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After nine months of open strike preparations and hard-line posturing, the New York Daily News is entering contract negotiations that both sides agree could determine the survival of the 71-year-old tabloid.
Management calls the negotiations the most important in the history of the paper. It seeks job cuts and tens of millions of dollars in labor cost reductions. The unions want to protect jobs and contend that the talks probably will end with the paper being sold or folded. The current contract expires March 30.
News management says its goal is to regain control of hiring, supervision, job allocation and overtime pay and to cut jobs in manufacturing and distribution.
"In plain language, contractual restrictions on how we operate and how we distribute are killing the Daily News," said a management statement.
"This is the single most important contract negotiation in the history of the company. We're talking about survival of the Daily News," said John T. Sloan, vice president of labor relations at the Daily News.
George McDonald, president of the Allied Printing Trades Council, the umbrella association of 10 unions that represent about 3,000 fulland part-time Daily News employees ranging from reporters to printing press operators to truck drivers, said management could offer such stringent terms that it forces a strike.
"They could let us wither on the vine until the News either dies of starvation . . . or our hungry bellies force us to accept cuts severe enough to attract a bargain hunter," McDonald said recently to union members.
Barry Lipton, president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, which represents 825 Daily News employees including reporters, editors and circulation and advertising sales personnel, put it more bluntly: "I'd call it the last great battle at the News," he said.
In a city that has lost 22,000 manufacturing jobs in the past two years, the shuttering of the News would drain another 3,300 jobs from the city's economy. And from a high of 19 daily newspapers 100 years ago, it would leave just the The New York Times, the New York Post and New York Newsday to scrap over the area's 5.9-million households.
On Sunday, management delivered the first of 10 contract proposals that it will dispatch between now and...