The axing of 82 full-time jobs from the Fairfax Media group has prompted protests by angry Fairfax employees in Sydney and Melbourne.
Sub-editors, designers and artists will be outsourced from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to Pagemasters.
Furious journalists and other workers from the Fairfax media organisations vented their anger at stopwork meetings in Sydney and Melbourne on May 12 and then again at public rallies on May 19.
At the Melbourne rally, the deputy chair of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) house committee at The Age, Michael Bachelard, told Green Left Weekly that more than 82 jobs will be axed because many workers are part-time and the cuts are for 82 “full-time equivalent” positions.
There is no guarantee that the workers will be employed by Pagemasters. If they are employed there, they will work for much less pay.
Workers at Pagemasters have a non-union collective agreement that was signed under the Howard government’s anti-union Work Choices legislation.
Investigative journalist Richard Baker told the May 19 rally that journalists rely on sub-editors. “We have complicated stories with sources that we need to protect. You need to be able to go through a story, line by line, with a sub as the deadline approaches.
“That’s not possible if sub-editing is outsourced.”
One journalist at the rally told GLW that “we’re working like dogs because of the last round of 550 job cuts in 2008. The outsourcing of sub-editors will increase the pressure on journalists. We’ll have to pick up the pieces.
“There’s so much pressure on us. I don’t know that I can take it any more.”
Journalists at the rally condemned the outsourcing as an attack on editorial independence. The Age independence committee spokesperson told the rally that there was a strike in the early 1990s which won a charter of independence.
“When our colleagues are outsourced, will the still have the same editorial independence, or will they be subject to commercial pressures?”
Bachelard said that Pagemasters is already sub-editing sections of The Age such as the “TV guide”, “Epicure” and “Drive” sections. “But they have never done news, sport or the tricky deadline pages,” he said. “The quality of journalism will go down, readers will decline, and that will be an excuse for more cuts.”
The May 12 stop-work meeting resolution said: “We have no confidence that the half-News Limited owned Pagemasters will have the skills, the speed or the cultural understanding to maintain the level of quality that we and our readers expect from newspapers with the proud traditions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.”
Bachelard told the rally that the cash bonuses to all of the executives and management in the last year amounted to more than $3 million, the amount by which Fairfax Media hopes to save by
outsourcing its subeditors.
At this stage, the MEAA is not considering strike action. It has set up a Future-Proof Fairfax campaign on Facebook and a campaign website at www.fairgofairfax.org.au .