A Settlement in Philadelphia, But the Acrimony Grows

At the 21st hour tonight, the Newspaper Guild became the last of the Philly unions to come to an agreement with the ownership of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. As with the settlement earlier this month in San Jose, you can smell the fight to come in the terms agreed.
If this were an old John Ford western, you'd hear the music that told you you're seeing a lull in the action until the real battle begins.

Look no farther than a statement approved by Philly Guild members after they approved the contract:

1- Because of their tight-fisted, slash-and-burn, anti-labor tactics, we have NO CONFIDENCE in the new owners’ actual desire to publish great newspapers.

2- Because of the new owners’ recent record of poor business decisions, which includes hiring executives while promising layoffs of union workers, we have NO FAITH in their desire to treat employees with fairness and dignity.

3- Because of the yawning chasm between what the new owners promised and what they now are delivering, we have NO STOMACH to hear any more of their cheerful prattle.

For the new owners we have ”No Confidence, “No Faith, “No Stomach.”

Some details of the settlement are here on the Guild site. The short story is that Guild won in its battle to avoid giving up control of the union pension fund to the company. The company's new ownership is headed by publisher Brian Tierney whose group bought the papers from McClatchy, out of the Knight Ridder sale. Tierney had recently raised alarms -- and may have scared off other would-be buyers of distressed newspaper properties -- by saying the papers' revenue situation was far worse than expected when the papers were bought this spring. He's said that cash flow is half what it was projected and that the new owners might have trouble making debt payments some time next year. So ownership's bid to control pension fund assets had, understandably, raised alarms. The pension issue is still far from resolved, with a kind of freeze on current pensions, as management and union search for better solutions next year.

They'll be no wage increase until at least September '07, with various givebacks in health care and sick leave funding. Frozen is probably the best word to describe what's going on, with no thaw in sight. Except for the thaw soon to be experienced by new, substantial layoffs -- somewhere between 80 and 150 more in a once Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom now decimated by job cuts, editor changes and a sinking feeling about the future of the papers.