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WBZ 1030's new owners making workers reapply for the jobs, refusing to honor union contracts
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There's a meeting Monday
People can stop this before the 17th if they call out iHeart loudly and tell them union busting is not OK in Boston. Tell iHeart you won't be a listener unless they honor the contract. Tell the advertisers you won't be a customer unless they demand iHeart honors the contract. Show them Boston hates a bully. #savewbz
Forget the listening. Hey advertisers,
you do business with these people, I don't do business with you.
Maybe I'll start listening again
Labor unions have become a cancer on society and the very idea of white-collar labor unions is a cancer of the brain.
The cancer of fair wages, healthcare and retirement benefits
are truly a threat to our freedoms.
Strawman is made of straw
The cancer of no-show/no-work jobs, work rules that require one guy to use a hammer and a whole separate guy to use a wrench, and a political machine masquerading as a voluntary collective bargain arrangement while requiring anyone who works at a place to join and pay dues, regardless of whether they agree with union politics, regardless of whether they hired on before or after the unionization vote, and regardless of whether or not the whole staff has turned over entirely since the unionization vote...those are a cancer on society.
Also, I hear the strawman really hates Mom, baseball, and apple pie.
Speaking of strawmen
I’ve been in unions since I’ve been 19, and this whole no-show job, different guys for every task, and unions as the tool of political machines thing is something I’ve never seen. Care to discuss real things rather than myths?
Then you've got the good fortune to work with good people
At my place of employment, white collar staff are non-union, blue collar "support staff" (machinists, physical plant, movers, etc) are. Many of them are great people with whom it's always been a pleasure to work. A few of them sit around on their rears and file $500 a pop grievances if they catch a white collar staff member carrying a box or moving furniture between offices.
Real things
You mean like guys getting yelled at for doing too much work, guys with hammocks in their work vehicles, guys that go fishing for half their shift or guys that "accidentally on purpose" get hurt at work so they can sue their employer or retire a level up because they got hurt filling in.
Those real things?
Do you really think
There are union collective bargaining agreements that allow for any of that?
You'd be surprised to learn that there is such a thing as bad management, and that can be found in both union and nonunion locations. For example, do you really think the contractor customer service agents now at T stations are really trained to hassle blind people? No, it's probably just like how when there were members of the Carmen's Union doing the job, there was no expectation that the agents would hide from or avoid passengers. These things happen due to poor managing of employees.
Do you really think
that collective bargaining agreements do nothing to make it harder for management to get rid of bad apples in the organization?
How many times have we heard stories about a Boston police officer fired for something egregious and then rehired right back after the union goes to bat for them? It seems like there's one or two guys a year the department just can't get rid of that make the news. Am I accusing every single cop of being proud to have the reprobates' back? No. But I do accuse them of being very cognizant of the fact that a union that picks and chooses which of its members it advocates for wouldn't be worth joining.
You're quite right, it is a dance. But my original comment was that the unthinking beast of collective bargaining for the sake of collective bargaining and "worker" solidarity has gotten too big and gets you into real situations with real consequences, from not being able to move a chair into another office up through terrible customer service on the trains and inflated construction costs all the way to questionable people being given a badge and a gun.
It's not all smiles and sunshine, my friend.
Oh, and I got a hot tip that the strawman practices witchcraft and invites small children into his gingerbread house.
Bad Apples
I have close friends that have to work with unions. They can never fire a lazy, incompetent or toxic employee. Imagine working in a place like that?
Top talent has options and wouldn't choose a workplace like that. so you get low quality output.
there was a time and place for unions but that time has passed.
The time for unions
Was before we ended up with 330 million people in a capitalist country. Everybody eats. There's a finite amount of food, and a finite amount of dollars.
Show me a starving person making $12 an hour, and I'll show you a starving person who will work that job for $11 an hour. Concurrently, I will show you a person who fears becoming a starving person who owns a business and gets taxed to death because he's a sitting duck for taxation with his wealth, and he's also trying to protect his existing standard of living.
We bred ourselves into this mess. Period. If we had 2017's population in 1917, we'd be working weekends today, for the labor movement would have largely been for naught.
You’re getting there
Go back to your, for lack of a better phrase, strawman comment then look at what you just wrote. You’ve moved from fantastic, almost mythical allegations to real things. Well done.
I mean, I could counter that these are rare incidents, but that puts us in “agree to disagree” territory.
Can't have that now
Just wouldn't be sporting.
Actually yes
There are targets they have to hit. Ysuslly about half what a normally productive person could hit. Very little management can do about it.
And how do you think the targets are set?
Okay, you’re clueless about collective bargaining, so I’ll be nice and tell you. Labor and management hash out what is called a “contract”. If somehow targets are put in these agreements, they were agreed to mutually by both sides, or possibly imposed by management. Therefore, there is a lot that management can do about it.
