Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Advance is sued over "job pledge" and buyout promises

This will sound familiar to a lot of folks that I know.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I feel for the guy. I was laid off in 2010 and thought my world was crushed. There is a lot of frustration in our industry, in particular in the newhouse regime, regarding the obvious mis-handling of of everything and anything.
But I do not think those feelings should turn into a lawsuit. I am not saying what Advance did was nice or honest or even ethical in my opinion. But I doubt it will be found illegal.
I read the line by line suit against Advance and noted I experienced much of the same notices, memos and meetings as the plaintiff. We all did. Anyone who worked for Advance for more than three minutes knew how the game was played with these guys and should have exercised caution when taking advice from superiors that would affect your livelyhood.
I guess I am saying in my opinion Advance did a crappy, under-handed, dishonest and cowardly thing to many many people. But I do not think any lawbreaking occured. I know one could argue all day about wether or not breach of contract happened when the job pledge was revoked. I know in our hearts and souls breach occured as many of us once trusted Newhouse. Unfortunatley, the court does not care about that.
I think this fellow should stop crying in his milk, move on and be thankful he no longer works for a runaway train steaming full speed towards newspaper oblivion.
On the other hand, if he wins I want in! :)

12 July, 2012 05:57
Anonymous said...

No wonder the paper couldn't meet its $10 million savings goal. It was paying a deputy editor almost $95,000 a year -- several years ago. That's probably the salaries of about four current Flint Journal content providers -- or half the salary of one appointee of Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano. You can't sustain a newspaper business these days paying anyone but the editor in chief that kind of money. Geez, who said journalists were underpaid? Apparently, not in the Garden State. I doubt any FJ deputy editors are paid anywhere near that. If they are, the poor remaining content providers need to storm the castle with pitchforks and torches.

12 July, 2012 08:01
Anonymous said...

LOL, Anon 08:01, I recall when just joking around in the newsroom about unionizing elicited sharp rebukes from a certain editor with super hearing for such potentially disruptive keywords (we called 'em buzzwords back then - wink wink). I'm not a union type, to say the least, but maybe organizing the newsroom wasn't such a bad idea at the time. Would it have saved the paper as we knew it? We'll never know. But it's intersting to ask why mere jokes made the editor so twitchy. Surely what is now MLive's sinister agenda wasn't already in its infacy way back then. Or was it? It's more than a bit curious how or why a left-leaning, supposedly labor-sympathetic newspaper (the FJ not too long ago referred to the UAW as its labor friends or labor brothers in a now-rare editorial; and the paper arguably sat on its hands as GM imploded after years of unrealstic, unsustainable and greedy moves by labor and management), based smack dab in the middle of Labor Land, has avoided a unionized newsroom all this time.

13 July, 2012 08:06
Anonymous said...

I never thought the job pledge was worth the paper it was written on. And I was somewhat amused to see it tweaked as conditions changed.

Still, I thought pledge was a nice gesture by a company that cared about its employees-until it threw them overboard in an attempt to keep the ship from sinking.

19 July, 2012 12:17

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