A pivotal year for the Times and its unions
Having never fully recovered from a strike seven years ago, the state's biggest newspaper is entering a period of critical labor negotiations. The company plans to outsource Teamsters jobs, and the Newspaper Guild contract is up for renewal.
Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen makes no secret of his antipathy toward unions. Part of the Times' current financial woes trace back to Blethen's clash with the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild seven years ago. A 49-day strike during the height of the 2000-01 holiday season cratered what should have been a bright year for the paper's advertising, and the Times never bounced back.
Now Seattle's largest daily is about to tangle with an even tougher union foe. Last week, the Times notified two Teamsters locals, which represent drivers, mechanics, and others, that it plans to outsource the work done by 74 union members – the entire trucking unit – to Penske, the big Detroit-based truck leaser. The outsourcing is scheduled to take effect Feb. 29, the day after the Teamsters contract expires.
Times officials were apparently hoping the truckers would go as quietly as customer service reps whose jobs the company farmed out in 2004. But Teamsters officials say they intend to fight, not switch. The Times outsourcing plan would be the first time a newspaper has farmed out a newspaper trucking operation, Teamsters leaders say, and they fear it could set a pattern for the rest of the ailing newspaper industry.
"We are adamantly against this outsourcing, and The Seattle Times knows that," says Joseph Molinero, director of the Teamsters Newspaper, Magazine and Electronic Media Conference. The union has been closely monitoring the Times negotiations here and sent representatives from its D.C. headquarters to sit in on several meetings with Seattle Times Co. officials.
Under its joint operating agreement (JOA) with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Times handles all non-news functions for both papers, including production, distribution, and marketing. The Teamsters negotiations would affect both papers' distribution.
"We're willing to sit down and meet with them if they have financial problems," says Molinero. "But any time an employer confronts us with outsourcing, it's a problem. We'll dig in and fight, if that's what it takes."
Local Teamsters officials complain that Times Co. labor relations director Chris Biencourt tried to pressure the union to bargain in secret, without telling members about the negotiations. "We ignored that," says Patty Warren, senior business agent for Local 174, which represents 67 Times drivers. Officials from the local and Penske plan to meet for the first time Thursday, Jan. 24. "There's a lot we need to know," Warren says.
A showdown with the Teamsters could make this a long spring for Times negotiators. The paper recently told the Guild, which represents about 600 Times workers and another 140 newsroom employees at the P-I, that it plans to cut 14 union circulation jobs, part of an overall plan to eliminate 86 jobs through layoff and attrition. The Guild hasn't received any notice that the Times plans to cut news or advertising positions, says the Guild's Seattle administrative officer, Elizabethe Brown, but the Guild's contract with the Times expires July 21, and bargaining on a new contract is scheduled to start in May. Brown says the union has lost about 10 percent of Times and P-I membership through attrition at the papers in recent years and is in the second year of a wage freeze at the Times.
"It's been hard on our people," Brown says. The Guild will seek to unfreeze wages when contract negotiations begin in May, she says. "They're trying to make the operation smaller, and that will free up money for wage increases," says Brown.
Blethen laid out the Times' financial crunch in a stark memo to the paper's employees Dec. 27. The Seattle Times will lose a total of about $33 million on its print operation for 2007 and 2008, he estimated, and is seeking to cut expenses by $27 million.
Times spokesperson Jill Mackie says a number of other newspapers have taken similar steps toward outsourcing some or all of their logistics and maintenance work, including papers in Kansas City, Indianapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, and Florida. The paper chose Penske, she says, because it has contracts with the Teamsters and agreed to fill more than half the outsourced jobs with Times truckers.
Both the Times and Teamsters could simply be engaged in some early-round bluffing. Molinero says his union has dealt with outsourcing proposals before. "The name of the game is money," he says. "If they need relief we're willing to talk with them, but not about outsourcing."
Mackie says that while the Times has signed a letter of intent with Penske, nothing is final. "We will listen to what the Teamsters have to say," she says.
Like what you just read? Support high quality local journalism by becoming a member of Crosscut.com today!
Comments:
Posted Wed, Jan 23, 1:02 p.m. inappropriate
Good News: Read all newspapers on-line. Fewer teamster members is a good thing.
