NEW YORK – The New York Times Co. said Wednesday it is cutting 190 jobs at its flagship newspaper, The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The cuts represent about 1.5 percent of the company’s total work force.
About two-thirds of the job cuts will occur at the Times, with less than two dozen coming from the newsroom. The newsroom jobs will be eliminated through a voluntary program, while the others will be a mix of voluntary and involuntary job cuts.
Toby Usnik, a company spokesman, called the cuts “part of an ongoing effort to streamline our operations and lower costs. It’s partly a reflection of the advertising climate, which has been difficult over the past couple of years.”
Wow… Ironic the Times should be doing this…
Here’s the New York Times on May 4, discussing why Wal-Mart should raise its pay scales for employees (note I didn’t say if it should, but that it should). It even offers financial advice:
Many of those assailing Wal-Mart argue that the company can, and should, pay its workers at least $2 more an hour and add $1 or $2 an hour beyond that to improve its health benefits. A Harvard Business School study found that Wal-Mart paid $3,500 a year for each employee for health care, while the typical American corporation paid $5,600.
If Wal-Mart spent $3.50 an hour more for wages and benefits of its full-time employees, that would cost the company about $6.5 billion a year. At less than 3 percent of its sales in the United States, critics say, Wal-Mart could absorb these costs by slightly raising its prices or accepting somewhat lower profits.
But company executives dismiss such proposals, saying they would largely wipe out Wal-Mart’s profit or its price advantage over competitors. Wal-Mart had a profit margin on sales last year around 3.5 percent. If “we raised prices substantially to fund above-market wages, as some critics urge,” the company argued in a recent two-page ad in The New York Review of Books, “we’d betray our commitment to tens of millions of customers, many of whom struggle to make ends meet.”
So Wal-Mart, who doesn’t downsize, is meant to pay its people more so they can live. But the Times can outright fire people, 190 of them, without consequence. It’s astonishing what the Times can get away with, isn’t it? It has to be the best example of liberal hypocrisy, next to the Newsweek story, that I’ve seen in ages!