The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from the union representing (former) employees of TQS in Quebec City. The union had demanded that certain payments to emplpyees (severance pay and pay equity payments) be bumped to the head of the line before other creditors in the network’s bankruptcy dealings. A lower court rejected that demand, ruling that these payments should be dealt with on the same level as other creditors.
Other regular payments to employees (salary, vacation and other benefits) still had priority over creditors.
The union says it’s not giving up and will pursue other avenues to secure these payments for its members.
Hugo Dumas reveals this in a column which also says the union at TVA is complaining that content its journalists provide to the business network Canal Argent is being used in the Journal and they’re acting as de facto scabs.
The Syndicat des travailleurs de l’information du Journal de Montréal, in response to Quebecor’s response to their response to the lockout, has released a page of frequently asked questions on its Journal du Journal website.
The text makes the union’s case on some of the issues that have been circulating in the media:
It finally gives an explanation for the discrepancy in salary figures. As I suspected, the union is using base pay and the employer is using pay including overtime and other perks to reach $88,000. As the union points out, all overtime is approved by the employer, so journalists are making that extra $30,000 because the Journal didn’t want to hire more journalists to make up for a shortfall in staff.
It says the union is against Quebecor setting up the Journal website as part of the Canoe network and they want the Journal to have its own unique website
It explains the work week (30 hours plus breaks = 32 hours over four days) and says the union is willing to be flexible about that
It explains why workers are paid time and a half for vacation (it was the suggestion of the employer in a past contract)
There are also some items that might rub people the wrong way. It suggests that, because most of the workers the Journal wants to lay off in the classified department are female, the move is in some way anti-women. It also skirts around the issue of freelancers, and the fact that the union has done little to protect their interests and is not giving them strike pay.
Don’t feel too badly for the Journal managers who have to work hard to put out the paper. Dany Doucet has been sent to Florida to report on stuff there.
The mood in the negotiation of this contract was a huge departure from the previous one, which was negotiated after the CBC locked out its employees in 2005. They were out almost two months before they approved a contract to bring them back to work.
Locked-out workers picket outside the Journal de Montréal on Tuesday
Le Soleil did the rounds of the provincial parties and found they’re not about to anger journalists in the Journal de Montréal labour dispute. The Parti Québécois and Québec solidaire are, as you might expect, solidly behind the union. The Liberals and ADQ are more on the fence, but aren’t going out of their way to grant interviews to scabs.
In other Journal news today:
Stéphane Gendron (remember him? He used to be a small-town mayor or something) says he’ll continue writing for the Journal. His excuse is that he’s not a journalist and he loves hearing himself think too much to cut off that avenue of communication. He also thinks the union is evil.
ProjetJ has a piece about media convergence and how this conflict is all about Quebecor wanting Journal writers to promote the activities of other groups in the Quebecor Media empire.
At a general meeting Sunday afternoon of the Montreal Newspaper Guild, the union which represents Gazette employees, editorial and reader sales workers overwhelmingly rejected an offer from their employer for a new four-year contract.
The primary reason for the rejection was the employer’s demand to change language on union jurisdiction, which is a clause in the contract that says any work done for The Gazette must be done by members of its union. Management wanted to add language that would allow them to freely outsource jobs outside the province.
For Editorial (the unit I belong to), the vote results were 23 for, 95 against for an 80.5% rejection. For (what’s left of) Reader Sales and Service, the results were 4 votes for and 11 votes against for a 74% rejection.
In a separate meeting, the advertising bargaining unit approved a new fourtwo-year deal by a vote of 17-9 (65%). That unit had a weaker strike mandate (59%) and the vote was expected to be close.
Classified and business office workers are under a separate contract which is still in effect.
Early Saturday morning, management at the Journal de Montréal locked out 253 of its employees, mere minutes after an agreement with the union not to launch a labour dispute had ended. The lockout apparently came during the night, late enough that workers would still contribute work to the paper, but early enough that management could sneak in a note to readers about the labour disruption.
Both sides, naturally, blame the other for failing to negotiate. In reality, both sides have held firm on their demands since the contract expired on Dec. 31, and a lockout has been all but inevitable when both sides left the table this week.
Journal management plan to continue publishing during the lockout. The union is also planning a publication called Rue Frontenac, which right now just has a video of employees who are on the picket lines.
