The Boston Globe to Cut Jobs

The Boston Globe is a newspaper that is read by many in the Boston metro area. Many people know the newspaper for its reporting, and for the accompanying website. Most of the readers however don’t think of it as an employer, but they are. Well, at least they were for 53 workers who are soon to be cut from the payrolls.

In most circumstances 53 jobs would be more then enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” In this case however the layoffs will only impact 10 workers. The other 43 are being offered buyouts in order to avoid a larger layoff. For now the company has not said how many of the workers who are being offered the buyouts have chosen to take them and how many will not.

Other news organizations are, as you can imagine, also feeling the pinch and they are also cutting back on staff. For those of you who missed out on  the coverage the first time around here is an excerpt, “The news company is getting ready to layoff about 100 workers in order to set its bottom line to right. The jobs, which will be cut of roughly fifteen percent of the editorial staff, are coming from the companies operations in the UK, if the rumors are to be believed, as the company has yet to put out an official release about the job cuts. This also leaves us wondering when the cuts will go into effect, and what kind of severance terms, if any will be offered to the workers who are soon to be displaced.”

Even larger cuts have been made at Fairfax Media Limited, where almost 2,000 people lost their jobs. Here is an excerpt from our earlier coverage of those cuts, “For those of you do not follow the world of Australian journalism the company is talking about a real loss of about 1,900 jobs when all of the cuts are said and done. These cuts will not be made in a single wave. The jobs will be cut in smaller stages between now and March of 2013. By that time the company is hoping to move farther away from the print editions it has used in the past and move more towards digital editions and other methods of delivering news.”

The Boston Globe is currently owned by the New York Times Company.