BOSTON GUILD REJECTS GLOBE CONCESSIONS.

Within minutes of a rejection of a plan to cut $10 million in wages and benefits at its largest union, Boston Globe management tonight declared that the two sides to be at an impasse and that it would slash wages 23 percent, effective next week.

Members of the Newspaper Guild/CWA rejected the take-back package 277-265 in voting held at the paper today. The package, totalling about $10 million in annual savings, included a 10-percent wage cut, a pension freeze, cuts to retirement and health benefits and the end of lifetime job guarantees for about 170 workers who were at the paper when it was purchased by The New York Times Co. in 1993.

The Times Co. has said in recent months that the Globe is losing money -- it estimated that the loss would be $85 million in 2009 without union agreements for cutbacks -- and it has secured concessions from all its other Boston unions, with the largest -- the Guild -- voting today.

While Guild leadership brought the deal to members for a vote, they wouldn't go on record advocating passage and individuals within the union suggested that management wasn't taking its fair share of cuts, with line workers carrying the brunt of the pain.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that the paper's other three major unions have based taking their concessions on the fact that all four unions take concessions.

Both sides said in statements tonight that they would be willing to meet in the coming days, but with the impasse declaration, most of the talk will be happening with the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. courts. Labor experts indicated that could be a long and "messy" process.

First major push-back from a newspaper union regarding the woes of the newspaper business (though it probably won't be the last: truck drivers at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis look to be nasty as well). Apparently it isn't so much the money or benefits in Boston, but those lifetime job guarantees, doled out precisely so an unflinching management in New York couldn't lay off elderly copy editors (etc.).

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