Monday, September 14, 2009
Media / News Bites The Terms of Saving the Sun-Times
Posted by Michael Miner on 09.14.09 at 06:20 PM
Like Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Croatians, union and nonunion workers can't be told apart at a glance. But they know who they are and the divide can seem vast — as we see from the hot, angry exchange on this blog over the concessions the next owners of the bankrupt Sun-Times Media Group expect of their unions if the sale's to go through..
What unites these burdened workers is far greater than what divides them, an earnest observer like myself might think. But maybe not. The proposed terms would gut the unions, turn them into shells, and while a worker outside the unions might have no reason to care, the ones who belong, who know their local's history and have fought its battles, are understandably furious at being to pack it in.
I'm posting a pdf of the "Memorandum of Understanding and Offer of Settlement" messengered late last week to the Chicago Newspaper Guild's Sun-Times unit. It's hard to see what employee rights that editorial staff isn't being told surrender, aside from the right to their accrued vacations.
Tom Thibeault, executive director of the CNG, has called a meeting of the unit for Tuesday evening in the Holiday Inn above the Sun-Times offices on Orleans Street. Thibeault expects a vote on whether to swallow hard and accept financier Jim Tyree's harsh terms or reject them and hope to bargain something better. Meetings of the three other editorial units the CNG represents — at Pioneer Press and the STMG dailies in Joliet and Waukegan — will be held later in the week. CNG also represents Pioneer Press production workers, who'll meet to discuss the closing of the printing plant in Northfield.
Comments (15)
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interesting terms.
they can create a "universal media desk," put a decades-long veteran guild editor on the street with a digital cam or audio recorder & simply say, "go to it boy, on-line's awaiting."
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I've worked for one of the unionized STNG dailies for many years. I'm proud to be a union member --and I pay for that privilege -- the dues are more than $600 a year.
And I've worked very, very hard for STNG.
It took me quite some time to land a job at my paper. But I wanted to work at a union shop in a newsy town. After many interviews and some luck, I got there. I've hung on ever since. It hasn't been easy.
If the union won't comply with the company's demands, the sale could go kaput. If we do comply, it could go kaput. These days, who knows? Union vs. non-union? Cute cat fight. But I doubt the pending sale hinges on that issue alone.
So we must fight.
I'll never forget the time, years ago, when a dear friend of mine, a former Waukegan reporter, asked me why I didn't go to work in Aurora. After all, it has long been the chain's flagship suburban paper. Denise Crosby and Rick Nagel know the Aurora and Naperville reporters well; I'm not sure they know I exist. I told my pal I didn't want to move. I wanted to stay in the union.
I gave up a lot to stay at my shop. The future is a crap shoot.
The cause goes on.
The universal media desk sounds intimidating, but they put it in place at Fox Valley about a year ago and most people's jobs didn't really change much. In my opinion it has been a failed experiment and I'm surprised they'd try to export it, especially to the Sun-Times where it doesn't seem to make sense. We still joke about when Fred Lebolt came to our office all excited because he Googled the term and couldn't find it anywhere, so he had made it up. How clever! Basically, the idea behind it is that copy editors and designers are all part of one desk instead of working for specific papers, so in theory they can help out wherever something needs to be done and you don't have people sitting around doing nothing in slow periods of the day. In practice, most of the people on the desk still do what they've always done because that's what they're best at and while people are cross-trained, they only help with another paper when someone is on vacation. I don't know how this would apply to the Sun-Times because it's already one paper. I guess if they currently have, say, a separate business editor and a separate features editor and so on, they might find themselves tossed together and occasionally working on something else.
Journalist, how it might apply at the Sun-Times is that workers at the suburban papers could layout and copy edit the Sun-Times and the higher-paid S-T copy/layout desk would be laid off.
Eliminating jurisdictional and geographic restrictions, as well as severely cutting severance pay, gives the green light to shifting work to lower-paid workers.
In theory a universal desk makes perfect sense, however when the rubber hits the road it's a far different story. Competing egos, turf battles et al all get in the way. This would especially be true if the "flagship" was factored in. During a prior "restructuring" I saw memos where downtown editors (Barron to name one) had at times "parachuted" into one of the suburban papers to teach the journalists the "proper" way to cover and package news. Their suggestions in typical ST fashion were never followed up. And, you're talking real basics here i.e. tabloid journalism 101. It was clear that the downtown guys - management or guild - treated their suburban brethren like dimwits if not outright idiots. I found this curious, especially the lack of follow-up but soon realized that was the way the ST did business. To compound the situation, I also soon realized that the memos etc. basically amounted to the blind leading the blind anyway.
Then, during the period of "sharing" resources I started wondering why there was so much duplication i.e. Rozek always reporting from Dupage the identical stories one of the suburban papers was staffing. I could only come up with two reasons: a) the downtown guys didn't trust the suburban guys to actually get the story and, more saliently, b) Rozek would lose all his Dupage sources if he stopped showing up, thus putting his job at risk.
