The local unions, Massachusetts labour leaders and elected officials joined the Boston Newspaper Guild, which represents nearly 1,000 Boston Globe employees, to protest the outsourcing of Boston Globe 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 more than 120 jobs at the Boston Globe. Of these, 55 jobs in advertising finance will be outsourced to India.
The job cuts came less than one month after Boston Newspaper Guild members ratified a four-year contract containing no guaranteed wage increases and significantly higher employee health care costs.
The protest came on a day when the Boston Globe had previously scheduled a business symposium entitled, "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 on Wednesday. "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 increases in health care 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.
"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.
