Fairfax staff take protected industrial action, following executive pay rises and email blunder
Cartoon by Canberra Times ‘s David Pope
Fairfax staff will take protected industrial action next week and step up a public awareness campaign after staff yesterday rejected a pay offer from management which comprised a merit pool of bonus payments but no general pay rise for editorial staff.
Today Fairfax staff across Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane are implementing a tactic of “performance of work in a manner different for that in which it is customary for it to be performed” – which includes wearing black “FairGoFairfax” t-shirts and a possible ‘work to rule’ 1pm lunch time walk out, ahead of a meeting with management on Tuesday.
Tensions at the publisher grew yesterday after it was revealed the company had posted a $224.4m net profit, with four top managers receiving $2.4m in additional performance shares at a time when the formal offer was zero per cent.
How long do you think before we see this in ad agencies?
It would seem to outsiders that Fairfax management do not understand what they are doing. Especially when someone in the business office interferes with how journalists do their job. May be, as their expertise is in counting, they might like to calculate the damage being done to the company by the people who are stuffing things up. They will need a big calculator.
“performance of work in a manner different for that in which it is customary for it to be performed”
read: sober
joking. give em a bloody fair go wouldya management ya flamin’ galahs
“We are surprised and disappointed that management of this company feels it’s appropriate to give themselves such lucrative rewards while at the same time lecturing staff about the need for stringent cuts to our pay and conditions.”
Replace the Fairfax staff with the Australian electorate and Fairfax Management with the Federal Government and it’s the same. Must be the way things are done all over this country now.
Happened a long, long time ago. Union? Which union?!!
Unless you were being sarcastic, in which case, I find what you said quite funny.
Calling all good journo’s and product people at Fairfax! Leave, set up on your own, you will win: do it! Fck the board and their cronies: they have nothing.
If all the good journos at the Fairfax left and joined The Guardian, its quite possible the company would die completely within 12-18 months and we might have Fairfax v2.0 resurrected
Good luck to the journos. Here’s hoping they take the lessons learned from their own experience with greedy executives and apply it to their stories on the wider economy. Every sector faces the same tsunami of corporate bullshit about the need to squash workers’ pay, despite record profits and stratospheric executive bonuses. It’s long past time journos applied the blowtorch to hollow, easily discredited claims about the “need” to keep wages low while raising executive remuneration.
@ Brian Mitchell. Not all Fairfax journos wages are on low wages. The Australian reported yesterday that Joe Aston, the gossip columnist for the AFR , is on a $225,000 a year package. I presume other Fairfax employees are on similar deals.
Apparently, it’s not enough for Aston. He approached News Corp asking for $400,000 but they did not take up the “offer” according to the Media section in The Australian.