Rosenthal: At Sun-Times, Guild's 'no' vote is all that matters


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Posted by Bud on September 16, 2009 at 09:04:56:

From the Wednesday morning edition of the Chicago Tribune, here is Phil Rosenthal's media column:


............
At Chicago Sun-Times, Guild's 'no' vote is all that matters

Phil Rosenthal
Media
September 16, 2009

Separated by a little more than a mile, and the distance from overview to the trenches, two discussions on the future of newspapers each began around 6 p.m. Tuesday.

At Loyola University Chicago's Water Tower Campus, a panel including Chicago Sun-Times Editor Don Hayner took part in yet the latest forum to ask, "Do Newspapers Still Matter?"

If one thinks they do, however, the more critical debate was behind closed doors at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza.

There, Sun-Times employees represented by the Chicago Newspaper Guild rejected major concessions management has said are an absolute prerequisite from all 18 collective bargaining units for a proposed sale of parent Sun-Times Media Group, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 31.

Without the concessions, Sun-Times Media Chairman Jeremy Halbreich warned in a memo to union and non-union employees, "The company will still be losing far too much money for any reasonable investor to underwrite." If the proposed $25 million sale to a group of investors led by businessman Jim Tyree falls through, the company "will shortly run out of cash, and we will be forced to shut down all of our publications and Web sites and liquidate the business," Halbreich wrote.

The memo came hours before the flagship Sun-Times' Guild meeting and the day after the Guild unit at Sun-Times Media's Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana voted against the concessions, which include locking in a 15 percent cut in compensation for at least three years, reducing the cap on severance pay from 50 weeks to four and eliminating seniority rules. The company also wants to be able to transfer employees at will, assign union work to non-union workers and scale back retirement benefits.

"It can get to a point where it is a contract in word only," national Newspaper Guild President Bernard Lunzer said.

Sources inside the Sun-Times union meeting said there was little sentiment for accepting terms that Tom Thibeault, executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, earlier said "basically guts our contract."

A vote against concessions is not necessarily the end of the story, however. Sun-Times Media's spokeswoman said the company's position remains that its "18 bargaining units have until Sept. 29 to approve the amendments requested by the buyer."

The two choices for union members, according to Halbreich, boiled down to this:

"If you approve the amendments, you will satisfy the most important condition for the buyer to purchase our newspapers, Web sites and other assets, thereby securing a bright future. ... If you reject amendments, the buyer will withdraw ... and all 1,800 jobs across the company will disappear."

Union workers fear they would give up their guaranteed severance pay to keep the company alive, only to have the company lay them off in a subsequent effort to cut costs.

It's common in negotiations for both sides to initially stake out hard-line positions before reaching a compromise, and The New York Times threatened earlier this year to close The Boston Globe unless its union agreed to $20 million in cuts and to eliminate "lifetime employment" that had been promised to several hundred employees.

But Alan Mutter, a San Francisco-based media analyst and consultant who was a former city editor of the Sun-Times, said neither Sun-Times Media nor its workers can afford lengthy negotiations.

"If they keep losing money, they cannot continue," Mutter said. "So, the time frame for union and management to come into agreement is extremely truncated and limited in a way that is not common."

Whether the newspapers matter or not.

Tribune reporters Michael Oneal and Julie Johnsson contributed to this column.


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