"As Bob knows, the Street hates
when executives mislead investors."
when executives mislead investors."
-- Anonymous@1:18 a.m. today, puzzled by chief Bob Dickey's statement to Wall Street analysts, where he said Gannett's U.S. newspapers had eliminated 24% of jobs last year. That would be as many as 7,000 positions, far in excess of the 1,400 layoffs he disclosed in July.
In the end, someone is going to have to nail this jello to the wall and figure out how many jobs Dickey got rid of in 2009 and how many he plans to eliminate in 2010.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that as many as 20 newspapers will outsource printing in the coming year (the number is going to be significantly greater than 8... executives get paid on exceeding goals not meeting them). It's obvious that Gannett is in love with the results of how the first 15 or so have worked out. Pensacola was just an appetizer (some said it wouldn't work). Shooting Ft. Myers will be filet mignon.
My guess is that someone in the Palace has a site map up on the wall in the office that's color coded with the highest payroll (plus) per copy printed in quartiles. The first quartile with the highest overall costs are all on the list. If you have an on-site this year, and your still printing in your own building, you can be sure that a sliver of the visit will be carved out for executives to meet with the daily 40 miles down the road.
Elimination of these long-time employees shores up the legacy pension contribution issues immediately. And let's face it, getting rid of any long-time employee does the same.
Gannett takes advantage of lesser run operations by showing the outsourced print "winner" the cash flow benefits of being able to print a large commercial job like another daily, and the Gannett managers laugh all the way to the bank, back slapping and high-fiving about getting rid of pressman making $30 per hour plus. The plus is the number that drives Gannett crazy... the benefits, the risk costs, the workmans comp, the aforementioned pension contributions, etc.
In the end, print just isn't what it used to be, and Gannett is ahead of the game in making such an assessment. Only in places with high depreciation, like Rochester, would Gannett even consider the option of still printing.
Hold on... it's going to be an interesting year.
So many times there are apples to oranges comparisons here. Are we talking headcount? There are thousands of part time, causual, work a couple hours here and there employees. When they are let go do they count the same as a full-time employee? At one point Gannett had 55,000 "employees". Today it's, what, 35,000? That doesn't mean 20,000 full-time employees were let go, does it? Probably have to drill down to the numbers. And look over several years.
ReplyDelete