|
||
| front page - search - community | ||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
‘Let ’em eat cake…’
Post employees protest company’s contract offer
(Published November 23, 1998)
By OSCAR ABEYTA
Staff Writer
Employees of The Washington Post whose union contract expired Nov. 12 held a lunch-time demonstration in front of the newspaper’s downtown offices that featured a Marie Antoinette impersonator serving cake to the newspaper’s staff.
The Nov. 18 "Let-Them-Eat-Cake" demonstration, which drew about 170 participants, was held to protest the Washington Post Co.’s latest contract offering, which would give union workers a lump-sum payment in lieu of a pay raise in the first year of a new three-year contract.
"Our wage proposal is in keeping with the other contracts here at the Post," said Patricia Dunn, the company’s vice president for labor relations.
Negotiators for the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, which represents 1,350 Post employees, rejected the paper’s offer, saying the company spent more on the 1997 salaries of its top five officers than it was proposing to spend on all of its Guild-represented employees in the first year of the contract. They noted the company posted after-tax profits of $353 million in the first nine months of this year.
"I can’t predict when there will be a contract, but I’m hoping there will be one soon," Dunn said.
The Guild covers writers, editors, news and commercial artists, accountants, drivers, commercial sales representatives, computer specialists and other workers at the Post.
Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator