Happy holidays! Journal Sentinel puts the squeeze on its workers

The Journal Sentinel, in the spirit of the property tax freeze and the Whip Inflation Now campaign, is playing hardball with its newsroom union.

Reporter Graem Zielinski, an active Newspaper Guild member, explains the situation in a letter to the Poynter website of Jim Romenesko, a former Milwaukee reporter himself:

So, just in time to add a sprig of Dickensian joy to the holidays, the worker bees at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will be faced with an ugly choice, namely to accept a contract that features 1.5 percent pay raises for each of the next three years, as well as a boost from a "merit" pool.

Forgetting inflation and other economic reality, this "raise" will without question be swallowed up and much more by sharply rising health care costs. We will lose much ground. (The millions-dollar bonus paid our chairman would have more than made up for the gap of what management offered in raises and what our Newspaper Guild had hoped for, but he will need to buy indulgences.)

The fun of the matter is not just the sinful contract offer, which offends what my Catholic faith teaches me about the dignity of labor, but the way the offer was made: At the point of a gun.

The some 270 members of our bargaining unit must accept the offer by the end of the year or lose all hope of a year's worth of retroactive pay we'd be due, since we've been working during that time with a contract extension. This scenario was just presented to us just this week so there is no real hope of mobilizing against what was said in an off-the-record meeting to be the Journal Communications final offer. Our wings are clipped.

We vote next week. I hope our membership sends a strong message with a strong "no."

Here in Milwaukee, what used to be family newspapers bled into employee ownership and now we live in the dim twilight of quasi-public ownership and the black hand of Wall Street's lunatic profit demands. There is no talk, yet, of layoffs or the type of economic horror now faced by other newsrooms and news chains (and I do thank our union leadership for that and for everything else they've done). But in their clever maneuvering, the new breed of management coming to Brewtown has shown that soon we will live beneath the same lash.

Do we submit to what is presented as an inevitability? Or do we go down valiantly but stupidly? My thought is that these are false choices working in service to relentless appetite and the kind of ethic this Christmas season very explicitly rejects. "Open Your World," is the motto here and now we are open to the type of world the rest of newspapers have seen. Can't say I like it.

The Guild votes today.