by Sarah Phelan
Chronicle employees have remained silent about Hearst Corp.’s claims that it needs to make major cuts now, or it will sell or shutter the paper. Their silence is understandable: folks everywhere are afraid of losing their jobs in a major recession. And, as the California Media Workers Guild reports, talks with Chronicle management representatives continue, focusing on management’s latest response to the Guild’s proposals to minimize job losses through cost cuts and business-recovery initiatives.
The Guild previously reported that their negotiators had offered Chronicle management representatives, “a comprehensive package of proposals to cut costs, minimize layoffs, generate new revenues and speed the transition from newsprint to online communications,” but Chronicle management expressed doubts about whether the would be enough to avert deep job losses in the Guild’s ranks.
But while Chronicle workers remain mum, and Chronicle editor-at-large Phil Bronstein tries to take credit for this crisis, Denis Mosgofian, a past president of Local 4, which has represented pressmen in the Bay Area for 110 years, has shared his theory about what just happened.
Mosgofian, who has been in the printing trade since 1972 and with the Chronicle since 1987 until he retired in 2001, believes Hearst may be overstating just how bad its finances really are. He also doubts whether Hearst is sharing its books with the Chronicle in a way that would help the newspaper evaluate Hearst’s claims. Here’s what he said:
March 2, 2009
“The Hearst Corporation announced early last week that they would either get concessions from the unions at the San Francisco Chronicle and be able to cut costs or the Hearst Corporation would seek a buyer or shut the paper down.”
“This announcement comes at the midst of the recession/depression. It comes after the Chronicle has already shut down its Richmond and San Francisco production operations and just four months before closing its very large Union City production plant and outsourcing its production to a Canadian non-union printing company named Transcontinental, which has built a brand new production plant in Fremont, California, scheduled to begin production of the Chronicle on June 29, 2009.”