Gannett announces furloughs

One week EVERY month of April, May and June, for those making $38K or more per year.

If there is a bright side, I guess it's that there aren't a whole lot left making more than that. But damn, that's a 25 percent pay cut for a three-month period. Here's some vacation, not that you can afford to do anything with it.

 

Well, you'll know who's making the big bucks when they disappear for a week. I doubt anyone other than the publisher makes that much in my building.

 

That kind of bread at this point is senior people and managers - managers will probably appreciate it considering how many hours over 40 they tend to work since they're salaried and not eligible for OT.

 

I guess I'm out of touch, because I wouldn't have guessed there's a single reporter in my publication making *below* $38,000. Maybe one or two fresh out of college. But maybe I'm wrong.

 

Congratulations to Gannett for finding a new excuse to do something it’s already been doing off and on for years.

 

What coffeeman said.
Sinful, but what can you expect.

 

At my local Gannett shop, which used to be mid-sized but is now definitely small-sized, I'm told half the newsroom (including managers) are over $38K. At the metros and bigger shops, I'd expect most to be over that threshold.

 

Awful.

Another company, in the last week, cut its full-time employees to 30 hours a week and cut the pay of salaried employees 25 percent. And, unlike Gannett, they actually claim to care about the product and its employees. Guess not ...

 

Holy shit, I'd rather have the furloughs than that, Sam. At least with furloughs, (often) you can get some unemployment relief after the waiting period, and I'm guessing the cut to 30 hours a week has some insurance/benefits impacts, too.

 

I worked in journalism for about a dozen years - finally got out this year - and I never hit that threshold except for one year at Patch.com. If you graduated after 2000, there's a pretty strong chance you bounced from paper to paper and never got $38k.

 

Heck, I am not even sure I made 30,000 a year in my seven years.

 

$38K was the maximum I made at the Gannett paper that I was laid off from more than 10 years ago. Which sounds like a lot, but I live in an expensive part of the country, and, every year that I would get a raise of 1 to 3 percent, a few months later, I would get the inevitable announcement that my health insurance deductions would go up, "coincidentally" the same amount of my "raise."

With those health insurance increases, I barely got anything resembling a "raise", even though the gross amount went up by about $170 over nearly a decade there.