STAR  BULLETIN  Unifor Local 87-M, SONG  

 

 

May 6, 2014

Guild filing grievances over digital job postings,

Page Editor layoffs

Union needs your help to campaign against

second-tier digital wages

Most Page Editors doing identical work as Team Editor peers

Your Guild officials continue to meet with the company over the many issues that flow from digital jobs in the newsroom, the latest Editorial and Circulation layoffs and a potential new voluntary early retirement (VSP) program. We’ll keep at these efforts – we’ve had many hours of meetings, most recently yesterday – and hope for progress. Having said that, we aren’t prepared to stand aside while our company creates second-tier jobs in the newsroom that threaten every one of us — and damages the Star’s precious brand of quality journalism. We will not stand by as the company unfairly targets some of our colleagues for layoff. With your active decision-making and endorsement along the way, we will be campaigning with every tool we can muster to convince the company to change course. We have much work to do on our own, including some steps we’re already taking: • Digital jobs: Lord knows we need to dramatically up our digital game. But this abrupt company introduction of something we’ve never negotiated — a separation of print and digital journalism, with second-tier wages for digital — is a direct assault on our contract, union seniority and every assumption we’ve been working under for a decade-plus. Until now, we’ve always been told the challenge is to evolve from print-only to multi-platform journalism. We’ve embraced that challenge, and still do. Here’s our position: A journalist is a journalist. We are all digital reporters. We are all digital editors. This is not Rogers or the Huffington Post. This is the Toronto Star. This is thestar.com. And we’re damn proud to work here.

 

 

The company has the right to introduce new jobs into the newsroom. We have the right to grieve the salary and classification of those proposed new jobs. We’ll be doing exactly that in grieving the digital jobs the company has posted. We don't need new editor or reporter designations to bring in new skills, if truly needed -- those job classifications already exist. Our biggest problem is the company attempt to put all but the digital reporter jobs in a separate department called torstar.com. This is a transparent bid to deny the rest of us our right, in the event of layoff, to bump into those new newsroom jobs. The company would be free to build a second-tier newsroom of much lower wages with immunity from the effects of layoffs. It’s a clear and present danger. Our fight is to prevent this. Our shared challenge here should not be to build up print and digital walls, but to knock them down. That’s our goal. • Layoffs: We’re also grieving the fact that a majority of the 11 fulltime Page Editors targeted for layoff do exactly the same work as colleagues who are Team Editors. On the photo desk, on the web desk, on the sports desk, editors sit side by side doing identical work, but are categorized differently. This isn’t fair. We’re grieving that most of the Page Editors targeted for layoff in July should not be considered Page Editors at all but Team Editors, just like their peers, and therefore should not be included in the layoff notice. We have a nightmare mix of both Team and Page Editors, a mess created by management in recent years without regard for actual job duties. Some of the 60 (!) Team Editors are actually Journalists in function, for example, either reporters or photographers, and have been for ages. We’ve long been pushing the company to clean this up. In recent months the company has posted and moved a number of these misplaced Page Editors up to Team Editor status, in effect reducing the potential layoff number. We applaud those changes. But the unfairness continues for most of the Page Editors now facing layoff, and we’ll be defending their unique interests. • Next steps: The annual Torstar general meeting is tomorrow. We’ll be taking advantage, with your assistance, of this opportunity to tell our company’s board of directors directly just how strongly we feel about what’s happening in our newsroom. We're booking space now for a Star unit meeting, hopefully early next week, where we can really focus on all this stuff. Whew! That’s a lot for one day. We have much to do, and we look forward to your ongoing support and active involvement. Remember: This is our paper too; our Atkinson Principles. In solidarity, Liz Marzari, Star unit chair Dan Smith, vice-chair