Strike

Negotiations today failed to bring an adequate resolution to the dispute, particularly with regard to the threat of compulsory redundancies.

We will be on strike on Thursday and Friday. We will have a picket line outside the offices of The Northern Echo and D&S Times and wil be holding a protest march through the centre of Darlington at lunchtime.

Come on down and show your support - or send an email to nujdarlington@hotmail.co.uk if you're farther afield.

Support across the nation

Newsquest's mantra is that pay is negotiated locally. But pay freezes have been imposed nationally, and lifting the pay freeze has also come nationally - with centres here, there and everywhere starting to get the same 2% pay offer coming through.

Here's what the National Union of Journalists has to say about Newsquest: http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=1852

Woolly Coates (No. 1)

FEELING down after the Christmas break? A touch gloomy now the dark days of winter are truly here? Perhaps it’s not the weather that’s to blame. Perhaps it’s the company’s “activity profits”. According to managing director David Coates in the latest edition of Griff – the official voice of Newsquest North-East – they don’t look good.

Hmmm . . . But just a minute. If our “activity profits” are down £100,000 on the previous December – that’s a drop of 67 per cent at a time when Government figures show the economy recovering – and “any further deterioration in our revenues is likely to result in the business making a loss”, then shouldn’t we be questioning the ability of the bloke who’s running the show?

How many photographers, reporters, sub-editors and graphic artists missed their targets in December? How many pages went out unfinished; how many stories unwritten; how many empty picture and graphic boxes appeared in the papers? Not a single one. Yet the managing director, who unlike the rest of us sets his own targets, is telling us his “activity profits” are down 67 per cent. And that’s his good news.

It’s no wonder there was a vote of no confidence in him. He’s making the wrong people redundant.

• Got any good material for future Woolly Coates stories? Email us at nujdarlington@hotmail.co.uk

Get in touch

Got a story to share, a link to let us know about? You can contact us by email at nujdarlington@hotmail.co.uk

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Follow us on Facebook

You can follow developments - and click your Like button to offer some support - on Facebook. Find us here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fair-pay-and-no-job-cuts/188805851130089#!/pages/Fair-pay-and-no-job-cuts/188805851130089?v=wall

Carrying the banner

THIS is our banner. It was made several decades ago by people who believed in justice, fairness, integrity and professionalism. Those people felt so strongly about the career they had chosen that they commissioned this banner as a statement of their determination to defend that profession. I, for one, will be proud to march under it.

Our jobs have been devalued by three years of pay freeze and our profession is under threat as never before. We are being continuously undermined by people who don’t know the meaning of justice, fairness, integrity and professionalism – the very foundation blocks of our industry.

That’s why this fight is important. It’s not just about money and jobs, it’s about principles. It’s about Newsquest executives treating us with disdain and contempt, using us as a resource to fill their own bank accounts and expecting loyalty in return while they dismantle our industry.

The people who made this banner wouldn’t have put up with it. Neither should we.

A McF

In it together?

This is the leaflet we'll be handing out around the streets of Darlington.

Are they all done taking? Not at all. Gannett has just issued its first round of executive pay for 2010, what's called restricted stock units - stock awards that don't need to be bought. Paul Davidson has been awarded RSUs to the value of $308,000 for 2010. That's just the first part of executive pay, more will follow. Source: http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/urgent-gci-grants-first-raft-of-2010.html