One year and counting; the Journal de Montreal lockout

Today marks the first anniversary of the lockout of the Journal de Montreal workers by the paper's owners, Quebecor Media. The staff is marking the occasion with the $20-a-ticket "solidarity benefit concert".  If history is any indicator, this lockout may continue even longer; its predecessor at the Journal de Quebec lasted 16 months.

BCAMP demurs

Silence continues to emanate from the tiny headquarters of the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers in the tower of the historic Sun Building in Vancouver, where as reported in an earlier post, the air has been rank with unpleasantness. Nine months or more have passed since the eruption of a “labour dispute” that has yet to be named or discussed before the membership, or even settled by the directors of BCAMP, including those elected in June of 2007.

The labour dispute, also referred to as a “staffing dispute,” appears to be embedded in larger problems of insiderism, coterie-building, and conflict of interest.

On September 2, two ex-directors of BCAMP (I am one of them) outlined the following complaints in an email sent to each of the current BCAMP directors, none of whom has responded:

1. Unresolved staffing dispute not disclosed to board or to the membership at the AGM.
2. President’s refusal to deal with member concerns.
3. Improper denial of member participation on committees.
4. Failure to schedule an external investigation as advised by the Mediator engaged to resolve the “staffing dispute.”
5. Conflicts of interest: research contracts.
6. Questionable documents: A policy and procedures manual never adopted by the membership.
7. Improper procedures: minutes improperly kept; job and salary reviews not made.
8. Inexperienced board of directors kept in the dark.
9. A climate of secrecy and bad faith.

One of the new directors of BCAMP resigned from the board in the summer of 2007, although his name remains on the BCAMP web page.

BCAMP lists 63 member publishers on its web page.

BCAMP up in the air

For the last six months, the BC Association of Magazine Publishers has been stumbling along under veils of secrecy thrown over a putative “labour dispute” that has been boiling away since February, an odd state of affairs for a staff consisting of two people working in one room. No mention of the dispute was made at the BCAMP Annual General Meeting in June, and the only committee that made no report to the AGM was the so-called Human Resources Committee, whose members were not identified.

In the aftermath of the AGM, a few rank-and-filers learned to their dismay that at least some of the Directors on the board knew nothing about the “dispute,” which had become so inflamed that the two employees engaged or embroiled in it were permitted to work in the same room only in the presence of a third party. This policy (unreported to the membership and at least some of the Board) must have posed no difficulty as the BCAMP office is (in my memory) a tiny room in the spire of the historic Sun Tower on Pender Street, where third parties have merely to open the door to separate first and second parties in the act of lunging for each other’s throats.

Attempts by BCAMP members to find out what’s going on with either the “dispute,” which is still unresolved, or with the anonymous Human Resources Committee, have been spurned in emails from the president who, having consulted a “solicitor” and a “litigator,” has concluded that no discussion of the putative dispute can include rank-and-file members, who unlike board members are unprotected against “potential liability” and therefore would be putting themselves at risk. (The same rank-and-filers observe however unfairly that BCAMP has operated for years as a coterie of board members determined to protect the membership from damaging itself with too much information.)

Publishing spectacles are not unknown to the historic Sun Tower, originally the World Tower, when it was the tallest building in the British Empire (103 metres), and owned by the World newspaper. In 1918 Harry Gardiner, aka the Human Fly, scaled its heights equipped only with bare fingers and sneakers, while thousands watched from the street. Five years later, after the Vancouver Sun moved into the tower, another huge crowd gathered in the street to watch Harry Houdini escape from a straitjacket while dangling from a rope above the sidewalk. They just don’t make publishing spectacles like they used to anymore.