As an example, letter carriers are collectively bargained, yet over the years the USPS has scrutinized carriers’ routes, making the quicker so they can reduce routes and thereby headcount. One of the PR disasters of this move was customer complaints when carriers would cut through gardens to shave seconds off the route.
You’ve never dealt with a union, have you?
Let's see
So if my options are
1. Drive the hardest bargain I can, have the union call a strike, picket my offices, get all sorts of socialist sympathizers to brand me worse than Hitler, etc etc, and maybe walk out with realistic targets
2. Agree to terms out of fear for my job, my reputation, and in instances for my personal safety, get the pat on the head for avoiding a strike, and pawn off the cost of the loafers on my stockholders or customers or taxpayers
Which one do you think most people would choose?
There is such a thing as negotiating in bad faith. Maybe you've had the good fortune to always work with good, honest, and industrious people. Good for you. I mean it. But your experience, while it may not be rare, is certainly not universal. That's why people like us say the things we say when people like you say the things you say.
It's also why US corporations like Boeing and international corporations like BMW and Airbus try to locate their US manufacturing operations in right-to-work states. It's not all the evil Koch brothers' machinations against the mythical Little Guy. It's real.
I wish it were like that
But alas, as this article notes, employers have no qualms playing hardball, and looking at the wages paid newly hired UAW members at GM, I would say that unions deal with reality more than some internet commentators do.
Obviously i know more than you
Because the guys doing the jobs told me they could do double what the union would agree to. That's why they only worked 4 hours of an 8 hour shift and had hammocks in their trucks and boats out back to go fishing. Management was not stupid but bargaining is a two way street. If the union had their way you'd have no work. 4 hours of work splits the difference in their mind.
Management was stupid
And the union should know better.
A prime example of resentment politics. You cite
examples of poor management and blame "the union". You call working people a cancer because you do not respect them. You resent your college loans and victimized class status as one more deserving than the cancer people. You realize that everything you've been feed by wing nut media focuses on you as the victim. Those blue collar cancer people have a collective bargaining agreement and you have?.
You don't know me
And you're off base on everything you wrote.
Try arguing with arguments instead of insult talking points you've been fed by big labor. I promise I'll listen.
You give examples of slights at your job which automatically
paints all workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement as cancer. You parrot wingnut talking points on the elimination of unions and and claim that as your original thought. This is a page for opinion. You've parroted the opinion of the WSJ, Rush, AEI, Fox, Sinclair and IHeart radio. Well done.
No I haven't
Read my post again. I'll quote it for you to save time:
Emphasis added where necessary since you didn't seem to understand the literal meaning of what I said the first time.
No emphasis needed. Your hate for unions is based in politics.
You vote republican and unions are the only funded political mechanism fighting back against corporatist nirvanna.
This is straight out of corporate anti union training manuals. Though they don't ascribe to the cancer part.
"The cancer of no-show/no-work jobs, work rules that require one guy to use a hammer and a whole separate guy to use a wrench, and a political machine masquerading as a voluntary collective bargain arrangement while requiring anyone who works at a place to join and pay dues, regardless of whether they agree with union politics, regardless of whether they hired on before or after the unionization vote, and regardless of whether or not the whole staff has turned over entirely since the unionization vote...those are a cancer on society."
And...?
You act like none of the things I said are in any way true.
If a Republican told you the sky was blue, would you disagree on principle?
According to republican EPA chief Scott Pruitt's newest
appointee the air in the sky is too clean and more toxins can help children. So yes I would disagree on republican opinion as fact not principle.
Unions...
Unions make it harder for bad managers to fire good employees. They also make it harder for good managers to fire bad employees.
Iheart union busters
Seems to be a trend in Boston. Keolis is also trying to bust the unions, then blaming the employees for their short comings.
I heart
The station that I stream at work, you have no choice, you have to use iheart radio when you click the Listen Live button on that radio stations website.
Eyeheart is teetering on the edge of bankruiptcy
Eyeheart's up to its ears in debt it acquired by paying more for radio stations than they subsequently turned out to be worth.
They aren't buying WBZ, but trading some stations in Richmond, VA and elsewhere for some in Boston and elsewhere.
The union-busting move suggests Eyeheart still thinks it can cost-cut its way to profitability. You can't do that in radio, where the proportion of fixed costs to total is very high. Yet they continue to try, and it's the listening public that suffers as a result.
There are broadcasters waiting in the wings to swoop in and buy up Eyeheart stations when it goes under. Let's hope that's soon.
If you buy a house, you own it...
If you buy a house, you own it. Therefore, you do not have to honor the living room layout of the previous owner.
But, if you buy a house that
But, if you buy a house that has an easement, or a deed restriction, then you are also bound to that restriction.
