Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gazette locks out some production workers

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Source: The Montreal Gazette

 

About 20 full-time and a number of part-time employees who work at The Gazette’s production facility on St. Jacques St. in Notre Dame de Grâce were locked out Sunday night after rejecting the company’s final contract offer.

Employees in four other units affiliated with the Teamsters – pressmen, machinist-electricians, paper handlers and building services – approved new contracts in votes on Sunday.

The main stumbling blocks in negotiations between management and its locked-out workers are staffing, working hours and overtime pay.

Bob Pruden, vice-president of labour relations for Postmedia Network Inc., said the previous contract had minimum staffing provisions that are far beyond what is required today, given the changes in the newspaper industry.

“Everybody is aware of the impact that the Internet and new technology like iPads and so on have had on the newspaper business,” he said. “In terms of our circulation, the number of papers we produce and also the advertising in those papers and the advertising inserts have all declined significantly over the last five years covered by the previous collective agreement,” Pruden said on Monday.

Denis Fournier, negotiator for the Teamsters Local 41M, said he was disappointed with the employer’s decision. “Management agreed to leave a four-day week in place for the workers (in the four other units), while requiring the mailing and plate-making workers to work five days a week,” Fournier said.

The locked-out employees include two active members of the platemakers’ unit, positions the company wants to abolish, and fewer than 20 regular, full-time mailers. There are also a number of full-and part-time substitutes in the mailroom who are assigned their shifts by the union.

The Gazette will continue to publish uninterrupted during the lockout.

Martin O’Hanlon Elected Canadian Director

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The National Elections Committee of CWA/SCA Canada announces the  results of the election for the position of Canadian Director.

Martin O’Hanlon: 440 votes
Ron Carroll: 167 votes

Uncounted ballots
Unsigned return envelopes: 30
Spoiled ballots: 4
Challenged ballot: 1
Procedural error by a Local Elections Committee: 30 ballots not counted

Martin O’Hanlon is declared elected as Canadian Director.

Scott Edmonds, Gord Holder, Nigel Sones
National Elections Committee members

THIRD-TERM PRESIDENT LARRY COHEN:

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‘We need to be in the streets as well as at the ballot box’

Source: cwa-scacanada.ca

Today’s tough economy and political attacks demand a “broader, deeper” movement, organizing not just new union members but building alliances that will make it clear where America’s true majority stands, CWA President Larry Cohen said Monday in his convention address. “We need to be in the streets as well as at the ballot box,” Cohen told the 1,600-plus delegates, retirees, family and friends at the 73rd CWA convention. “We need the energy and intensity of Madison, Wisconsin, or Cairo, Egypt. We need to unite with non-labour groups who share our vision of restoring the American Dream for working families.” As history proves, collective bargaining rights are essential to that dream, Cohen said. In both the United States and Canada, as bargaining coverage grew from the 1930s to the 1960s, “we negotiated real improvements in living standards — better health care, better pensions, higher wages and expanding organizing rights, and we expected that our children and grandchildren would have a better life,” he said. But as bargaining rights declined, everything changed. Despite still-growing worker productivity, workers’ wages have stagnated while “CEOs keep getting richer because they are writing the rules,” Cohen said. “Bargaining rights are critical to any functioning democracy,” he said. “And they are critical for a functioning economy.” Drawing rousing cheers from delegates, Cohen unveiled a short new video showing CWA in action with its partners in recent battles. “This is movement building. This is what democracy looks like,” Cohen said.

The Perils of Postmedia: News staff out, managing editor in, at Edmonton Journal

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Source: albertadiary.ca – By David J. Climenhaga

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

“The Press” … back in the day when the Edmonton Journal was a great newspaper. Below: soon-to-be Journal managing editor Stephanie Coombs, former Journal publisher Linda Hughes, Colonist founder Amor de Cosmos.

Just when it didn’t seem like another drop of blood was left to squeeze from its various Alberta stones, Don Mills, Ont.-based Postmedia Network Inc. pushed another five senior newsroom employees out the door of the Edmonton Journal on Friday.

The carnage at the Journal included two veteran copy editors, two graphic artists and a National Newspaper Award winning photographer.

Reports from Alberta’s deep south indicate a similar number of newsroom staffers were made to walk the plank at the Calgary Herald about a week earlier.

The situation at the Journal is actually worse than it appears at first glance, however, since not included in the casualties listed above are a veteran newsroom administrative support worker, gone from the building the same day after decades on the job, a talented young reporter who recently quit in disgust at the lack of support for journalistic effort, the newsroom’s Web and social media guru, who also quit, and a significant number of distribution employees.

