Fairfax: Jobs before Executive Bonus

ACTU Secretary, Dave Oliver, said that it was a particularly bad look for Fairfax to be voting to boost the salary of CEO, Greg Hywood with a $420,000 bonus payment at the same time that the company rejects efforts of Tasmanian newspaper workers to save the jobs of four of their colleagues who are being made redundant.

“The shareholders of Fairfax should not take the decision to award an executive bonus lightly. A company undergoing redundancies should not be handing out extra payments to their management.

“If they have enough money to pay bonuses, their obligation should be to instead use it to assist their staff,” said Mr Oliver.

Unions are calling on the company to:

• Pay workers in the customer contact centres whose jobs are to be outsourced their full redundancy entitlements, based on their actual earnings;
• Negotiate decent redundancy packages with workers on minimum redundancy arrangements in good faith;
• Genuinely make every effort to work with employees and their unions to mitigate job losses, particularly in regional operations where unemployment levels are high;
• Commit to develop a fair process for implementing redundancies and provide resources to assist workers to maximise their re-employment opportunities;
• Respect the Recommendations made by Fair Work Australia designed to ensure a fair and transparent process of implementing redundancies ; and
• Guarantee employee entitlements.