Globe spokesman Bob Powers said in a statement.

"We deeply appreciate the sacrifices that Guild members are making to help sustain The Boston Globe's mission of delivering high-quality journalism to the greater Boston community," he added.

The Times Co. said it needed $10 million in wage and benefit concessions from the Guild on top of $10 million in concessions it negotiated with six other unions.

The Guild filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board after management imposed the 23 percent wage cut, but a hearing before the NRLB has been postponed while talks continue.

[rocketjl]

I must admit that when I see something like 'lifetime job guarantees', I begin to wonder if part of the problem is a 'auto-worker like' union contract. Lord, I (and others) wish I had a lifetime job guaranteed. It makes me go back and think this article really does not address what these employees are making in terms of wages and benefits. Do get me wrong, I'm sure that management has it's agenda, but it makes me think that we are reading about about a cat fight, where some want us to back up their side.

[platteman]

Oh darn, I had hoped the unions wouldn't cave and stand their ground. Then this left wing liberal rag could close it's doors forever and we wouldn't have to listen to them toot the praises of the great obambi.
Drats. More trees will have to be cut to keep the presses rolling.

[tmittelstaed]

Sounds great but that's not the real problem. The problem is that over the years the newspapers depended less and less on advertising revenue from their large advertisers, and more and more on advertising revenue from their small advertisers - ie: the classified advertisers.

After all, when a large grocery store offers to take out a weekly full page ad for 52 weeks, that adds up to a serious amount of money for the contract. Naturally they are going to get the space for maybe 2-3% higher than cost.

But when Joe Schmoe wants to take out a nice advert with a picture of his car that he's selling for $6K, for a decent amount of time to sell it - like a month - the paper wants 10% of the sale price of the car. So, joe has to content himself with a 1/2 inch ad in the classifieds and become lost in the sea of other 1/2 inch adverts. Of course, the paper is making a mint off all those 1/2 inch adverts.

Well, for years the papers were the only game in town so Joe just had to suck up and pay it.

Now along comes Ebay and Craigslist and Joe gets a nice advert with a picture that will last a month - for 1%, not 10%, of the sale price of his car.

I think you see the problem here. The newspapers are being forced into either raising advert rates to the large advertisers like the grocery chains, or lowering advert rates for the Joe Schmoes.

If they raise advert rates then the grocery stores are incentivised to get into repeat customer-registration programs, like cards and the like, so that they can just direct-mail their adverts and bypass the paper entirely. So the chains scale back their adverts and the paper makes no more money than before.

If they lower rates for Joe Schmoe, then there's no guarentee that Joe is going to come back to them - and even worse, the Joes that haven't gone to craigslist and are still advertising in the paper, end up paying less money, when they might still have been perfectly content paying the original higher rate.

All the papers can do is hang on to their existing structure and see just how much loss they are going to end up with and if there will be an end to it. Surely everyone who advertises in the newspaper isn't going to end up on craigslist, the thinking goes.

Well, probably not. But nobody knows right now who those customers are going to be, and if there's going to be enough of them to support a paper.

The absolute worst thing about riding a shrinking industry isn't that you know it's shrinking. The worst thing is that you don't know if it's ever going to STOP shrinking, and if it is going to, where it's going to stop.

you may be the buggy whip manufacturer who gambles that once the auto is in, that 10% of the population is still going to hold on to their horse and buggies - and there will still be enough room for you, you just will be smaller. Or you may be the whip manufacturer who discovers - way too late to do anything about it - that only .01% of the population is still buying buggy whips, and there's just no more room in the industry for you.

The Web isn't the answer for the newspaper industry. News sites on the Web are an entirely different industry, they are as different from newspapers as television news is from newspapers. Sure it's possible to convert over - but there's no guarentee right now that news sites on the web will EVER turn a profit. And with television and computers converging, there's a lot more synergy with a news website that's operated by a television news station - you can click on a link on a news site on the Internet and get video.