PrintJanuary 12, 2007
More New York Times hypocrisy
Yet another heartless greedy profitable American corporation is downsizing and outsourcing, while cutting benefits. Sounds like just the sort of thing the New York Times loves to highlight. Except, of course, that the corporation in question is the New York Times Company.
Editor & Publisher, the very left wing website and dead tree publication, notes:
When The New England Media Group said yesterday it aimed to cut 125 jobs at the Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette, via buyouts, it explained that 55 of them would not really go away -- they would be outsourced to outside contractors.
This didn't go down real [sic] well with the Boston Newspaper Guild.
Dan Totten, president of the Guild, denounced the outsourcing initiative as "corporate greed at its worst," as he was quoted in the Boston Globe.
"Outsourcing efforts by The New York Times [Co.] on our beloved Boston Globe shows a lack of respect for the quality, dedication, and work ethic that Boston Newspaper Guild members have brought to their Globe jobs," Totten said.
Meanwhile, the Guild in New York is tussling with the Times Co. over what it calls "retrogressions" in health insurance and pensions. It will meet again today with the company to negotiate, charging that the Times wants to "gut" their contract in these areas.
I think the Times has every right, indeed the responsibility to its shareholders, to maximize profits, which have been down of late. And it has every right to outsource union jobs to other deserving workers willing to work for less.
But of course the Times has long postured as the guardian of the poor and critic of corporate greed. This hypocrist is not lost on the Boston labor union, the Newspaper Guild. A memo from them is quoted on E&P:
Rather than leading our industry by example and competing vigorously with a creative business plan, New York has chosen to reduce staff and outsource in order to go along with the status quo. These actions are repulsive given the fact that the New York Times preaches ethics at every turn, and routinely lectures the nation on how to treat working Americans.Once again, the Times Co. is standing true to a "Do as we say, not as we do" mentality. [emphasis added]
So even their union now realizes that the Times is not to be taken seriously when it makes moral pronouncements.
Hat tip: Lucianne Goldberg