Unless you're talking about a downtown observation deck. Then you can do whatever you want.
Very few deed restrictions
if any, require the new owner to use the same landscaper and plumber as the previous owner, or require him to shop at the same stores and buy the same products.
Wow, that shows a lack of
Wow, that shows a lack of integrity and a big F U to the average American worker. Don't listen to AM radio, but I will find a list of their adverising sponsors and let them know I will no longer be patronizing their businesses / buying their products.
Eyeheart controls much of the Boston FM dial too
Start with "Jam'n" 94.5, "Kiss" 108, and "the Bull" 101.7. The forthcoming deal will add WZLX 100.7 (from CBS), and WKAF 97.7 (from Entercom) to Eyeheart's portfolio. On the AM dial, in addition to WBZ 1030 (from CBS), they're also getting WRKO 680 (from Entercom).
Why we're in this mess
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act, which allows one company to own eight stations in a market.
Vote Democrat again. Funny, I thought that was the party of the working people.
Read much?
Which party was in Congress at the time? Trump's FCC is working hard at eliminating the reminder of the ownership rules, net neutrality, etc.
Keep mindlessly ignoring the news.
I'm very aware of the news
Thank you very much. Yes, it was the GOP running Congress in 1996. People should also stop voting Republican, but at least there's no pretense of caring about the non-wealthy from those schmucks.
A less pithy response now that I'm at my laptop: I like markets, but some things are finite, and this is to be considered when protecting working people. I respect the right of IHR to not honor the old owner's union contracts.
Problem is, there's a finite number of AM frequencies on which the government will permit an entity to broadcast at 50,000 watts. FCC rules wouldn't allow the employees of WBZ to simply start their own station under the same terrestrial audience reach they enjoy now, so they're forced to ply their trade under an existing license owner.
With this sale, we'll be down to three companies owning every commercial FM frequency which serves Boston between 92.1 and 107.9 on the dial. The only one I can think of that's not owned by one of those three companies is 92.5, and that's a Haverhill station with a limited Boston reach. And I'm not sure it's for sale at any price.
FM radio still succeeds because people demand curation, whether they deem it hip to admit it or not. Internet radio will never truly succeed, because anybody can do it. It's impossible to parse the wheat from the chaff. The FM band is a construct which allows entities to develop a standard for what listenable radio should sound like. I'm not and never have been comfortable with a handful of companies controlling that.
And yes, this is a guy who often gets called "Ayn Rand" in response to his posts talking. I also support largely unlimited public access to waterways.
Will's Points
Should be regarded as completely moot. He openly stated that his posts on here should not be taken seriously or factually. The court of public opinion hereby tosses out every sentence in your last post.
Go get laid
Please.
Deal
Agreed; "I respect the right of IHR to not honor the old owner's union contracts."
And we all have the right to not support the station or its advertisers in any way.
Deal.
Neither of the two largest parties represent the working people
.
That's why I'm running as an independent
I'm discouraged and disgusted by the non thinking partisanship in this country.
Clinton was a Blue Dog Democrat
He took a lot of credit for advancing Republican priorities: welfare reform, NAFTA, and repealing Glass-Steagall, to name just three. Bill Clinton wasn't what my parents, who grew up in the Presidency of FDR, would have called a real Democrat.
I wrote President Clinton a letter when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act. I predicted that if he signed it, it would ruin local radio by encouraging massive consolidation in the industry and triggering a frenzy of speculation in radio station licenses, which, as you know, can be bought and sold almost freely, requiring only a rubber-stamp from the FCC which is merely a formality. Clinton wrote back, explaining that the Act would save consumers a great deal in long-distance phone charges and that he was going to sign it. And so he did.
As a consequence of that, we can't challenge the transfer of WBZ or any other station on the grounds that it is not in the interest of the community it's licensed to serve (Boston), as we once could. Only if Eyeheart has violated federal law or FCC regulations can we challenge it.
November 17 will be a black day in the history of Boston radio.
Better content, more in depth journalism please at WBZ !
Better content, more in depth journalism please at WBZ !
Why start now?
Despite the station's place in broadcast history, WBZ's news product has been little more than AP headlines read over the air with traffic, weather and sports peppered in between for at least two decades now. There hasn't been much there there in a while.
Reporters Roundup 12:30am weekdays WBZ-AM 1030 kHz
Reporters Roundup 12:30am weekdays WBZ-AM 1030 kHz and online at
http://boston.cbslocal.com/audio/wbz-newsradio-1030-reporters-roundup/
Are you even paying attention?
AP headlines? They have actual reporters, who work on stories, often two or three stories a day. Plus producers who work on other stories for the anchors to read. There's Carl Stevens up before dawn, at the airport during blizzards or out trying to find people to interview at 7 a.m. and Kim Tunnicliff and Karyn Regal and Doug Cope and Laurie Kirby running all over eastern Massachusetts all day and even old Mike Macklin sometimes goes out on stories and I'm sure I've forgotten a few.
