For Alden Global Capital, $160 million in profits is not enough. Management for Digital First Media, speaking for its corporate masters at the New York vulture fund, rejected a modified wage proposal Thursday by the unions that comprise the DFM Caucus during wage negotiations in Philadelphia.
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Union representatives will press management to increase the pay of workers at Digital First Media newspapers nationwide when wage negotiations resume on October 11 in Philadelphia. The message will be simple: Our award-winning employees deserve their share of the massive profits that DFM is earning from their work. Most DFM employees only have received one raise in 10 years.
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Union leaders representing the Denver Call Center served notice on Purple/ZVRS management this week of our intention to move our ongoing talks for a new labor agreement to Denver. The company — recently found guilty of multiple violations of federal labor law — threatened to file even more time-consuming legal appeals to keep that from happening.
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Top executives at the hedge fund that owns Digital First Media must have felt terrible that employees at the newspaper company weren’t getting any raises in 2017. So they did something about it. They gave themselves a raise.
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After 14 months of negotiations, the Chronicle and the Pacific Media Workers Guild on Wednesday reached tentative agreement on a four-year labor contract that offers an average annual merit-based pay raise of 2 percent and – for the first time – a 401(k) employer contribution and match of up to 2.5 percent of annual salary.
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DFM management came to a bargaining session empty-handed, telling a national coalition of NewsGuild representatives that the company’s hedge fund ownership intends to keep employee pay frozen companywide to help maintain its profits. Alden Global Capital, principal owner of Digital First Media, has earned worldwide notoriety for its ruthless staff cuts and double-digit profit margins. The ongoing damage to newsrooms across the country has triggered protests from New York to Denver to the Bay Area.
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An overwhelming majority of the 63 unionized workers in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser newsroom voted on April 25 to ratify a five-year contract with owner Oahu Publications Inc.
Read MoreIn a near-unanimous vote, workers at The Maui News on Monday voted to ratify a two-year contract with newspaper ownership that runs to April of 2020. The vote was verified Tuesday. With more than three-quarters of eligible members submitting a ballot, 32 votes were cast for the new agreement, which calls for maintaining wages and […]
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Bargaining continued in late January, early February at all four McClatchy California units (The Modesto Bee, The Fresno Bee, The Sacramento Bee and News Desk West). Full contracts are up at Modesto, Fresno and News Desk West while Sacramento has a reopener. The guild and company were able to narrow bargaining to a few core issues during each of the sessions. They include the new metrics for page view goals, seniority language in the case of layoffs, minimum salary levels and merit pay scales, equipment reimbursement, and drug policy.
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Twenty-one Guild members are being bought out and layoffs are next. How many more people will be let go is not known.
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