The fact that the "universal desk" is part of Tyree's game plan also indicates that somebody is listening to Lebolt. That's a big mistake since Fred talks a good game but that's pretty much where it ends. I realized this as well after one of the suburban papers launched a neighborhood blog. At the beginning - before the comment section went gangbusters - I called him (he was then the downtown "internet guru") for advice re/the lack of comments. His reply: "You're doing something wrong." I waited for a second on the other end of the phone for his suggestions and was met with dead silence. At first, I thought we had gotten disconnected. Then I, sadly, realized he had nothing else to say. As noted above, I was impatient i.e. the comments soon came pouring in but that phone call told me all I needed to know.
Fred Lebolt thinks he invented the universal media desk? How does that man walk around with his head so far up his own hole? Fox Valley had a universal desk in the 90s when Copley consolidated operations in Aurora, to disastrous result. After four years, the company was finally getting it to work in so-so fashion (probably because the newspapers were much smaller, plus all the vim and vigor had gone out of the staff). Then Hollinger bought Copley and broke that operation up, giving the individual newspapers control again. Lebolt says he's fixed all the problems of the universal media desk, but spend 15 minutes with anyone who actually works on the thing and you know it's smoke and mirrors, desperation and insanity. I've also had conversations with Lebolt, and he always clams up when you would expect an intelligent leader to offer advice or insight.
just a few quotes to help whip up the troops for tonight's meeting (as if they needed whipping up):
Frank Lloyd Wright, "If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor."
Molly Ivins, "Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts."
Abe Lincoln, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
Clarence Darrow, "Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for."
Just remember this management group went to the bankruptcy court and asked permission to give a 1.5 million dollar severance payment to an undisclosed list of managers. Even though they had discontinued severance and medical insurance subsidies to all non union employees! Even though they didn't include union workers the union workers at the shut down Plainfield Plant did not get their severance, they have to go through the court for a maximum payment of $10,975, much less than the full years pay negotiated by their unions. This deal is only to guarantee the top managers golden parachutes when the company downsizes itself into nothing worth working for.
As someone completely on the outside of this debate, I can say the one comment here that has the ring of undeniable, certifiable and reliable truth is that of "union journalist," who says the ultimate aim is to replace unionized work with non-unionized work. Management-generated high-concept notions with multisyllable labels invariably boil down to something slimy like this, don't they?
not wanting to seem biased, a few quotes in support of tyree & co's seemingly harsh take-it-or-leave-it terms for the unions:
- "Allowing the unions to continue will make it difficult to fire incompetent workers and reward those who perform exceptionally well."
- "Unions are simply no longer affordable in a globalized economy."
- "If you allow the guild to stand, you won't even be able to send a rookie, let alone veteran reporter out to pick up your dry cleaning."
source: really couldn't find any anti-union quotes, so needed to make 'em up.
No. They are not spot on accurate. Without Labor you have no Middle Class. We are at because of management (Black and Co.). Now we have a new set of money changers.
To understand the full essence of Fred Lebolt here's another illustrative story. I met him when I first arrived in Chicago at Orleans. We had a long talk about the web re/newspapers. At the time, the Fox Valley web site was (I don't it really qualified as a web site). It was absurd. As I had come from a straight single-copy environment where the cardinal rule was never give your content away at the expense of your revenue-generating print products, I found Fred very insightful and extremely knowledgeable about the internet re/newspapers.
However, after doing a little research, I soon found that he was spouting the same conventional wisdom as everybody else in the business as they flailed around trying to find a web strategy that would make money. And, it was months before decent web sites (now reduced to flogging cars, neighborhoods etc.) were introduced to the Fox Valley.
Cut to a year or two later when Freidheim addressed "senior managers" of STMG regarding the state of the business but with a big focus on the web. There was a a Q & A after Freidheim's speech so I asked: "What about all these studies out there that pointed to web advertising providing a viable money-making model that would be like 10 years off...if at all. Emphasis on "if at all." Freidheim's answer (and I can only assume he was getting his talking points from Lebolt and his people, because Freidheim as everyone knows, never had a clue about the newspaper business, despite all the money he spent on high-priced consultants etc.) said: "No, no...you got it all wrong. We're going after Google and the pirates." Usually, journalists ask follow-up questions. But when I heard that I thought what's the point? For the ST then-CEO to actually say the company was going to take on Google defied any kind of rational thought.
The fact that these "executives" continue to expect blood from the turnip's they are squeezing, you'd think they would be extolling the extreme personal financial sacrafices that they have made as an example for the union members to follow. Believe me, after reading the bankruptcy filing front to back, I'd happily take the "consessions" that they are lavishing on themselves at the expense of the union and non-union employees. For Example, while Blair was busy with the initial 15% pay cuts,to the unions, he was busy giving himself and others big pay raises and bonuses. And thats beside the $1.8 mil. in secret "performance" bonuses that Im sure he was one of the elite 11. How about the page that shows unbelievable pay increases of up to 37.5% for a select group of 10 or so chosen ones? And how about the filing stating there are no "insiders"in the agreement, Jeremy is negotiating for the seller, with the buyer, whose investor group he admits he is joining, that is the ultimate insider. No wonder the bid price is so low, he wants to make sure he owes as little as possible, to maximize profits. Maybe they will bring in their tax returns from last year and their checkstubs to empathise with the common folk, {turnips}from whom they want even more from. The Question for each union member is ...do I want to finance the purchase of the paper with further wage consessions so the executives who have driven us to this point, and the millionairs that want to own it can continue reap their rewards... Or not.
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