December 18, 2007

Reuters Guild members

meet Thomson workers

Reuters Guild members met informally with Thomson staffers in the United States recently to become better acquainted with the people who will soon be our colleagues. The exchanges of ideas and experiences occurred against the backdrop of a similar and larger Reuters-Thomson meeting in London. The key difference between the two is that Thomson editorial workers in Britain already belong to a union, the National Union of Journalists. In the United States, Thomson staffers have no such representation yet.

It has become clear from recent conversations between Reuters staffers and their Thomson counterparts, that the Thomson folks are understandably anxious about their fates after the merger of the two companies, probably sometime in the second quarter of 2008. From the Thomson workers’ perspective, things look dicey: they see this deal as a reverse takeover, with Thomson putting up the money and Reuters getting most of the control. They took little comfort from the roster of managers recently announced by the “integration” team. There are only four Thomson executives, compared with 18 from Reuters, on the recently announced Executive Committee and Operating Committee.

When this merger gets done, it’s going to be important for us to have Thomson workers folded into our Guild unit. We hope the leaders of the merged company – mostly Reuters managers – will recognize the value of having a truly integrated staff. Not all Thomson employees know about our culture of Guild representation. This is where every Reuters Guild member can get involved. All it takes is reaching out to the Thomson employees who cross your path in the course of your work to tell them about life at Reuters and the importance of having strong union representation.

Of course, strength comes with numbers. If you’ve never been active in the Guild, now is an exciting and critical time to start. If you’ve always been active, this is the time to use every bit of skill and experience you have to make sure Thomson’s workers join us.

Finally – some specifics on the merger

Reuters union representatives in the United States and Britain got some reassurance and a few numbers on the merger on Nov. 29 from Editor in Chief David Schlesinger and Global Head of HR Mark Sandham. Unlike previous conversations with these two, both Schlesinger and Sandham acknowledged the lack of information about the deal, due in part to regulations in Europe and the United States, and provided at least one tidbit of information: Reuters will bring about 2,400 editorial staff to the deal while Thomson AFX has 266. Schlesinger discounted the impact on staff represented by the Guild and the National Union of Journalists: “The maximum potential impact over three years is negligible … A lot of that will be additive.” Sandham added, “There is no intention that anyone would be less well off than they are today.”

Soothing words, but no real commitments at this point.

Web site news

If you’ve been reading Common Sense, you know we’re retooling the New York Guild Web site. You may not know that our colleagues at the NUJ have a Web site of their own on the Reuters intranet, and it’s a good one to add to your list of favorites: http://wwwss.ime.reuters.com/nuj.

Is Thomson paying too much?

The Wall Street Journal took aim at the Thomson-Reuters acquisition on December 4, under the headline “Thomson’s Costly Dream.”  Here’s how it started: “Information provider Thomson Corp. fulfilled a long-held dream when it agreed to purchase business-data and news company Reuters Group PLC in May. These aspirations have come with a cost – namely a sense it made the deal to buy Reuters at the height of the economic cycle fueling Reuters’s profit.”

The gist, after a thousand words or so, was that Thomson made a lousy deal.

Or not. Here are a couple of details from the end of the story:

“Even if Thomson paid too much, some investors say the deal still makes sense. Part of their rationale: Thomson’s financial-information division is relatively weak in Asia and Europe, Reuters’s strongest markets. Reuters would like to be bigger in North America, Thomson’s home market. Reuters also is better-positioned to weather any recession than last time …’’

The truth probably lies somewhere in the mushy middle. We’ll be watching.

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