The Union of Journalists (SJ) will discuss this Wednesday with the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the situation at the Global Media Group and the newspaper A Bola, his statement said.
In a note published this Wednesday, the union body said its leadership “regrets the return to the past at Global Media Group (GMG) with the current administration, appointed in September, doing what is usual at Global Media Group – ignoring or disrespecting union structures, while trying to terrorize the workers.”
According to the same information, on November 20, “the union, concerned about the situation at GMG and concerned about the stagnation of wages in the company, wrote a letter to management proposing a meeting so that negotiations that began on October 26 could be resumed.” and “given the urgency, November 29 was proposed.”
However, he stressed that “this day has come without any response,” guaranteeing that the SJ “entered these negotiations in good faith, giving preference to dialogue when it would have been easier to resort to legal mechanisms, namely to immediately enforce the new CCT.” [contrato coletivo de trabalho]”.
According to SJ, this “return to the past” occurs not only at the level of “trade union discussion” and “extends to the strategy of the company, which loudly announced to several representatives the dismissal of about 150 people – 40 in the Jornal de News, 30 in the TSF and 56 in general services of the group, and then denied the press, reporting this plan as the only possible one.”
“The expressed intention to carry out a collective dismissal represents a return to the deepest past using a methodology that has already proven incapable of solving the problem in journalistic companies,” SJ said.
For the union, “the reduction of those who make news, the firing of journalists has not helped the evaluation of the work,” and if, he continued, “quality declines, so does the interest of readers and advertisers, dragging the company into a negative spiral that some businessmen think that the problem can be solved by mass dismissal of people.”
SJ also assured that “this happens at a time when the company hires advisors, consultants and directors for the group, of course, at a price higher than the minimum wage of a journalist, 903 euros, which the company refuses to pay.”
According to the union, “GMG plans to fire journalists and other company employees” and sell “two magazines that represented added value for the group, Evasões and Volta ao Mundo, without providing any information.”
These are some of the questions that the union will ask this Wednesday “to the President of the Republic at the hearing in Belém, which intends to draw attention to the need for greater attention to the people and societies that take over the leadership of media companies.” .
“The collective dismissal of the newspaper A Bola, which the courts have already begun to refuse, will also be discussed at this meeting, where we hope to draw attention to foreign investment in media in Portugal. such as World Opportunity in GMG and Ringier Group in this sports newspaper,” he concluded.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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