Tag Archives: labour

| Media

Ultimatum time at La Presse

On Thursday morning, La Presse editor Guy Crevier sent out a mass email to all employees saying in no uncertain terms that, unless the union agreed to $13 million in concessions, the newspaper would be shut down on Dec. 1.

Within minutes, the email was forwarded to other news outlets all over the place (including Fagstein), the first news stories appeared within two hours, and the union quickly organized a press conference to respond.

Stories with the basic facts are all over the place:

and, of course, La Presse itself.

The big question now becomes: Is this a bluff? There are reasons to think it might be, and reasons to think it might not.

It’s a bluff

  • They’re going to shut down a newspaper just before the Christmas advertising season, when newspapers are the most lucrative?
  • Aside from shutting down the Sunday edition, La Presse hasn’t made very serious efforts to reduce costs. It still has things like foreign bureaus that newspapers twice its size would consider luxuries. Normally newspaper shutdowns follow years of cutbacks of increasing severity.
  • This is a union negotiation tactic – and employers tend to exaggerate the dangers ahead when they’re in negotiations for a new contract.
  • La Presse and Cyberpresse are vital to other newspapers in the Gesca chain. Shutting them down would do huge damage to those papers as well.
  • Flagship papers like La Presse (and the National Post and Journal de Montréal) tend to have sentimental support from big media owners, even when they’re losing money.
  • The political fallout from such a decision would be enormous, especially in an environment like Quebec.

It’s not a bluff

  • Advertisers get really scared at stuff like this. They probably won’t buy ads for after Dec. 1 until they know the paper is still going to be around (and there won’t be a lockout).
  • Management has agreed to have a third party look at the paper’s financial situation, which will no doubt confirm that it’s losing money hand over fist.
  • Gesca isn’t stupid enough to try a bluff like this without following through.

Right now my gut feeling suggests that “it’s a bluff” is more likely.

But it’s not my job that’s on the line.

UPDATE: Patrick Lagacé doesn’t know what’s going on (just like I don’t know what’s going on at Canwest – being an employee of a media outlet gets you some inside information, but only on the small scale). Talks are on behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, locked-out Journal de Montréal workers (remember them?) are calling for Quebecor to release the Journal’s financial information like La Presse is doing.

| Media

Journal Lockout Digest: Protest? What protest?

As the lockout of Journal de Montréal employees celebrated its six-month anniversary, those employees took advantage of an open door on Wednesday and stormed the Journal’s offices (CP, Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, Metro), a place they’ve been forbidden by court order to enter since the lockout began in January. Though there was no outright violence (despite the somewhat staged photo as evidenced by the video above), and they left a few minutes later, it was a very tense, very dramatic few minutes.

And if you’re religiously tuned to the LCN 24-hour cable news network, you wouldn’t have seen a moment of it. While Radio-Canada’s RDI was all over the event, It seems the Quebecor-owned network gave only a brief mention of the incident on TVA’s evening news. There wasn’t even a video to attach to the story.

UPDATE (July 24): Richard Therrien has more in Le Soleil.

Meanwhile, Quebecor has responded by complaining to the court, arguing that the employees who stormed the building were in contempt of court by rather obviously violating a court order that said they couldn’t enter the building. Thankfully, Quebecor-owned enterprises are all over that part of the story (ot at least, copying the Canadian Press version online).

The anniversary has also prompted some big-picture discussion from the blogosphere, with one capitalist saying unions aren’t all bad, and another asking why the union doesn’t forgo Quebecor entirely and start their own newspaper.

UPDATE (July 27): A video originally attached to this post, which criticized Rue Frontenac for a misleading photo, has been taken down by YouTube after a copyright complaint from the photographer. The photos have also been removed from the Rue Frontenac article on the protest, without any correction.

In other news

| In the news, Montreal

Central Station is about to get very quiet

VIA Rail announced late Tuesday night that, because of an impending engineers strike set to begin Friday at noon, it has begun cancelling train departures. Like, all of them.

Read the rewritten press release story through your favourite corporate filter:

Note that of the above, only CBC provides a working direct link to VIA’s list of cancelled trains (PDF). Essentially, any train which does not reach its destination before the strike begins Friday at noon will either be cut short or cancelled entirely. These cancellations are happening whether or not there is actually a strike. All trains after Friday will be cancelled unless the strike is averted or ends.