Rue Frontenac
In what has become the norm for journalist labour disruptions ever since the Journal de Québec’s incredibly successful MédiaMatinQuébec, the union launchedRueFrontenac.com, a website which they will use to continue working as journalists. Unlike MMQ, there are no plans for a print version of the paper. Right now the website contains a video with black-and-white pictures of locked-out employees. They’ve also started a Facebook group.
The Journal’s side
In its press release announcing the lockout (conveniently available in English), the Journal says the Syndicat des travailleurs de l’information du Journal de Montréal “has left the company no choice.” It says the lockout is needed because of the “urgency of the situation and the need for far-reaching changes to the Journal de Montréal’s business model”.
The company suggests there were pressure tactics that were disrupting the functioning of the newspaper, which is the first time I’ve ever heard of such a thing. Naturally, they don’t hint at what those tactics might be.
In its analysis of the current economic situation facing newspapers, it stresses the need for the Journal to have more flexibility with online operations (the reason it doesn’t have a real website is because of restrictive clauses in its union contract) and the need for employees to become more efficient. This, of course, means they want to lay off a bunch of them:
“…as it will be impossible to maintain all jobs at the paper, we have already made a commitment to offer employees who will have to leave the Journal generous separation packages accompanied by relocation support.”
The press release closes on the fact that the Journal’s workers enjoy some of the best salaries and working conditions in the Canadian media industry. This is true, and a source for much jealousy among fellow journalists like myself. But as Patrick Lagacé points out, the Journal makes no mention of not being profitable (suggesting that it is still very profitable). Any cost savings from payroll would go straight toward that bottom line.
In a two-page letter to readers in Saturday’s paper, editor Lyne Robitaille says they want to increase, not decrease, the number of journalists working for the Journal. She also says the union’s suggestion that the paper made $50 million in profits in 2008 is false, though she refuses to provide budget figures to corroborate that statement.
The union’s side
The STIJM’s press release focuses on how this lockout will affect families, which probably won’t elicit as much sympathy as they think considering (a) their working conditions are disgustingly generous and (b) they’re getting very generous strike pay (76% for two years) because of the massive fund that’s been built up since the Journal first started 45 years ago.
They declare outright that anyone who does their work (24 Heures employees, Journal de Québec employees, or those of mysterious fly-by-night news agencies) are scabs, and they call on advertisers and readers to boycott the paper.
The union says it wants the Journal de Montréal to start a website, and all their contract demands is that management negotiate it with them (translation: the union has to approve any plan). They say they want a professional site, not a carbon-copy Canoe-branded dumping ground for articles and photos (like what they’ve done with the Journal de Québec).
The issues
Most of the points of dispute are the result of management demands for changes to the existing contract that the union has refused to consider. They include:
Increasing the work week from 30 hours (4 days) to 37.5 hours (5 days), with no extra pay
Laying off 75 employees
25% pay cut for classified employees
20% reduction in benefits for all
Clauses that would give new hires fewer rights than existing employees
Flexibility to reassign workers to do multimedia work for the website
How this will end
This conflict could easily last for years. The Journal has plenty of sources from which it can draw “content”: The Journal de Québec (ironically), 24 Heures (where they just hired a bunch of people), Canoë, the Sun Media chain, and perhaps even TVA and LCN.
Meanwhile, the union has a vast strike fund, as this is the first labour disruption to hit the paper since its launch 45 years ago (part of the reason for that is management concession to union demands, which is why their contracts are so generous).
The Journal de Québec lockout lasted 15 months before an agreement was reached. And the two sides there were closer together than they are in Montreal.
Long labour conflicts tend to end when the union’s finances have run out, employees are demoralized, and exhausted management throw them a bone with a sweetened offer. Both sides make concessions, but the union side will make more.
Expect an end similar to what happened at the Journal de Québec. The union will agree to a longer work week, though at a salary cut much less than what Quebecor is demanding. Multimedia flexibility will be granted and the Journal will finally launch a website (though it will be of poor quality like the JdQ’s). And the Journal will gain the right to make layoffs, but with enhanced severage packages. These are all just gut feelings of mine, so take these predictions with a grain of salt.