Posted Wed, Jan 23, 4:34 p.m. inappropriate
How many managers will be laid off?: It always disturbes me to read about employees being laid off.
How many Times managers will be laid off? That question is rarely asked. We all know the answer, none.
The question should be asked anyway.
Posted Wed, Jan 23, 5:47 p.m. inappropriate
RE: How many managers will be laid off?: In general, people become managers because they are considered your most valuable, competent employees (note my use of the word "considered"; no need for snarky replies). When there are cutbacks you try to keep such people, perhaps shifting them to other roles.
The people who are laid off are (again, in general) the most expendable.
Posted Wed, Jan 23, 11:57 p.m. inappropriate
Albatross print news is hurting everywhere and will continue to hurt...: Relentless trends:
- Online news readership keeps going up.
- Online news content continues to increase in quantity and quality (including all print plus extended content including TV and photo galleries)
- Online news is increasingly pervasive: readers now get news on flat screens in restaurants and banks, and online news is delivered on cell phones. Plus, all local content is available on the internet while traveling. And many big sites (e.g., Yahoo, Google, MSN) are news aggregators.
- Advertising continues to gut the venerable printed classified ad business. This has been an enormous revenue hit.
- Printed news either goes big (national) or goes local. Large metro papers that try to serve huge communities such as the Seattle Times, the LA Times, the now defunct KC Journal, etc., are caught in-between the NY Times, the Wall St. Jrnl, and USA Today at the national end, and local weekly papers that concentrate on a more focused local audience.
- Newspaper reading is a boomer habit, but one that post-boomers substitute with online browsing and reading. So the problem here is not cyclical, but evolutionary.
- Even newsprint will become obsolete, I'd guess within 25 years or so. New flexible screens will be developed allowing the newspaper to be electronically delivered, but still read as a newspaper. In 10 yrs, reading a newspaper at a large screen, touch screen desk may be common.
- Even as online news is increasingly eating away at print, advances in printing technologies have created considerable competition for newspapers in reading in general. Many more niche papers and newsletters (and blogs and email newsletters) now compete with the content of the Seattle Times.
- The print newspaper has lost any monopoly it may once have had on being the provider of the latest sports scores or stock prices.
The only good choice left for the Times or any other major metro daily is to manage a dual-media news enterprise with web content and a printed paper that share content. To differentiate vs smaller papers, larger papers must add more content and add more video (often by partnering with TV stations or by turning reporters into video reporters who also do blogs, take photos, spin plates on sticks, juggle bowling balls, all, while humming on a kazoo).
I'd like to say "Will the last person leaving the Times, please turn out the lights?," but eventually the Seattle Times will get the balance right, and continue to do well. But they'll have to emphasize quality content and stay (or get to) the leading edge of news technology. Outsourcing trucking of papers is a step in the right direction. Vertical integration of the print enterprise is no longer as important as it once was, and with shrinking print readership, the future--in-house-was going to be more layoffs and more acrimony, whereas an outsourced trucker can scale the work force to a particular customer, without having to make layoffs.
The future of the P.I. vis-a-vis the Times is interesting: I think they have a lot of unique content that they can highlight to differentiate themselves. Ultimately, they need to get bigger and invest more in content and quality. Quality and quantity will be the great differentiators. That's why the NY Times and Wall St Journal are so successful both in print and online. The same will be true at the metro level.
In a lot of ways, the printed paper is an albatross around the neck of each paper. Sometimes its better to cook the albatross before it starts to go bad and stink up the place. The Times is carving up the trucking piece of the albatross right now. (Who needs albatross feet anyway?)
Posted Mon, Jan 28, 10:14 a.m. inappropriate
Reply to bigyaz --- Managers: I have to disagree with you regarding your position on managers. From my 33 year experience in the professional world, 50% of mangers are deadwood just like you imply about those being laid off. My last manager could not do my job physically, and she did not know how to do it mentally. Her job was to look for fault, and expose others faults (not mine, she would not take me on) while covering up her own faults.
As a result a 110 year old Seattle company is on it's knees. She was weak mentally and physically, not the type I would want on my team. She was a yes person, not a idea person..... She was management.... it does not appear the Times made a good choice.