Specifically, for trains in and out of Montreal, the following are the final departures that VIA is maintaining. Those booked for later trains can get full refunds or (for departures before noon only) use alternative transportation (buses) that VIA is setting up:

  • Montreal-Toronto: 6:30am Friday
  • Toronto-Montreal: All Friday departures cancelled
  • Montreal-Ottawa: All Friday departures cancelled
  • Ottawa-Montreal: 9:03am Friday
  • Montreal-Quebec: All Friday departures cancelled
  • Quebec-Montreal: 7:50am Friday
  • Montreal-Jonquière: Friday departure cancelled
  • Montreal-Senneterre: Friday departure cancelled
  • Montreal-Gaspé: Friday departure cancelled
  • Montreal-Halifax: Friday and Thursday departures cancelled
  • Halifax-Montreal: Friday departure cancelled

Note the cancellation of the Thursday evening departure from Montreal to Halifax, which would have arrived at its destination past the noon Friday deadline. Thursday’s train from Halifax to Montreal arrives Friday morning and would not be affected.

| Media

Journal Lockout Digest: He’s a scaaaaaaaaab!

It was spun as a victory at Rue Frontenac, but the union lost far more than it won in the latest round at the Commission des relations du travail.

In a decision issued Wednesday (PDF), commissioner André Bussière dismissed all but one of the complaints issued by the Syndicat des travailleurs de l’information du Journal de Montréal, which represents locked-out Journal de Montréal workers. The STIJM made numerous accusations about people and companies working as scabs for the Journal, mostly in roundabout ways.

Among the conclusions reached by the commission:

  • The setup of the Agence QMI wire service was not an illegal act. Stories from other Quebecor entities were assigned by them, and the Journal had no assigning ability over workers of other publications. The only communication between them (other than the stories themselves) were daily skedlines (lists of stories) that were sent from the news outlets to Agence QMI and then distributed to its members.
  • The revamping of websites for 24 Heures and 7jours were part of Quebecor’s business plan and not measures to bring in scabs.
  • The cartoonist YGreck, who has been providing editorial cartoons for the Journal de Québec, is not a scab even though his contract with the JdQ was changed so he would provide more general (less regional) cartoons on a daily basis to replace the Journal de Montréal’s Marc Beaudet. His orders came from the JdQ, not the JdM.
  • Joseph Facal, whose freelance column went from once a week to twice a week when the lockout started, is not a scab because the second column replaces that of other external freelancers who left the paper because they didn’t want to scab.
  • Freelancers who worked on special sections of the Journal were not scabs.

The one complaint that was upheld concerned Guy Bourgeois, who wrote the Défi diète column in the Journal. The complaint concerned the fact that he began conducting interviews in the 2009 version, which was different from previous versions and also violated the collective agreement. The commission agreed, and said the Journal can no longer make use of his services as an interviewer.

Notably, the decision used the Journal de Québec decision as a precedent, countering the Journal’s argument that he wasn’t a scab because he never entered the building.

It’s a silver lining in a decision that the union is not happy with. The STIJM has vowed to continue the fight.

In other news:

| Media

Journal Lockout Digest: FTQ traitors

It’s hard to argue that your employees should make huge concessions when you’re in the process of bidding for an eight-figure sports franchise. And yet, that’s exactly what Quebecor is doing.

But the Quebecor bid for the Canadiens took a new twist this week when it was discovered that it’s being supported by the Fonds de solidarité of the FTQ. The FTQ labour union.

Needless to say that’s raised a few eyebrows among the media, not to mention the folks at Rue Frontenac. The STIJM calls it immoral, Martin Leclerc is calling for heads to roll, Michel Van de Walle calls it treason, Serge Touchette is revolted and Beaudet takes a whack at the issue in cartoon form. There was even a protest, another protest at the Bell Centre, and an open letter to Jean Charest.

Aside from the union implications, the deal is also making some worried about what would happen to Canadiens games on RDS if Quebecor and its “king of convergence” at Planète Quebecor were to buy the team. The Gazette’s Pat Hickey calls it “a bit scary”, Mike Boone agrees and unions aren’t crazy about it either. There’s even a Facebook group to keep Quebecor from buying the team.

Back to the table, please

Remembering that there’s a labour conflict going on, labour minister David Whissell wants both sides to return to the negotiating table. Though he says he doesn’t take sides since the conflict is with a private corporation.

Inside the conflict

Radio-Canada’s Desautels has a piece about the Journal de Montréal conflict. The audio is online in Windows Media audio.

Défi Chicoutimi

25 of the Journal’s 253 locked-out workers have embarked on a bicycle trip from Montreal to Chicoutimi (via Quebec City) to express solidarity with their locked-out colleagues at Le Réveil. You can read about their departure, Day 1 and two reports about Day 2.

