SARASOTA, Fla. - Columnist Tom Lyons says some are happy and some are unhappy inside the Sarasota Herald-Tribune building.
"Management tried hard to talk us out of this...they talked some people out of it, but at least 22 of us are very happy," Lyons said.
Lyons is referring to the 22 newsroom workers who voted to form a union, over the 16 who voted against.
"We just had a day with eight people laid off, bam. We want a better system to negotiate that. We can't prevent layoffs; I wish we could, but maybe we'll talk about severance packages and now we have the means to do it. We are dealing with a corporate owner who seems like a faraway stranger and a business plan that seems to lay people off," Lyons said.
That corporate owner is Rochester area-based GateHouse Media. We reached out to newspaper management for a comment, but got none. The publisher was quoted by the Poynter Institute as saying he's "disappointed" about the attempt to unionize.
ABC7 Business Commentator Richard Stern says it's no secret the internet, a younger generation that doesn't buy papers and the Great Recession conspired against the newspaper industry. He's not shocked the newspaper staff would unionize.
"They don't know where their future will be, so trying to take advantage of what's available to them right now and worry about five years -- five years from now -- but the reality is it's not going to get a whole lot better," Stern predicted.
Questions also remain about the future of the iconic Main Street building that is only about a decade old. Lyons says it's so underutilized, it appears they're going to move out and lease some floors at the building next door.
"This building looks like the Taj Mahal now. It looks like we're moving into that building over there...yeah, this building is bigger than we need, the reason--we don't have that many journalists anymore," he said.
The only other union paper in the state is The Ledger in Lakeland. Workers there voted to unionize just last month.
