Journalists at Thomson Financial News fear compulsory redundancies after the company’s merger with Reuters completed last week.
The new Thomson Reuters company employs more than 50,000 people worldwide – including 2,800 journalists – and has not ruled out compulsory redundancies in any of its departments.
The TFN NUJ chapel was this week planning to hold a ‘consultative ballot’on whether to hold industrial action after passing a motion this week condemning ‘management’s insistence that there will be job losses in editorial and that some of these will be forced through as compulsory redundancies.”
It said: ‘We are concerned that a lack of meaningful consultation with unions so far is only masking attempts to present a fait accompli after the official closure of the merger, given that work is clearly taking place to identify where job cuts can be made.
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‘As a result, we feel we have no option at this stage but to conduct a consultative ballot of our members to consider industrial action.”
The chapel said it would wait for a ‘global roundtable’meeting with unions and executives on 1 May before making any further decisions, and said its aim was to ‘settle this through negotiation”.
Tom Glocer, CEO of the merged company, has said that news and journalism would be an ‘integral’part of the company’s future.
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A spokesperson for Thomson Reuters said: ‘There will be some redundancies but that does not particularly relate to the newsroom or any specific division across the whole group of 50,000 employees.
‘Thomson Reuters is looking to make cost savings within three years of $500m but much of that will be taken out of things like building costs.”
She said that both Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters, and David Schlesinger, editor-in-chief, had both committed publically to the importance of news and journalism and said it was a ‘growth area”.
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