Several other respected Journal reporters, editors and executives had already departed either during a round of layoffs and packages last fall or soon thereafter. Together, insiders claim these departures leave the paper with only about a dozen city-side reporters to cover the news in a city of close to a million people.

Possibly related to this, an announcement is expected tomorrow of a newsroom managerial reshuffling that is said to include the addition as managing editor of Stephanie Coombs, late of the Ottawa Citizen and more recently city editor of the self-evidently unhyphenated Victoria Times Colonist.

Ms. Coombs’ coruscating trajectory follows the path across the cosmos described by the Journal’s recently appointed editor in chief Lucinda Chodan, who is also a veteran of the once-great Victoria newspaper founded by Amor de Cosmos in 1858. That paper was known in those pre-media non-network days as the Daily British Colonist. For his sins, Mr. de Cosmos was briefly premier of British Columbia.

Probably more important to the decision-makers at Postmedia, however, was Ms. Chodan’s history at the Edmonton Sun, which some time ago went down the same dreary path now being trod by the Journal’s weary and diminished editorial staff.

Interestingly, some Journal insiders assert the latest bloodletting will leave the city room with a staff-to-management ratio of about two to one – that is, half a dozen or so senior editors to supervise about a dozen front-line newsroom workers.

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, anyone who has served any time in the newspaper business understands that this kind of staff cutting usually improves the bottom line in the short term at the expense of the quality of the journalistic product over time. The effect of this phenomenon is one of the key reasons for the decline of the Canadian newspaper industry, which the newspaper executives who made these foolish decisions inevitably blame on the Internet.

The desire for short-term gains regardless of cost at the metaphorically named Postmedia may be related to the corporation’s parlous financial state, described last month in the company’s own Financial Post publication as the effect of a combination of non-recurring charges related to cost-cutting and “declines in print advertising.” However, a series of acquisitions and other business decisions made over several years by owners including Southam Inc., Hollinger Inc. and Canwest all contributed to this doleful state of affairs.

Certainly, Postmedia President and CEO Paul Godfrey was quoted as saying in the same FP story that “debt repayment and cost management will continue to be priorities in the ongoing transformation in our business.” And so it would seem!

Postmedia may be extremely anxious to cut costs to make its stock more attractive, since it is “imperative” for the company to sell shares “if it wishes to remain a Canadian newspaper publisher under tax laws,” the FP story explained. “Under the law, advertisers are permitted to write down ad expenses spent on advertising with Canadian newspapers.”

Alas for Postmedia, its current owners are made up “primarily of U.S. hedge funds and banks that are former creditors of Canwest Global Communications Corp. The group bought the assets after the media conglomerate filed for creditor protection and was forced to sell.”

This all has remaining Journal employees on their knees nightly praying to whatever deity they worship that someone will buy the Journal and somehow return it to its salad days, when it had the reputation as the best newspaper between Vancouver and Toronto – or at least between Kamloops and Medicine Hat.

Lending credence to their fevered hopes is the fact that Linda Hughes, the Journal’s respected former editor and publisher who retired in 2006, was last year appointed to the board of Torstar Corp., publishers of the Toronto Star. As readers of this blog know well, the Star is the last great newspaper still publishing in Canada.

At least once before in recent years, Torstar looked at the Journal as a potential addition to its stable of newspapers.

Will Ms. Hughes and the Torstar Boys ride to the rescue of the beleaguered Journal? Tune in next time for another exciting episode of the Perils of Postmedia!

$2.5-million pay-equity plan approved for Gazette workers

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Source: cwa-scacanada.ca

Montreal Newspaper Guild | CWA Canada Local 30111

A pay-equity plan that has finally been approved at The Gazette will see about $2.5 million in back pay and penalties doled out to workers.

David Wilson, the CWA Canada staff representative who has been involved with the pay-equity file in Montreal since the beginning in January 2000, says workers who were “grossly underpaid” will now be properly compensated, some as much as $50,000.

Clerical jobs were the source of some of the greatest discrepancies, says Wilson. Pay increases range from one to 20 per cent and are retroactive to Nov. 21, 2001, the original deadline for The Gazette to comply with provincial legislation. The payouts include a five-per-cent penalty the company was assessed each year past the deadline.

The province’s Pay Equity Commission has just given its stamp of approval to the plan, which was thrashed out over more than 10 years.

The employer-employee committee now has to begin a maintenance process, which must be completed by the end of this year. Wilson says this is necessary because new technologies and ways of doing things constantly alter the nature of jobs. After 2011, companies will have to do maintenance to the plan at least every five years.

