February 25, 2008

U.S., Europe, Canada

okay Thomson deal;

 What’s next for us?

 Some “inevitable” job losses

On Tuesday, February 19, the U.S. Justice Department, the European Commission and the Canadian Competition Bureau approved Thomson’s plan to acquire Reuters. That means the deal is going forward and is expected to be final sometime during the week of April 13. But we still know little about how the two companies will mesh together and more importantly, whether job losses are in store for Guild members.

In a teleconference hours after regulators cleared the deal, members of the Reuters Alliance – representatives of union workers at Thomson and Reuters in the United States, Canada and Britain, including Reuters Unit Chair Debby Zabarenko – had some basic questions for Global Editor in Chief David Schlesinger and London HR’s Mark Sandham: how’s it going to work? Who will stay and who will go? How many? When?

There were few solid answers.

The first practical steps of combining the two companies may add a little work for our technical members. The plan is to turn Reuters News on to all Thomson clients and get Thomson Analytics and Thomson News to the staff and clients of Reuters, which will mean getting the two companies connected. Management also wants to find savings in technology platforms, hardware and software after the merger, but did not elaborate.

In terms of real estate – remember, this was a key area where Reuters executives said uniting the two companies will produce promised cost cuts – Schlesinger said the combined  company will hang onto the two “signature” buildings each company now has in New York City: 3 Times Square and Thomson’s 195 Broadway.

Schlesinger repeated what Reuters has said before: senior management is where the obvious duplication is, and that’s where cuts will happen soon after the deal closes, along with jobs in Sales, Account Management, HR, Finance, Legal and Marketing.

No specifics on who or when

What about Guild members, and members of other unions in Reuters and Thomson? “It’s inevitable that there will be some job losses at some point,” Sandham said, though he gave no number and no date.

“People will be consulted in line with the legal requirements regarding any job losses,” Sandham said after some union representatives expressed concern that the new company would try to rush the job cuts. He and other execs have said repeatedly they plan to honor the Guild contract in the United States and they reiterated that during the teleconference.

The earliest that management might be able to put a number on job cuts is sometime in May, Schlesinger said, and then it will be “a matter of months” before this would be put in action. Schlesinger said there would be no “cataclysmic job losses” in Editorial, with “the total, absolutely possible duplication” of jobs worldwide at 260 – the current size of the Thomson Editorial staff. He repeated that the merged company’s Editorial staff will be larger than the current Reuters Editorial staff, but not as large as the two companies’ current Editorial staffs combined. The executives did not discuss the possibility of job cuts in non-Editorial areas.

Some union representatives were openly skeptical of management’s claim that they did not already know how many jobs would be cut. Also, the Guild cautioned the executives against trying to deny union coverage to some employees in the merged company by creating artificial corporate barriers between employees doing the same work.

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