Tribune Publishing, which has already made two rounds of cuts among its non-unionized workforce, is running into big resistance as it tries to furlough journalists at its flagship Chicago Tribune.
In a Monday e-mail to its members, the Chicago Tribune Guild said it sees the hand of the newspaper giant’s biggest shareholder, hedge fund Alden Global Management, as the driving force behind the cuts.
“We are fighting Alden now,” the union said in the e-mail. “The economic downturn opened the door for them to to gut us despite our union protections.”
The union alleged that the company wants “to furlough half of the Tribune’s features and sports departments, plus an unspecified number of photographers for three straight months.”
Tribune, which owns the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant and the Orlando Sentinel among other papers, made two rounds of cuts to its non-union staffers last month. Initially, it cut pay from 2 percent to 10 percent on employees making more than $67,000 a year. Then on April 22, management came back and furloughed employees making $40,000 to $67,000 for one week per month.
At the time the first round of cuts was revealed, CEO Terry Jimenez said negotiations would commence with the News Guild unions in Chicago, Baltimore, Hartford and elsewhere.
That followed pre-coronavirus voluntary buyouts that took place in February.
The push for deeper cuts comes as the Tribune’s board appears ready to pay out another multimillion dollar dividend to its stockholders — unlike Gannett, which announced it was suspending its quarterly dividend on the day it announced pay cuts and furloughs.
Megan Crepeau, president of the Chicago Tribune Guild, said, “They have not canceled their quarterly shareholder dividend, and they’ve given no public indication whether they will. When we have asked about the dividend at the bargaining table in the process of negotiating the proposed cuts, the TribPub rep declines to engage with us.”
Newsrooms across the Tribune chain are worried because Alden, which already owns 32 percent of the stock, can start accumulating more shares when a standstill agreement expires on June 30. The speculation is that Alden will try to assume majority control by purchasing the stake held by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the second largest shareholder, with just under 25 percent of the stock.
Soon-Shiong, an LA-based health care billionaire, would seem to have diminishing interest in Tribune after his $500 million acquisition from Tribune of the LA Times and the San Diego Union Tribune in 2018. The LA News Guild, which represents both dailies, recently agreed to take 20 percent pay cuts in response to the coronavirus.
Elsewhere in the Tribune empire, the News Guild chapter in Baltimore is trying to team up with two local nonprofits to buy the paper: The nonprofits include the Abell Foundation, formed by the family that owned the Sun from 1837 until its sale to the old Times Mirror Company in 1986 to the Goldseeker Foundation.
