Business

Big chill sets in between Gray Lady and Guild

Labor relations between Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of the New York Times Co., and the Newspaper Guild — which appeared to be edging toward less hostility a few weeks ago — took a turn for the worse this week.

The Guild, with more than 1,100 members, has been without a contract since March 1, 2011. Talks broke off last year and only resumed following the December 2011 ouster of CEO Janet Robinson.

There were actually two contracts, one that covered 1,000 mainly print side employees, and a second one that covered about 100 digital-only editorial workers.

The expectation has been that there would be one new contract for both types of employees.

The talks have gone through ups and downs, but recently as more serious negotiations on issues such as the pension plan began to take place, the rhetoric appeared to be cooling off a bit.

But earlier this week, Bill O’Meara, president of the Guild, said that the company “dropped a bomb” on the process by demanding dual contracts.

O’Meara feels the move by the Times is a prelude to declaring an impasse.

The union boss is threatening to file grievances with the National Labor Relations Board over the digital work that many have been asked to do and said he might seek a strike authorization vote from members.

“With a possible breakthrough looming after nearly a year and half of negotiations, Times corporate management inexplicably dropped a bomb on the process [Tuesday] by presenting two new comprehensive proposals aimed at negotiating two separate contracts: print and digital.”

“Management’s dual-contract demand is a legal maneuver to preserve its option to declare the talks at an ‘impasse’ — a rarely used, draconian move that would enable management to impose its ‘last, best’ contract offer on members.”

In the past, the Times Co. has declined to discuss the labor negotiations publicly, but a day after the Guild memo, Terry Hayes, the company’s senior vice president, operations and labor, issued a lengthy memo to employees, apparently in a bid to cool down the situation.

Hayes countered that it was the Guild that dug in its heels by refusing to commit to negotiating a single contract for print and digital workers.

“While the Guild negotiators have intimated that they, too, wanted a unified contract, when we asked them [Tuesday] to explicitly commit to negotiate a single contract that erases the increasingly irrelevant distinctions between our print and digital journalism, they refused.”

The Times had been pushing to abolish its pension plan and replace it with a 401(k) pension plan.

Gross returns

Dan Gross was one of many Newsweek staffers who stampeded for the exits when the magazine was put up for sale by the Washington Post Co. in 2010.

He had been writing both for Slate, still owned by WaPo, and Newsweek before leaving for digital digs.

Now he is returning from Yahoo!, where he was a business columnist, to become the new editor of global finance for Newsweek/Daily Beast.

“I’ll be writing a column for the magazine and Daily Beast and helping to run and grow a small-business vertical,” said Gross.

He left originally before stereo magnate Sidney Harman emerged to save the magazine in September 2010 and before the subsequent merger with Barry Diller’s InteractiveCorp-owned Daily Beast.

The magazine is still jointly owned by Diller’s IAC and Harman’s estate, headed by his widow, Jane, a former Democratic Congresswoman from California.

Through the July 16 issue, Newsweek’s ad pages are up 4.6 percent to 371, even as it chopped two issues out of its publishing cycle to cut costs.

Glamourous life

Condé Nast chief editors were treated to a rare look at a new editorial efficiency system that has been instituted at Cindi Leive’s Glamour — and could soon be coming to other magazines at the company.

Most startling, insiders said, was Rick Levine, a top corporate production editor, showing them slides of a car assembly plant that uses the Toyota Production System designed to eliminate, among other things, “muda,” which is the Japanese word for waste, in manufacturing.

“Rick said, ‘we’ll be visiting you all in the near future,’ ” which was greeted coolly by the chief editors.

Leive declined to comment. One former Glamour staffer said that the well-respected editor, who has been on the job for 11 years, was angry that Glamour, as the company’s largest circulation magazine, was the one picked for the first project.

Said one insider, “Cindi Leive is a terrific editor but she blows through people and makes endless changes.”

Under the new InDesign production system, many of the changes that were handwritten on page proofs of the magazine will now be made on the pages within the computer system.

Condé Nast Editorial Director Tom Wallace said in a statement: “This is not about fixing anything. It’s about adapting to a publishing process made more complex by new digital opportunities.”

kkelly@nypost.com