March 16, 2007

 

Time Inc.: It’s a Terrible New Company

 

Old “golden handcuffs” traded for brass knuckles

 

The recent and ongoing negotiations have been extremely disillusioning for all attending on the Guild side, especially the long-timers who remember when Time Inc. was a wonderful place to work rather than the brutal, dispiriting entity it has become since the AOL takeover of 2001.

 

In the current negotiations, outside lawyer Jonathan Sulds relentlessly harps on one theme: You people at the Guild have to get into the twenty-first century and get used to the new business model of the Internet age.

 

Which century is it?

 

The Guild, however, sees the distant, ugly specter of the nineteenth century in the company’s endless list of givebacks and retrogressions – the age of the Robber Barons, the era before unions, a minimum wage, paid vacations and holidays, and insurance. Time Inc.’s ideal world is one of untrammeled company power and discretion, in which it gets everything it wants — and it wants everything! — without discussion or argument, without having to fight any countervailing power like the Newspaper Guild and the Time Inc. employees we represent.

 

Life at Time Inc. will be unrecognizable if the company gets its way in these negotiations. The proposed cuts in our compensation, benefits, and general welfare include almost every area of the contract and of our working life: guaranteed pay, overtime, severance pay, notice pay, sabbaticals, definitions of employment status, information to the Guild, temporary employees, supplementary employees, minimum pay scales, night-work bonus, holiday pay, Guild approval of holiday schedule, beeper pay, vacations, profit-sharing (currently being fought for in arbitration by the Guild), tuition reimbursement, out-of-town meal money, in-town meal allowance, taxi reimbursement, parental leave, retraining allowance for job-eliminated staffers, and, last but not least, the elimination of past practices, under which proposal all decades-long traditions and employment practices not enshrined in the contract would be wiped out with a single sentence.

 

 Whose company is it?

 

Look at that list! The complete details are too numerous to elaborate here, but it all spells trouble for all of us, Edit and Publishing, Guild and non-Guild, because everything that Time Inc. does to the Guild will be done to everyone else (and more! Ann Moore?). The publisher standardizes everything, and it’s in a high-speed race to the bottom. The publisher is in the process of wrecking the company under the cover of saving it; the twin gods are “stock price” and “cost savings.”

 

You must have a work force in order to put out magazines, and you must have a quality work force to put out quality magazines. The number of Guild-covered employees has gone from almost 2,000 in the late 1970s to less than 400 right now, a decrease of about 80%! The publisher is getting perilously near the point of not having enough employees to do the job. Management has told us that some departments are short-staffed; strangely, those departments have just had job eliminations.

 

As for quality, what journalist or support worker is going to want to work for a publisher that takes everything worthwhile away from its employees? The DUMBING DOWN AND Britney-ization of Time Inc. will continue, and the tradition of thoughtful, high-quality journalism will become a distant memory.

 

Employees here care deeply about the future of Time Inc. They want the company to survive as an institution and they want it to be a place where everything works very well. And they have a good idea of what works and what does not. So, of course, do the actual managers who work for the magazines. But, for the first time in the long history of Time Inc. contract negotiations, the company’s bargaining committee includes no actual Time Inc. managers.

 

What can you do about it?

 

If you’re Guild-covered and aren’t yet a member, join! Contact recently laid-off Guild Unit Chair and Membership Chair, now working for the Guild as a Local Representative, Alex Blanco at 212-522-4187, or Acting Unit Chair John Shostrom at 212-522-3965.

 

Also, come show your support for the Guild at the negotiations next week. The publisher has set an expiration date for the contract of March 22, so the two sides have meetings scheduled all day (and night, if necessary) from Monday, March 19, through Thursday, March 22, in the HR conference room on the seventh floor of the Time & Life building.

 

We’ll be there all day, every day, and it’s very helpful to have friendly faces at our backs. See you there. We’re all in this together!

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3/16/07