Thursday, January 8, 2009

One More Trend

One newspaper move that is becoming trendy of late is freezing salaries or salary/wage give-backs in order to reduce costs.
  • Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal, just announced a salary freeze. They also plan to negotiate with their unions to implement a similar freeze among members.
  • The Chicago Sun-Times is asking its unions for a 7 percent cut in members' salaries.

This puts newspaper folks in a bind. On the one hand, you want to keep your job. However, the only way to do that may be to surrender some of your salary, or accept a freeze in salary. Considering the alternative, which is no job at all, this may not be too hard to swallow. More newspapers may go this route, especially if they've cut staff to the bone.

Look out for other ways that effectively "reduce" salaries, including:

  • hike in health insurance costs
  • reduction or elimination of 401k contributions

Some newspapers deliver the newspaper free or at reduced cost to employees. You'll know you're really in trouble if you lose this benefit.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmmm...health insurance went up slightly this year, 401k contributions eliminated, no free paper (eEdition only).

Guess this means the Sentinel is in trouble.

Anonymous said...

Remember when the (now defunct) Washington Star went to a 4-day workweek to save money? It didn't help.

Anonymous said...

There is a lot the Sentinel can do to reduce costs, you can reduce staff and operate just fine if the correct staffers are selected. What I am saying is get rid of the Bozos that do nothing all damn day long. I can give Kelly a list if she wants....LOL