The Windsor Star (Photo by Adelle Loiselle)The Windsor Star (Photo by Adelle Loiselle)
Windsor

Strike Deadline Approaching For Windsor Star

Windsor-Essex could soon be without its main daily newspaper.

A strike deadline of 12:01am Saturday is looming for over 180 employees at the Windsor Star.

Officials with the Joint Council of Unions (JCU), which is the bargaining representative for the three unions that represent Windsor Star workers, say they are prepared to set up picket lines if an agreement is not reached or talks are not scheduled before the deadline.

The employees have been working without a contract for over a year and overwhelmingly approved a strike mandate in December 2017.

The majority of the Star's workforce is part-time and stationed at the paper's printing facility off E.C. Row. The rest of the employees work in the paper's downtown offices, covering a variety of departments.

The JCU says the main issues are wages and job security, with Star employees receiving only a 1% wage increase over the past seven years due to freezes set by the paper's parent company, Postmedia.

"We know this company has challenges but you don't fix that on the backs of workers, by stripping away their wages and benefits," said Katha Fortier, assistant to Unifor's national president, in a statement released Thursday.

Postmedia owns newspapers of varying sizes and prestige across Canada, but the media group has faced tremendous criticism for giving their executives huge raises and bonuses, while cutting newsroom jobs, and closing small-town and online newspapers nationwide.

A spokesperson for the JCU says cuts in the Star's reporting staff have hampered the paper's coverage of key beats such as crime, courts, municipal government and education. Postmedia says, however, that print newsrooms need to adapt to changing news appetites, as well as declining circulation and ad revenue.

According to News Media Canada, the Star is Canada's 20th largest newspaper, with circulation in 2015 (the most recent year surveyed) at below 50,000. However, the report also says that in 2016, over 31-million newspapers were distributed in Canada each week, in print and online forms.

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