Those who couldn’t make it on bikes hit the golf course.

Bonne Fête

The Journal de Montréal is 45 years old. Not quite the birthday it expected. Thoughts from:

Rue Frontenac expands

Reinforcing the fact that they’re in this for the long haul, Rue Frontenac has added a new section, Détente, for weekend lifestyle features. It also has a special from Jean-Michel Nahas looking at the various candidates for mayor of Montreal.

TVA Publications likes this union thing

Rue Frontenac reports that ad salespeople at TVA Publications are looking to form a union. They’ve requested accreditation. TVA Publications, in addition to abusing freelancers, is mostly ununionized.

And…

Another pot shot at the Journal’s manque de rigueur…

Meanwhile, at the Journal de Québec

Remember that labour board decision that Quebecor said they’d appeal? They’re appealing it.

| Media

Canwest gets another break

Like tonight’s episode of House, the latest Canwest announcement is a repeat. That doesn’t stop CBC, Reuters, CP, Variety and, of course, Canwest itself from writing stories about it.

The next date for our calendars is June 30, when this recapitalization plan will have to be figured out (or another deadline agreed on).

Meanwhile, my employer’s employer is reportedly looking to save $20 million in labour costs through union concessions. It has sent letters to unions but says it isn’t a done deal that they’re officially making such requests. If they were, it would include managers like Dennis Skulsky (who is being given an honorary degree, by the way), but not Leonard Asper. Still, the unions aren’t impressed.

The Gazette’s union, the Montreal Newspaper Guild, says it “has received no communication of any kind, verbal or written, from Canwest or Gazette management requesting us to consider any salary or other concessions in our contractual relationship in any of our units.”

The Gazette’s editorial and reader sales departments have been without a contract since June 2008.

| Media

Journal Lockout Digest: Canoe promos are ads, arbitrator rules

You know how the Journal always has little boxes pointing you to Canoe.ca? For Richard Martineau’s blog, or photo galleries, forums, or various other Quebecor cross-platform stuff? A grievance from the union that dates from before the lockout (in fact, dates so far back it mentions Canoe blogs from Patrick Lagacé and Dominic Arpin that no longer exist) has finally been decided on. The ruling from arbitrator Diane Sabourin (PDF) says that these promos in editorial space were promotional material, which violates the collective agreement’s clauses preventing the mixing of advertising and editorial content.

This case is actually somewhat complicated because of the Journal’s union contract. The contract prevents the Journal from setting up a website without union approval, so instead Journal stories have been published on canoe.ca. The Journal has been pushing the limits of this ability by pointing to columnists’ blogs and other material on Canoe. Here, it was determined that the employer crossed the line. Either the contract will have to be changed or such promotions will have to be done in advertising space.

The union, of course, is celebrating.

QUINZE. TONNES.

Free trip to Switzerland

Rue Frontenac’s Jean-Philippe Pineault has been “invited” on a trip to Switzerland sponsored by the Swiss tourism bureau. Apparently there are no ethical issues involved here.

In brief

Synergie multi-plateforme globale intégrée de toute


Christian Vanasse’s take on PKP during what was otherwise a fairly uninteresting AJIQ awards ceremony.

And at Le Réveil…

| Media

RRJ explores MédiaMatinQuébec

MédiaMatinQuébec's final issue: August 8, 2008

MédiaMatinQuébec's final issue: August 8, 2008

The spring issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism has an article by Carolyn Morris about the labour conflict at the Journal de Québec, and the MédiaMatinQuébec free daily put out by stiking and locked-out workers 317 times over 15 months (No. 317 is shown above).

Of interest to those who have read everything I’ve written about the conflict is a bit of back story about how the paper began, including the lengths union leaders had to go through to make sure word of their project didn’t get to their employer.

Sadly, when the labour conflict ended, the website was shut down, taking all the paper’s archives with it. The Wayback Machine has managed to store some web pages, mostly from the fall of 2007, and eight PDF versions of the printed paper, including a 16-page special edition devoted entirely to the sudden death of Quebec City Mayor Andrée Boucher.

| Media

Journal Weekly Digest: No protests for you!

