While union battles at Amazon and Starbucks may make the news, the labor struggle within America’s newsrooms is often ignored by the corporate news media. The issues of low wages, job insecurity and long hours strike too close to home and those mass media gatekeepers don’t want their workers to get any radical ideas about organizing.
Better to keep the notion that unions only belong at a retail location, a factory, on the railroad or in a warehouse and not on a hot TV news set.
A case in point would be the campaign being waged by journalists with the CWA’s NewsGuild at more than 50 newspapers owned by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, to get management to negotiate in good faith after years of resistance and obfuscation.
Gannett’s Wall Street predatory business model has been to assume over a billion dollars in debt to buy up local newspapers, shrink their newsrooms, then mine their physical assets like their real estate, all while paying out millions of dollars to their CEO and hundreds of millions in debt payments.
And when their business model faltered, the C-Suite antidote was to float talk of a $100 million stock buyback, which satiated the wolves of Wall Street for a while until the next round of bad news. In between SEC filings, Gannett squanders a small fortune on an army of anti-union lawyers that quarterback the company’s union busting tactics that land it in front of the National Labor Relations Board where it has several pending cases.
Gannett has...
The agency of BLACKPINK member Jisoo has clarified that allegations of sexual harassment involving her elder brother are "completely unrelated to the artist (Jisoo)." On the 20th, Attorney Eun Hyu...