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Journalists, editors and photographers at the New York Daily News have been bargaining for a first contract with the newspaper’s owners for three years amid cuts, staff reductions and complaints from employees about a lack of raises.
Members of the Daily News Union have tried to pressure the newspaper’s owners — private equity giant Alden Global Capital — to halt the cuts and reach a contract through a variety of means, including a brief strike, the filing of federal labor charges, petitioning and others.
Their latest tactic is to highlight the support of politicians Daily News reporters cover through a City Council resolution condemning Alden Global Capital and calling on management to reach a fair contact with workers. Around two dozen union members rallied near City Hall on Monday with union leaders and local lawmakers who have been supporting the workers to call attention to the contract campaign.
Michael Sheridan, a video editor at the Daily News and the union’s vice-chair, said that bargaining has been taking so long in part because management initially took regressive positions such as proposing to decrease vacation days and remove retirement benefits. He said that representatives from management have become more “hostile” the longer bargaining has dragged along.
"The company took positions that were very extreme to one side, and it's taken that long to try and get us to some kind of middle point,” he said. “I'd like to think we would get [an agreement]. I want to be positive and believe we will get there."
The Daily News Union — a unit within the NewsGuild of New York — was certified in February 2021, just months before Alden Global Capital purchased the now-106-year-old paper that May as part of a $633 million acquisition of Tribune Publishing. The private equity firm owns about 200 different newspapers. Following the New York-based hedge fund’s purchase of the paper, a group of longtime editors and reporters quickly left the publication.
No raises in 10 years
Many editors who have left the publication since Alden's purchase in 2021 have not been replaced, workers said Monday, and the newspaper no longer has a politics editor or reporters covering the statehouse in Albany or courts in Queens or The Bronx. Evan Simko-Bednarski, a transit reporter, said Monday that the decrease in staff has made it more arduous for his stories to move through rounds of editing and get published.
"We want a piece of what we make,” Simko-Bednarski, a union shop steward, said of the contract negotiations. “We're not asking for the moon — we're asking for enough to continue to do our jobs."
Sheridan said that he and many of his longtime coworkers haven’t received a pay raise in more than 10 years and that dozens of workers suffered salary reductions shortly after Alden bought the paper. Workers have yet to recoup those losses, and union members said that the 2.5-percent raises management has proposed would not be enough to make up for that lost pay.
Tribune Publishing did not respond to a request for comment.
To highlight cuts at the paper and their contract fight, workers walked out on a one-day strike in January 2024, which was the first work-stoppage at the newspaper since a 147-day strike in 1991.
The union later accused Alden Global Capital of bad faith bargaining and of attempting to unilaterally change workers’ healthcare plans. In June, 130 former Daily News staffers, among them former columnist Denis Hamill and former editor-in-chief Jim Rich, signed a petition calling on management to agree to a contract.
Workers speaking at the rally on Monday directly criticized Alden's managing director, Heath Freeman. Joining the Daily News workers was City Comptroller Brad Lander, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and a cadre of City Council members, including Carmen De La Rosa, chair of the Committee on Civil Service and Labor, who will introduce a resolution next month that expresses the body’s support for the Daily News Union and calls out Alden Global Capital.
“Resolved, That the Council of the City of New York condemns Alden Global Capital[‘s] cuts and managerial hostility towards unionized Daily News staff and calls on the hedge fund to reach a contract deal with the newspaper’s union,” says the yet-to-be-proposed resolution as currently drafted.
De La Rosa labeled Alden Global Capital as an example of “corporate greed that seeks to extract from workers and not give back.”
“It is important for us as Council members to see, to listen and to be watch dogs about what is happening in our city with our workers,” she said at the rally. “That’s why we are looking forward to introducing a resolution in the City Council that sends a clear message that predatory equity firms cannot come in, gobble up our papers, fire our workers, not give them pay raises; and we will not be silenced.”
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