The New York Times, which has never met a pro-union rule it didn’t like, has suddenly found notoriously pro-labor France too expensive a place to do business.
So, as The Post’s Claire Atkinson first reported, the paper is eliminating 70 positions from its Paris operation, with editing and print-production functions relocated to New York and Hong Kong.
To be fair, the Times editorial page has faulted French labor laws. But that hasn’t stopped it from pushing similar insanity here at home.
The Times’ editors are waging a nonstop campaign to impose a $15 minimum wage across America. They’re also pushing for universal paid-family-leave mandates.
The paper is a reliable friend of prevailing-wage laws and other pro-union measures, and an avid foe of right-to-work laws that ban “closed shop” arrangements that force workers to join unions.
All without realizing that the end of the road is something like the 3,400-page French national labor code — a worker’s dream and an employer’s nightmare.
Those rules are plainly what’s moved the paper to dramatically scale back the Paris headquarters operation of the International New York Times (formerly the International Herald Tribune).
To slash those 70 jobs, it will have to shell out $13 million in severance and relocation costs — and conclude negotiations, required by French law, with local work councils.
Far be it for us to question what the Times opts to do for its own fiscal health.
We just wish the Gray Lady kept such realities in mind while urging similarly unaffordable mandates on US-based businesses.