Second…Dow Jones currently is in contract negotiations with its primary union, seeking severe cutbacks in our health benefits and limits on our pay. At a time when Dow Jones is finding the resources to award golden parachutes to 135 top executives, it should not be seeking to eviscerate employees’ health benefits and impose salary adjustments that amount to a pay cut.

The reporters returned to work by midafternoon. On June 18, the union filed two unfair labor practice complaints over Dow Jones’s conduct in the negotiations.

IAPE President Steve Yount writes on the union’s website that the company is stalling negotiations and is demanding that the workers accept at least a doubling of their prescription drug costs. 

In April, several of the WSJ reporters covering the war in Iraq and Afghanistan wrote to members of the board of directors outlining their concerns over efforts by Dow Jones CEO Rich Zannino and management’s efforts to “wring profits out of the employees for years now.” 

In the letter, published in The New York Observer, the reporters stated:

Managers now routinely tell reporters to take their own photos, shoot their own video and write and read their own broadcast scripts to accompany the stories they write. Other newspapers devote entire staffs to these specialized jobs. Dow Jones, however, wants the additional work for free. 

Many Dow Jones reporters and editors have said they fear that Murdoch, who owns Fox TV and the New York Post, will water down and politicize the news.

That sentiment is shared by PBS commentator Bill Moyers, who says in a video that Murdoch is “the predator of the hour” in an ongoing series of corporate mergers that is destroying the quality and integrity of journalism.

When it comes to money and power, [Murdoch] is carnivorous—all appetite and no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path. He hires lobbyists the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes. He stacks them in his cavernous closet along with his conscience.