Over at the Texas Observer, Gus Bova peeks at the battle to unionize the Snooze. This is the same A.H. Belo of the infamous ad "welcoming" JFK to Dallas, of a current editorial page editor being a former Shrub Bush flunky and all sorts of wingnuttia in between, with the occasional non-wingnut columnist claiming to be a librul. And I haven't even mentioned homophobe Rod Dreher's time there.
What prompted the drive and put it into gear, he notes, was a round of layoffs last year with FIFTEEN MINUTES NOTICE. That was then followed this year, during the early COVID days, by cutting pay up to 17 percent, but without an hours cut. With the pay cut less than 20 percent, employees couldn't file for partial unemployment bennies. Without the hours cut, they couldn't find other PT work so easily.
As for its antiunion history? Bova details the decades of that, as well. And, not just at the Snooze, but at other former Belo properties.
And, that's a key here. The Snooze and related Dallas properties is all Belo has. No other papers. No teevee. Just the Snooze and other Dallas paper products, plus the marketing division that it finally separated.
Bova gets a thing or two wrong, though. I wouldn't have considered the Snooze Texas' leading paper over much of its history. And going back more than 29 years, I wouldn't even consider it DALLAS' best paper. And, the closure of the Dallas Times Herald, which WAS No. 1, reinforces all the other bad behavior Bova paints. (Beyond that, the Snooze didn't start winning most of its awards until after the Times Herald was folded.)
At D Mag, Eric Celeste and Jim Schutze (nutbar alert!) weigh in as well. No, seriously, it's nutbar on Schutze's part, who says he "ratted out" a similar attempt at the Dallas Observer shortly before he was let go.
Really.
Celeste is generally sympathetic.
Schutze? Sympathetic to the degree it gives him a new tool for kicking the Snooze in the nads, and that's it.
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