Locked-out workers will no longer be allowed to picket the entrance to the Journal de Montréal office

Locked-out workers will no longer be allowed to picket the entrance to the Journal de Montréal office

The STIJM, representing locked-out Journal de Montréal workers, has been slapped with a temporary injunction limiting their picketing activities after recent events. They include:

The STIJM has a copy of the injunction (PDF) on its website. This is a temporary injunction, which means there will be another hearing about it. The way I read it, it doesn’t prevent them from protesting near properties owned by Quebecor or advertisers, merely from protesting on those properties. The “harassment” clauses, however, could be interpreted broadly enough to be worrisome to their rights to freedom of expression.

As for the other legal proceeding, about whether the Journal is using scab labour, they’re back in court on Friday. The CSN is calling on the government to have more inspectors to ensure businesses don’t use scab labour (telecommuting or otherwise) during conflicts.

In other news

| Media

Synergy at Sun Media

In an effort to cut costs, Sun Media is combining resources at its small Ontario dailies (which formed the Osprey Media chain that is now part of Quebecor). It’s being described as “synergy”, but it basically means replacing local jobs with fewer, lesser-paid jobs at larger production centres.

Among the changes:

In each case, jobs that were considered technical rather than editorial in nature are being replaced by a centralized operation that can be more efficient and work with fewer people. But the worry is that the people doing these jobs now have no connection to the papers and don’t care about the quality of what they put out. The fact that union jobs are replaced by non-union jobs with less pay and no benefits only makes that problem worse.

It’s also touching aspects of editorial too. As the Observer article points out, the papers are taking advantage of “synergy” by running national columns rather than local ones wherever possible. The Sun and Osprey chains are even copying whole pages (taking advantage of their similar layouts) from each other, and outsourcing layout work to a centralized location (which is how the Journal de Montréal is still functioning despite a lockout of 253 workers).

If this sounds familiar, a similar strategy is at the centre of stalled contract talks between my union and Canwest, which has centralized its customer service call centre, is centralizing some layout and copy editing work, and started printing standardized business pages in its major dailies.

I think some centralization (even of editorial work) makes sense, and I understand the need of these companies to reduce costs, but there’s a fine line between outsourcing a technical job to a company that specializes in that work and removing parts of what give local papers their identity, which go beyond just what names appear in the bylines and what you get in the police blotter.

In the end, it will be the subscribers who decide whether or not any cut goes too far.

| Media, Video

Journal Weekly Digest: An inconvenient truthing


Journal retro from 1994 thanks to ladyjaye27

Hi, remember us?

The STIJM, the union representing Journal de Montréal workers, was busy this week. First they crashed a lecture given by freelance columnist Joseph Facal, accusing the former PQ minister of being a scab in no uncertain terms (especially because he’s now writing two columns a week instead of one). Shockingly, Rue Frontenac was there, admitting that students were not amused, but mitigating that by saying some were on Facebook or browsing other uneducational websites.

Then on Wednesday, they were protesting outside the home of Quebecor CEO Pierre-Karl Péladeau, planting crosses to represent the careers of people PKP wants to fire. Once again, Rue Frontenac was there.

Meanwhile

And at don’t-forget-the-Saguenay, Quebecor says that coverage of the lockout at Le Réveil is biased against the company, with articles about the union encouraging boycotts of the paper. The company is even threatening to pull investments from the region if it feels it’s unwelcome.

| Media, Video

Journal Weekly Digest: Bring in the lawyers

We all knew it would happen eventually: the union has officially protested with the government that the Journal de Montréal is using scabs to replace 253 locked-out workers.

Specifically, it is asking for an injunction preventing the Journal from using content derived form the “Agence QMI” news service as well as other Quebecor publications and websites. It’s also asking that freelancers be restricted to providing the same amount of work as they did before the lockout, and not being given more space to replace locked-out columnists (they point specifically to Joseph Facal, who had written once a week but was upgraded to twice a week after the lockout started). And it complains about cartoonist YGreck, who hadn’t appeared in the Journal de Montréal before but has been used since the lockout.

The text of the complaint is available as a PDF on Rue Frontenac.

Exhibit A in the union’s argument is the decision reached in the Journal de Québec case which showed that much of what that paper did during its lockout was exploiting illegal scab labour, including those who worked for other Quebecor divisions, notably the Canoe website. The main difference in the Journal de Montréal case is that 24 Heures and ICI, where it’s taking much of its content from, existed long before the lockout and are legitimate publications. The question will be whether the work some of them are doing is being done primarily for the Journal’s benefit, in which case it would probably be ruled illegal.

Quebecor, of course, denies that they’re breaking any laws, just as they did with the Journal de Québec.

The government won’t step in, but the STIJM (and the FPJQ which supports them in this matter) still hope the case will be expedited.

