Benefits of an “employee friendly” management structure?

While the general operating structure of  the “NEWCO” Corporation imagined by the Newspaper Guild would be familiar, there should also be important opportunities for improving the day to day work environment and decision-making practices of “NEWCO” to be consistent with its “employee friendly” origins. If significant employee ownership is a feature of the final “NEWCO” ownership structure, it should be possible for management and labor to construct a new form of “partnership” that has both economic and psychological underpinnings. Such a partnership should contain adequate incentives for up to now, unrealized levels of transparency, efficiency, communication and trust.  Such a partnership should produce newspapers that can serve their communities without the same kind of distractions that industry commentators agree have undermined the profession of journalism in recent decades.

The employee owned “NEWCO” imagined by the Newspaper Guild would not be “utopia.”  It would create its own, new challenges and headaches, and would probably retain certain of its old ones as well.  But it would also offer NEWCO employees, union and non-union, a special opportunity to have a real economic stake in their work place, to have a new voice its strategic future, and the ability to improve the conditions of  their day-to-day work. The structure the Newspaper Guild imagines would represent a departure for the newspaper industry at a time when new thinking is needed more than ever before.