The 1000-strong Boston Globe employees union is now being backed by labour unions and local labour in their protest against outsourcing of jobs to India by the New York Times Company. The New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, had recently announced the elimination of over 120 jobs at the newspaper. Of these, 55 jobs in advertising and finance would be outsourced to India.
The job cuts came less than a month after Boston Newspaper Guild members signed a four-year contract containing no guaranteed wage increases and significantly reduced employee healthcare payments. The latest protest came on a day when the Boston Globe had previously scheduled a business symposium titled, ‘How to attract and keep good workers.’
“The hypocrisy of the New York Times Company is staggering,” said Dan Totten, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild. “We are here today to call for a stop to the slash and burn policies of this absentee landlord.”
“Despite employees’ good-faith approval less than two months ago of a four-year contract containing difficult wage freezes and in increases in healthcare costs, Boston Globe employees are now faced with the indignity and outrage of seeing their jobs shipped overseas,” said Totten.
The outsourcing of Boston Globe jobs to India fits a systematic pattern of divestment in the Globe by the New York Times Company, Totten said, noting that the Boston Globe has eliminated more than 200 jobs since 2005.
Even the Boston City Council last month passed a resolution calling the move to outsource jobs at to India as “deplorable.” The resolution, by Council President Maureen E Feeney and Councilor Felix Arroyo, lend support to a protest by the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents editorial, advertising, and business office workers at the Globe, including those losing jobs to outsourcing.
“Our members recognise the challenges facing our industry, but we believe that the way to succeed in a difficult marketplace is to invest in the human resources of the Globe, the very people who have built this great newspaper into the great institution that it is today. The way forward must not be paved with outsourced workers and disappearing jobs,” Totten added.
These measures come on top of other cost-cutting moves, such as shutting all of the Boston Globe ‘s foreign news bureaus — a troubling sign of the Times Company’s disinterest in the Globe’s journalistic ambitions and the newspaper’s mission as a vital news source, he added.