Slight correction
WBZ's news product has been little more than AP headlines read over the air with a trillion commercials, plus a little bit of traffic, weather and sports peppered in between for at least two decades now. There hasn't been much there there in a while.
Because you don't have an FM radio?
Guy, the purpose of WBZ is breaking news, weather and traffic reports. You want to know about backups on 93 and the forecast every ten minutes, plus maybe the sports scores and some breaking news like hey, there was a shooting in Somerville or the governor just signed something that might affect you. They go more in depth on the reporter's roundup segments, outside of drivetime. During drivetime, they have a tight schedule. And to make the station economically viable, those reporters are working two or three stories a day. Some of the best, hardest-working reporters in Boston work at 'BZ and what's happening to them is beyond unfair.
But I bet you probably don't even listen.
Not likely
Under Eyeheart, WBZ may not even have a local newsroom.
Honor what contract?
Unless there was some clause requiring iHeart to inherit and honor the contract, there is no contract. I wish the unions well and it would be good PR for iHeart to honor the current agreements but a new owner shouldn't be bound by something they didn't agree to. From a business POV, I'm sure owning several stations in the same market allows for fewer employees who do the same thing. The economy of force.
Other than Howie Carr, Dan Rea and possibly Jeff Kuhner, most of the Boston AM talent is now replaceable. A few of the sports guys (now on FM) are probably worth keeping but at what salary? Look at most of the spokesmen and women for Marty Walsh and Charlie Baker. Mostly former Boston media who exited for the safety and pension of government work. They were smart to get out then.
Howie Carr, Dan Rea and Jeff Kuhner.
All you really need to know about Fishy.
Howie Carr works for himself
He buys time on WRKO and sells his show to about 50 stations across New England. The show comes "live from an undisclosed location" in Needham, about a mile from where I am sitting. Carr also has his own in-house advertising sales department. That sets him apart from most voices on the radio, which belong to station employees.
requiring reapplying to existing jobs is common
I'm curious to know how big of a pay cut everyone will take. I'm also curious to hear about how their benefits are impacted. I've seen this happen at many companies. The workers almost always get hit the hardest.
Just a reminder: Boston has two other news stations
Both WBUR (90.9 FM) and WGBH (89.7) have decently staffed newsrooms. No, they don't have traffic on the 3s, but, honestly, do you need that to know the traffic sucks?
Local news on AM-FM-HD radio...
Around the local radio dial what other AM-FM-HD radio stations have hourly news headlines or something?
Haven't listened to WBZ much since Brudnoy left us
Dan Rea (sp) is okay, but he's no Brudnoy.
Simulcasting the CBS evening news as WBZ does, is silly.
Phone apps have eliminated the need for traffic on the 3s (same with weather).
AM radio is becoming obsolete like the newspaper. Even Sports broadcasts are on FM.
The River 92.5 is the only station worth listening to anymore. As its slogan states: "Independent Radio"
"Independent radio" isn't.
WXRV 92.5 "The River" belongs to Beanpot Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Northeast Broadcasting, a chain that includes stations as far away as Wyoming.
Northeast is, however, owned by a Bedford, NH lawyer, Steven Silberberg, and not by a Wall Street-dominated company like Beaseley or Entercom.
The only truly independent FM's (other than college or public radio stations) are: WPLM "Easy" 99.1, WATD 95.9 (Marshfield; the call letters stand for "we're at the dump"), and WBOQ "North Shore" 104.9. There are a few low-powered exceptions, like WSRO's 40-watt presence at 102.1 in Framingham, but they are strictly local.
Running the "CBS Evening News
Running the "CBS Evening News" twice is what gets me (repeats at 7:30pm)
I wonder if the cutting of ties with CBS will affect that and their "60 Minutes" simulcast
Maybe the new owner
can do something about those Kars for Kids ads? And the new ones with that guy who rambles on about his cousin Maureen and his uncle Bobby and going to the packie and then some condescending blow-in from Minnesota comes on and tells us how their bank won't push the silent panic alarm when this townie clown or his cousin or his uncle walk in for a construction loan or something?
Re: Maybe the new owner...good luck on boycotting advertisers
Agree with above comment. A boycott of advertisers wouldn't do much unless you were planning on donating to Kars for Kids, or seeking addiction treatment, New England Fat Loss, Bill Kelly Financial (he just dropped dead) or a shed. As for Carr, Kuhner and Rea, few other local AM hosts in Boston that I'm aware of.
Dynamo handcrank radios.
What manufacturers' models of radios are the best AM-FM-HD radios with a dynamo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo hand crank?