PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

by Paul McKie

When new owners buy the places where we work, feelings of hope and despair often mingle. Will things improve? Will I get laid off? Will the company expand? Will the company contract out?

And will the new owners treat the old employees better than the old owners did?

Sorry, but I can't help but think of that old Who song, Won't Get Fooled Again. You know, the one with the lyrics, "Meet the new boss - same as the old boss."

In the last year or so the majority of our membership has experienced major change due to significant ownership or management upheaval.

The Winnipeg Sun was the first to feel the brunt. Technically, the Sun has been under Quebecor ownership for many years. But when the Quebec-based media giant bought the Sun chain, the company put our Sun under THE Sun management team.

The result is an anti-union employer who cares more about running Calgary Sun stories than covering Winnipeg news events.

These bold new owners even object to who we bring to the negotiating table for Sun contract talks. At a recent Manitoba Labour Board hearing the Sun lawyer challenged the union's right to bring whoever it wanted to the bargaining table.

The Sun lawyer asked if we would bring someone to negotiate if they had sexually assaulted a son or daughter of the Sun management team. With owners like this, who needs fiction?

The Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal is feeling the pinch from its new owners, Horizon Publishing. After years of Thomson squeezing money out of this successful and profitable paper, Horizon believes a five-per-cent wage reduction is what the members in Thunder Bay need. What a striking proposal.

Members at the Winnipeg Free Press and the Brandon Sun haven't felt too much of a change -- good or bad -- in the few months Ron Stern and Bob Silver have owned the properties. There's more space in the Free Press. There are fewer employees at the Brandon Sun.

Old publisher, but new company president, Rudy Redekop closed Brandon's composing room in late February. (The handful of employees there were members of the Communication Workers of America).

Employee/employer relations were so bad under Thomson management at these papers that the union felt we should try and improve them. Local rep Adolph Setek and I met with Ron Stern in Vancouver in December. The meeting proved fruitful and since then we've been meeting regularly with Redekop. I have met with the publisher about once a week to discuss the excessive number of grievances.

The successes have been few. Only a slight number of grievances have been dealt away. The Company still uses standard industrial relations delay tactics to slow our attempts to resolve simple grievances. And the new grievances keep coming.

If nothing else, though, we now have a dialogue with the Company that we haven't had in a long time. We are trying to do something with that dialogue.

Time will soon tell whether the Company means what it says about a new relationship or whether Free Press/Brandon members will be singing Pete Townsend lyrics outside their buildings come autumn.

Solidarity! Paul McKie