Those paydays that New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger and President Janet Robinson received last year are once again coming back to haunt them.
The Boston Newspaper Guild, which absorbed more than $10 million in pay and benefit cuts to members last year in order to save The Boston Globe, has lashed out at the Sulzberger and Robinson 2009 bonuses and are demanding their lost wages and benefits be restored.
“We were astonished to learn that the two of you received more than $10 million in stock awards and options in 2009,” the Guild wrote in an open letter urging its members to send to Sulzberger and Robinson. “During the year for which you were so richly rewarded, the 600 members of the Boston Newspaper Guild gave back almost the same amount in pay and benefit reductions — $10 million to be exact — after you threatened to close our newspaper, lay off hundreds of people, and strip Massachusetts of its largest newspaper.”
“Now that the Times has shown it can afford to lavish so much on a few top executives, we expect our pay and benefit cuts will be restored in the coming months.”
The Times Co. declined to comment.
The company raised eyebrows earlier this month when it revealed in a company filing that the pair of execs got higher bonuses in 2009, a year in which the company not only threatened to shut down the Globe, but also imposed a 5 percent pay cut on Times journalists and laid off employees.
Robinson’s base salary and options for last year totaled $6.2 million, a 32 percent hike from a year earlier. Sulzberger netted $5.9 million, also up 32 percent from 2008. The increases came even though their base salaries held at $962,500 for Robinson and $1 million for Sulzberger.
When word first surfaced about the bump-up in pay, a Times spokeswoman said the increases were driven predominantly by “payouts under performance-based bonus plans with pre-set goals.”
The Times had threatened to sell or close the Globe unless it extracted major concessions from the unions. The Newspaper Guild had at first rejected the deal, but in a second vote agreed to take the pay cuts that the company demanded in exchange for not shuttering the paper.
The Globe has been a sore spot for the Times Co., which paid more than $1 billion for the paper in 1993. The asset has seen its value plunge. An attempt last year to sell the paper produced meager bids and eventually the Times Co. pulled it off the market.
While the crowd in Boston appears outraged at Sulzberger’s and Robinson’s higher bonuses, the Newspaper Guild in New York, which had to absorb a 100-person downsizing at the end of 2009, plus the 5 percent pay cut, was staying on the sidelines for now.
Bill O’Meara, president of the New York Newspaper Guild, said only that members were “angry,” but at this point no one was taking any official action.