Meanwhile…

And at Le Réveil, Quebecor’s other locked-out newspaper, they’re handing out stickers so people can show they’re boycotting the free weekly paper.

| Media

What’s amateur hockey analysis worth to you?

In November, The Gazette’s Canadiens blog Habs Inside/Out launched a guest-blogging section in which they brought in four contributors whose only real expertise was that they were hard-core Habs fans and loved to write about it. Three of the four, in fact, blog about the Habs on other blogs.

Called the Other Wing, it’s a place devoid of news but filled with amateur analysis of the Canadiens. (I use the term “amateur” in a technical sense of unpaid non-expert, not in any derogatory Christian-Bale-like way.) Though the opinions don’t come from with any background of insider knowledge, they’re still well read because hard core Habs fans are insatiable information wolves who will stop themselves in the middle of sex to find out who’s in nets for the next game. Just look at the number of comments on Mike Boone’s liveblogging and other posts from a fan’s perspective.

This week, one of the more active contributors to the Other Wing quit, posting a final post in which she said that she couldn’t continue writing for free for a for-profit media outlet and a website that is getting millions of hits a month:

I write here as an unpaid volunteer, and I’ve been having some serious second thoughts about what that means for others. … In an age when my professional colleagues in the newspaper business are struggling to keep their jobs and keep their papers viable, a site like Inside/Out could be an important source of work for them. Therefore, I believe it’s wrong for me to undermine the work they depend upon for their livelihoods by providing content for nothing.

The contributor, Leigh Anne Power, is herself a paid journalist. She’s co-host of the CBC Radio morning show in Central Newfoundland, which makes note of her Habs fandom. And she blogs (for free) about the Habs on her own blog.

The post prompted quite a bit of reaction, including some argument over whether such contributions should be paid or not. One commenter who agreed with her even wrote a blog post of his own blasting Canwest and Boone (who’s on staff at the Gazette and so paid for his work – though he does sacrifice quite a bit for this labour of love).

I won’t comment on the merits of the argument since the website is run by my employer, but I’ll point to some arguments on both sides of the equation, taken from the comments attached to the post (it’s worth a read to see other opinions on the subject).

Pro

As long as the gazette is profiting from this site they should pay their contributors. Anything less is exploitative.

FSLN

I don’t provide other media outlets with free content because that’s undermining my profession and preventing me from actually getting a paying job in the industry. Did you know that when you submit photos or comments to news sites, that outlet owns them at perpetuity and can reproduce them in more or less any shape or form… for ever… without EVER paying you? Even if your pic spearheads a national ad campaign that ends up bringing in a whole lot of money.

How can J.T. justify providing free content to the Gazette when her job might not be safe from people providing free content to her place of employment?

Naila Jinnah

Con

One thing you are perhaps undervaluing regarding providing free content to a media outlet like the Gazette is the exposure you receive. Blogs are a great way to express one’s opinions, build a portfolio, etc. But a blog that receives no traffic is not as useful as one that does. One way to build a reader base, as we have commonly seen here at this website, is to contribute a lot of thoughts and comments to a “mainstream” site while also linking to one’s own blog. Readers that like your comments will want to read more, especially if that contributor slowly begins to scale back their input to the mainstream site.

…

From the outset, the Other Wing was a spotlight for some of us fans to get a bigger spotlight for our comments based on whatever criteria the HI/O powers used, comments that were being made before in the general comments section prior to the creation of the Other Wing.

Chris

So what do you think? Is this journalism? Should these contributions be paid? Is Habs Inside/Out building a community or profiting off of it?

| Media

Journal Dailyish Digest: All your caisse are belong to us

(Video from Youssef Shoufan)

Locked-out Journal workers protested in front of the Caisse de dépôt et placement on Wednesday to take advantage of their announcement that they’d lost all our money. The Caisse has a financial interest in Quebecor (45%), which is the reason for the protest.

Speaking of that financial interest, Quebecor released quarterly report this week, and “Quebecor réduit sa perte” was the headline. The improvement was mostly because of Videotron, which increased its number of customers and managed to squeeze 10% more out of each one on average. Newspaper revenues dropped by 5.5%, though the report covers the period before the lockout at the Journal started.

Crank calls? Really?

La Presse reports that managers at the Journal got calls last week from people answering classified ads on Craigslist and Kijiji. Apparently their phone numbers were placed on fake ads put on the sites and managers got calls late at night. Those of you wondering when the union’s pressure tactics would descend into the cliché and juvenile, there you go.

Meanwhile