Newsday truckers rebuff Cablevision
Cablevision once again finds itself in a bitter standoff with unionized workers at Newsday.
Angry truckers, by a razor-thin margin, rejected on Sunday the cable company’s new four-year pay offer for Newsday — and in the process scuttled the entire proposal for all 500 unionized workers covered by the umbrella Local 406 of the Graphic Communications Council of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The proposed pact sought to entice the transportation unit of the union with a $1 million buyout proposal that would have given a one-time payout of $29,500 to 35 departing truckers.
The resulting $10 million savings over the course of a four-year pact would have been doled out to all bargaining units in the form of 6 percent pay hikes over the next four years.
The vote by Local 406 was set up so that the pressmen, journalists, maintenance workers and other bargaining units would not vote on the proposal unless the truckers, whose jobs were on the line, approved the deal.
But in a stunning development, the contract on Sunday was rejected by the truckers 52-47. A Newsday spokesman declined to comment.
Cablevision has not made a profit at Newsday since CEO Jim Dolan purchased it in 2008 for $650 million from Sam Zell’s bankrupt Tribune Company. Some analysts have urged the cable giant to sell the Long Island daily, which is the 12th-largest daily paper in the country.
Last year, Newsday lost about $40 million, and in the first six months of 2013 lost another $12.2 million.
As circulation tumbles and ads disappear, Newsday, like many other papers, has found it does not need as many trucks to deliver its papers and it was looking to cut drivers under the proposed contract.
But truckers objected that Cablevision was going to farm out the union jobs that pay an average of about $29 an hour to lower wage non-union delivery companies on the East End of Long Island.
Most of the other bargaining units seemed to be leaning toward accepting the contract, sources said, because it would have afforded them the first pay hikes in years. But fear that trucker jobs would go to non-union workers stocked resentment within the transportation unit.
Labor relations at Newsday have grown increasingly tense in recent years.
In the most recent three-year pact, workers had reluctantly accepted a 5 percent pay cut after first overwhelmingly rejecting a Cablevision proposal for a 10 percent pay cut.