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Le Journal Lockout: Convergence Conquers Workers
Owner Quebecor crushed labour ruthlessly, even though its newspapers are earning lots of profit.
Le Journal workers on picket line last year.
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Sadness and relief after locked-out Montreal newspaper workers accept contract
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Why Big Media Is Failing
News empires pursued ever bigger profits, not the public good.
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Why Media Is a Big Election Issue
Canada is about to remake the way you get your information.
The seemingly interminable labor dispute at Le Journal de Montréal finally ended last week after 763 days when workers voted to accept terms of surrender offered by the newspaper's owner, Quebecor Media. And a surrender it was, as about 75 per cent of the 253 workers who were locked out in early 2009 will lose their jobs. It wasn't the longest labor dispute in Canadian media history, however, as some news outlets reported. A strike at the Castlegar Sun that started in 1999 went on for more than five years.
How ironic that Le Journal got its start in 1964 as a result of a strike at La Presse, which was then the dominant French-language daily in Montreal. Pierre Péladeau, who owned several neighborhood weeklies, took advantage of the strike to start a new daily. Through a young labor lawyer named Brian Mulroney, he offered generous terms to the unions in order to keep labor peace. His tabloid, which focused on sports and crime, took the market lead from La Presse after the conservative broadsheet resumed publishing.
Quebecor is now run by Péladeau's son Pierre Karl, who was reportedly so left-wing as a student at L'Université du Québec à Montréal that he distributed leaflets for the Communist party and even changed the spelling of his middle name in honor of his idol Karl Marx. That all changed once he began to climb Quebecor's corporate structure.
The sorry outcome is a cautionary tale of the perils of media convergence. Quebecor locked out Le Journal workers after demanding contract concessions that included lengthening the work week by 25 per cent without additional pay, reducing benefits by 20 per cent, laying off 75 staff, and introducing an "unlimited convergence plan." It required newsroom staff to produce content for all Quebecor media, including its Canoe (Canadian Online Explorer) websites and its television outlets.
The company was able to continue publishing from behind a picket line for more more than two years using only management personnel, because it owns so many other media outlets in Quebec and across Canada, including the country's largest chain of daily newspapers. It could repurpose the content of those outlets and print it in Le Journal de Montréal to keep it publishing. It skirted Quebec's anti-strikebreaking laws by exploiting a loophole that allowed it to create a news agency to provide this content to Le Journal. This created what some called "the perfect lockout" and resulted in a call for Quebec's labor laws to be strengthened.
Even more disturbing is the power that convergence now allows publishers over public perceptions. Quebecor is a hugely profitable multimedia corporation, racking up record revenues and earnings every year, despite the recent recession. Its 2010 financial figures won't be released for another month or so, but its third quarter report showed that revenues were up 4.9 per cent and earnings rose 9.4 per cent over the first nine months of last year. As usual through last Sept. 30, Quebecor was keeping in profit one of every three dollars of revenue it took in.
Quebecor Media: Year/Revenue/Earnings/Profit (millions)
2006: 2,998 / 788 / 26.3 per cent
2007: 3,365 / 949 / 28.2 per cent
2008: 3,730 /1,121 / 30.0 per cent
2009: 3,781 /1,276/ 33.7 per cent
Yet somehow, newspapers have managed to portray themselves as just hanging on financially due to the recent recession. The fact is that newspapers are still some of the most profitable enterprises going. That seems to be a mystery even to some who should know better, judging by this account of the lockout's end:
"It's just a sad commentary on what's going on with the newspaper business," said Linda Kay, chair of Concordia University's journalism department. "I think we're going through cataclysmic times in the industry. Even for the 62 who do go back to work, it's such an uncertain future."
Here, for the record, are the earnings and profit figures for Quebecor's newspaper division, which is the largest in Canada and includes the Sun Media chain and Osprey Newspapers.
Quebecor Media newspapers: Year/Revenue/Earnings/Profit (millions)
2006: 928 /207 / 22.3 per cent
2007: 1,028 /226 / 22.0 per cent
2008: 1,181 /227 / 19.2 per cent
2009: 1,029 /199 / 19.3 per cent ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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4
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Dukeboy
1 year ago
FOX North
And these are the same buddies of Harper and his former Director of Communications, Kory Tennecyke tried to get the law changed that would allow dishonesty and lies to be part of the so called truth disseminated to the people and still be legal. Wiser heads shot the proposal down!!
Lolo Fleet
1 year ago
ROE and ROA
Reporting revenues and net profit is all fine and dandy, but does not provide the key information needed to understand the financial health of the company. More useful is return on assets and return on equity. ROA is the income divided by total assets. ROE is income divided by net equity. Equity is how much the company has invested after subtracting what they owe. Quebecor has had two very good years, return on equity for 2009 and 2008 is 27% and 28%. ROA is 12% and 4.8%. Very healthy returns, but a marked contrast to previous years. This was a company in trouble, the question is will the company be able to remain profitable. The company is highly leveraged, any hike in interest rates will dramatically reduce income.
marcedge
1 year ago
profit measures
The question of what is an appropriate profit measure goes back to the 1970 Davey report on Mass Media. From p. 230 of my book Asper Nation:
"The profit measure preferred by Davey’s senators was “return on equity,” which compared earnings — before or after taxes — to the market value of a company. Another quite different profit measure was preferred by companies, which they used to publicly report their earnings. “Return on revenue” instead counted how much they ended up keeping of every dollar they took in. It usually resulted in a figure several percentage points lower than after-tax return on equity. At Canadian newspapers from 1958–67, for example, return
on revenue ranged between 11.8 percent and 15.6 percent."
See also p. 236 on profit figures contained in the 2003 Senate report on News Media:
"The figures were thus confined to return on revenue and not the return on equity yardstick favoured by Davey’s committee. They showed, however, that media companies
were still extremely lucrative. Owning newspapers was even more profitable than in Davey’s day. Radio profits were about the
same, and television’s were lower. In 2005, return on revenue for the major newspaper chains varied from 17–24 percent, with CanWest coming in at 20.7 percent.42 In radio, return on revenue ranged from
18.5–22.7 percent between 1999 and 2003, and in television from 13.6–18.6 percent"
Find the book at:
http://www.marcedge.com/Asper_Nation_3W.pdf
TYRONE
1 year ago
Disparity in laws should be more carefully evaluated before . .
. . . are passed.
I have only one reaction to the above article and the following comments: Argh!
Laws, that have loopholes are not laws but regulations to allow for theft - theft human of decency, personal freedom, carde blanche to government to do ANYTHING they want without regard to all the people who have put them there in the first place.
They are there to govern and to protect the people from predatory practices, but it appears, they are now the proverbial 'foxes in the henhouses'!
I take issue with the direction of the former comments not of what they say, but because they do not address the deeper issues troubling todays societies i.e. CONTROL by unseen forces!
Control is achieved by first of all dumbing down the population, ignoring the few that are left sounding the alarm and lastly giving away sovereignty so that the populace has no more recourse to the criminal machinations of our so called representatives in government, who have long ago stopped caring about the opinions of their costituents.