Hear ye hear ye
One thing that might shorten this time period is the courts. A huge decision was handed down last month that decreed much of the work used for the Journal de Québec was scab labour. Though Quebecor is appealing that ruling, it severely restricts their options, No mysterious come-from-nowhere press agencies can be used to fill space, and reporters from other Quebecor-owned media can’t be assigned to do work for the primary benefit of the Journal.
There will almost certainly be disputes in court over this. If the STIJM can knock down enough of the Journal’s options, it may force them to stop publication and move fast on a new offer. If the STIJM loses enough cases (which is unlikely in a province with such strong pro-union values), their situation could become hopeless and they’d be made more willing to concede important points.
One thing is for sure, this won’t be solved over the weekend. So go ahead and cancel your subscriptions.
How this affects The Gazette
My coworkers are obviously paying a lot of attention to this development, both out of general curiosity and because we are set to vote on a management proposal for a new contract on Sunday. Hints of an impending lockout are spreading via rumour, but there’s no way to tell if this is a serious threat or not until after the vote.
The union executive is strongly encouraging employees to vote against the contract offer, as it affords little protection against the outsourcing of jobs to nonunionized Canwest employees.
I haven’t been updating much on Gazette contract negotiations, mainly because there hasn’t been much progress. Negotiations took a break for the holidays, then resumed with a conciliator, but the talks were placed under a gag order which prevented both sides from talking about what was discussed.
Nevertheless, sources close to the negotiations tell Fagstein in exclusive interviews that they really can’t talk about it and I should stop pestering them with questions.
The deal means four of the STM’s six unions have contracts. The two remaining ones are smaller professional unions representing about 400 employees in total. Presumably a disruption in either of those won’t affect regular service as severely.
Le Devoir this morning reports that concilitation talks at the Journal de Montréal (fun fact: next door to conciliation talks for The Gazette) have broken down and a lockout is now imminent. An agreement to keep labour peace expires on Friday, so employees could be out the door as early as this weekend.
The report breaks a media blackout imposed on both parties by the conciliator, so neither side can confirm whether this is true.
The gulf between both sides is huge. Quebecor is demanding just about every point in the contract be changed in its favour, a total of 233 points of dispute. The union is fighting this, arguing that even in this economic climate the newspaper is raking in millions of dollars in profit.
(UPDATE: News hit Twitter today that the lockout had already begun at the Journal, which would have totally showed how Twitter has scooped the mainstream media, if only it was true. Steve Proulx sets the record straight, and adds that the Journal has not changed its bargaining position at all)
Catherine Handfield looks at which freelance columnists will bolt and which will stay on if there’s a labour dispute at the Journal de Montréal. Jacques Demers and Martin Brodeur (who obviously don’t need the money) would be out.
Despite yesterday’s decision that said many of the people who stepped in at the Journal de Québec were scabs, the union representing workers at the Journal de Montréal held a news conference and issued a press release this morning saying that they expect to be locked out within days of their contract expiring on Dec. 31. They’re calling for a conciliator to step in and get negotiations started again.
This comes as negotiations at The Gazette are set to resume in January, and an arbitration hearing about outsourcing of editorial work is set to be heard in February. The prospect of two of Montreal’s four major daily newspapers being crippled by labour disruption is very real.
In a decision handed down Monday by the Commission des relations du travail, Quebecor Media and the Journal de Québec were found to have illegally used scab labour to replace locked-out and striking workers during the 15 months they were on the picket lines.
The decision is a huge victory not only for the Journal de Québec workers’ union, but for journalist and other unions in general. It sets a precedent for what qualifies as “workplace” in Quebec law, extending its definition beyond the physical building where offices are located.
For those unfamiliar with the story, editorial workers at the Journal were locked out in April 2007 after negotiations on a new contract were stalled over the issue of convergence (having journalists do multimedia jobs). Immediately, press workers went on strike, and the Journal was left with just over a dozen managers to put out a daily newspaper.
Shortly after the labour conflict began, we started hearing about news content providers that appeared out of nowhere: Keystone Press, a photography agency, and Agence Nomade, a wire service. In addition, reports that news conferences in Quebec City started seeing reporters from “Canoë”, which is Quebecor’s web portal and shares content with its newspapers.
The union complained that this was essentially scab work. The decision finally got resolved after the conflict ended, even though the issue had become moot by then (the Journal fought to get the issue dismissed after the labour conflict ended, but the union pushed to get a judgment).