He says CWA Canada Locals, particularly in Ontario which has pay-equity laws, need to keep up to date on changes in the workplace. “All those Locals should be doing maintenance because there’s money sitting there for their members.”

Wilson, who has the most pay equity expertise of any staff in the union, encouraged Locals to contact him if they would like some guidance on the matter.

Literally hundreds of hours were spent on pay equity in Montreal, he says. At the outset, the committee evaluated 73 jobs and had to construct a rating system that would pass muster with the commission.

Those sessions bogged down in 2003 when The Gazette “threw up roadblocks” with complaints to the commission and appeals to the courts, says Wilson.

Many companies put the process on hold in 2006, when it was thought the legislation would be revisited. “A lot of employers were hoping the legislation would be vastly changed or eliminated,” says Wilson. It wasn’t.

The committee at The Gazette restarted the process last August and concluded two weeks ago, says Wilson. The rating system they had devised was considered deficient by the commission, which then sent an employee to work with the committee to modify the plan to its satisfaction.

It could take some time to track down everyone who’s entitled to receive a payout, says Wilson. He cites the example of the Reader Sales & Service phone room (it closed in 2008) where many workers came and went over seven years.

The raises aren’t going solely to women. Wilson says some males who work in female-dominated departments such as the business office, will be getting an increase.

How Digital Editions Can Help Save Newspapers

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Source:  editorandpublisher.com

Virtually all newspapers have websites that look good and have great functionality. So why aren’t they all producing acceptable amounts of profit? The question probably should be asked differently, “What do consumers and advertisers expect from newspapers?” Then ask, “What do they expect from the Internet?” The answers are different, but there is overlap. The area of overlap is an area of opportunity for creating a business that is needed by consumers and advertisers, and capable of creating value that translates into profits.

Continue to read entire story here

An edit too far

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Arbitrator orders reinstatement of RFA reporter whose edited story caused a diplomatic flap

By Andy Zipser, Editor

Source: The Guild Reporter

In a case underscoring the dangers of social media reporting — especially when complicated by foreign-language translation —  a Guild-represented reporter for Radio Free Asia has won an arbitration that rescinds his termination and orders full reinstatement with back pay, seniority and benefits. 

A highly regarded 10-year veteran who had racked up several awards for his reporting, King Man Ho nevertheless was fired last February after video-recording, tweeting and writing about an event at which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton briefly interacted with two Chinese bloggers. Although Ho’s story correctly quoted one of the bloggers, subsequent editing made the blogger sound overly enthusiastic about Clinton and implied “too intimate a connection with the U.S. State Department.”

Moreover, an RFA headline referred to the bloggers as “Chinese Web dissidents,” a characterization which the bloggers vigorously disputed. “The Son of Free Asia reporter has a bit professional ethic; he hocus pocus my work, make me outrageous,” one tweeted in angry response.

In the wake of the ensuing diplomatic flap, and amid concerns that the reports would endanger the bloggers upon their return to China, the RFA coerced Ho into tweeting an apology. Written by Ho’s manager, Shiny Li, the statement said he had misquoted the blogger and had mischaracterized the meeting with Clinton — which, ironically, followed a speech she gave at the Newseum about internet freedom.  But despite assenting to the forced apology, Ho was warned that an RFA investigation into the incident would continue.

Later that month, following a meeting with management at which Ho was faulted for showing insufficient remorse, the reporter was fired for “insubordination and violation of the Code of Journalistic Ethics and RFA’s Conflict of Interest policy.”  The Guild promptly responded with a grievance, charging RFA with making Ho “the public scapegoat for a legitimate news story” and forcing him to publicly apologize “for a story that was wholly accurate.”

After three days of hearings in July and August, arbitrator Herbert Fishgold agreed. Not only had the RFA failed to make its case for insubordination and ethics violations, he wrote, but it had “contributed [to] and exacerbated” a diplomatically sensitive situation. “As noted,” he wrote, the two bloggers “took specific issue with the use of ‘warm push’ and ‘Dissidents,’ and the inference that they ‘met’ with Secretary Clinton. All of these concerns are attributable to Li’s editing and the headline, not to Ho’s actual wording. . . . Li’s editing allowed an impolitic suggestion that these ‘independent’ bloggers were cozy with the Secretary.”

Although Fishgold rebuked Ho for some of his tweets, which had become increasingly intemperate as he responded to the blogger’s accusations of unprofessional conduct, he noted Ho’s “otherwise unblemished record during the past ten years.” Accordingly, he wrote Nov. 9, Ho should receive a written warning “that he should not engage in a public ‘debate’ with news sources” but otherwise should be reinstated with back pay — an amount the Washington-Baltimore Guild estimates at approximately $50,000.