Today was the first of two days during which Courant leaders try to instill a little fight into a battalion of brave workers who are rapidly becoming a squad. I haven’t heard much yet in the way of feedback.
There is another meeting of News staffers Tuesday, during which Editor Cliff Teutsch will lay out some of his plan for soldiering forward, uphill, while taking more and more casualties.
The folks I know are somewhere between freaked out and numb.
Meanwhile, just to add a note of joy to the proceedings, Tribune’s Head of Happiness Gerry Spector has sent around this little note, which, compared to some other possibilities, seems downright reasonable:
As you know, this year is off to a difficult start—not only for us, but for our peers in the media industry and for much of the business world as well. The advertising environment is very difficult. The economy is, at best, challenging. Across the country, businesses are cutting jobs, furloughing employees and freezing pay. Some of our major advertising clients, like General Motors, have laid off thousands of employees; others, like Circuit City, have been forced to liquidate assets and go out of business. Obviously, developments like these put significant downward pressure on our revenue.
As a company, we’re fighting back like never before—developing new products, operating extremely efficiently, and re-examining everything we do with an eye toward maximizing our cash flow. However, given current trends and the likelihood that it will take some time for the economy to recover, we have to do even more. For that reason, we’ve decided to implement a salary freeze for non-union employees in 2009. For those employees represented by a union, the issue will be addressed in collective bargaining.
I know this is difficult and I appreciate your understanding. Compensation is our largest expense and a salary freeze enables us to share the sacrifice. Hopefully, freezing salaries now will allow us to avert more drastic action in the future.
Thank you again for all your efforts.
Gerry
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Some joke, pay freezes. Seems most people are terrified whether they’ll have any pay at all not whether it will grow rapidly enough. That’s boss-think since bosses are not much laying themselves off so their solidarity with the casualties-crew is that they won’t have even MORE money than usual.
And reports of the Carver (what a name for this publisher) session is not all that rallying — “significant” staff reductions, cutting back hard on all expenses notably freelance and the like, possible furloughs, no change in the paper but only in the number of employees.
The better military analogies are found in things like “The Charge of the Light Brigade’ rather than that this gang of generals is leading the troops anywhere.