The details
Among the findings in the judgment (50-page PDF) concerning the scab labour:
Keystone Press, dubbed a scab company by the union, tried unsuccessfully to pitch its freelance services to the newspaper until the day after the lockout, when it was contacted by the president of Sun Media. Up to that point, the photography company had no office in Quebec, but had three photographers in the region the next day, taking photos of news events. The Journal would ask Keystone to cover specific events, and would then have exclusivity over the photos for a 36-hour period. Keystone in turn signed agreements with its photographers (in English) which paid them a set rate per hour of work. The commission singled out Geneviève Larivière, Antoine Leclaire and Pierre Gauthier as scabs.
Ferron Communications, a PR company, was hired by the Journal to provide news articles. It hired two journalists, Bernard Plante and Dominic Salgado, to cover news for the Journal. This continued until about June when the Journal found this method of operation too expensive.
Canoë, Sun Media’s web portal, had no journalists in the Quebec City region before the labour conflict (for that matter, it didn’t have much of a news operation at all – it was an aggregator of Quebecor’s newspaper and TV content which it would throw online). A few weeks after the lockout began, they put out ads looking to hire journalists in the region on a temporary basis. The group of journalists inluded Plante and Salgado, as well as Geneviève Riel-Roberge, Hubert Lapointe, Marc-André Boivin, Reine May Crescence and Mélanie Tremblay.
In August 2007, all these journalists were told they were working not for Canoë, but for a company called Agence Nomade. This company, a wire service, was actually an idea by Quebecor CEO Pierre-Karl Péladeau. It was ostensibly setup by Sylvain Chamberland, one of PKP’s friends, to compete against Presse Canadienne (Canadian Press’s French equivalent). It offered its content exclusively to Quebecor Media (including TVA, 24 heures, Journal de Montréal, etc.). Because Nomade retained no rights to its content, Canoë and Quebecor could pretend it was theirs. Again, the Journal would “ask” that certain events be covered, and Nomade would “decide” what it would cover based on that. Journalists would file to Nomade, who would forward texts to Canoë and the Journal.
Despite these changes, the journalist scabs would always present themselves as being journalists for Canoë.
The journalists, who had to work exclusively for Nomade (and hence, Quebecor and hence, the Journal de Québec) as scabs on repeating short-term contracts got a salary equivalent to $40,000 a year for their troubles.
The issues
In the end, the judgment came down to three questions:
Were these journalists working for the Journal? The commission ruled that no, they were not. They weren’t being paid by the Journal, and were not taking orders directly from the Journal.
Was the Journal using the services of these workers to replace locked-out workers? The commission ruled that yes, the Journal was actively making use of these workers’ services to replace their own. They assigned stories and photos which were then filed directly to them for use in the newspaper. Though technically the scabs were working for Agence Nomade, which in turn worked for Quebecor Media, the work they were doing was mainly for the benefit of the Journal.
Were the journalists at the workplace of locked-out workers? This one was where the commission broke new ground. The idea of workplace wasn’t an issue in the days of factories with big pieces of equipment. You couldn’t work as a scab unless you were on the premises. But journalists with the Journal did most of their work outside the building, and so the commission ruled that wherever they did their work, either at the courthouse or at news conferences or at the National Assembly, these scabs were at their workplace.
What this means
Two unions are going to be very happy with this news: the union representing journalists at the Journal de Montréal (who will hold a press conference Tuesday to discuss its own contract negotiations as its current one expires Dec. 31) and the union representing journalists at The Gazette (their contract expired June 1 and they’re back at the negotiating table in January).
Had Quebecor won this case, it would have been a manual for other companies on how to get around Quebec’s liberal anti-scab laws. Have the journalists be freelancers, working for a separate company, and filing mainly for the website. But the commission threw a wrench in that setup, and that puts the unions in a much better bargaining position.
There’s still some room to maneuvre if someone wants to try this again. A lot of the focus was over the fact that the Journal asked for specific news events to be covered. Not to mention the fact that all of this was setup after the labour disruption started. Had those things been different, the decision might have been a little more murky.
But it’ll be much harder for a media company to get around a labour disruption in Quebec by outsourcing work to a third party. And that creates a huge shift in the balance of power away from newspaper owners and toward newspaper unions.
In case you’re interested, there are press releases from the union and from Sun Media.
