Former Dow Jones & Co. CEO Peter Kann, who retired from the company at Wednesday’s annual meeting after a career that included winning a Pulitzer Prize while a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, received a hostile sendoff, according to Reuters reporter Robert MacMillan, writing on a Reuters blog.
MacMillan wrote, “He got his sendoff at the annual shareholder’s meeting in New York on Wednesday, but not before some reporters took the company to task over cost cuts and proposed benefit and wage changes in contract negotiations.
“WSJ war correspondent and union member Michael Phillips brought the flamethrower:
– ‘Managers now routinely tell reporters to take their own photos, shoot their own video, write and read their own broadcast scripts to accompany the stories they write. Other newspapers devote entire staffs to these jobs. Dow Jones, however, wants to have this work for free.’
– On the 2.5 percent annualized raise now on the bargaining table: ‘We understand that this increase is below the 3.1 percent average inflation rate over the past two dozen years. This is a pay cut, not a pay raise.’
– On Chief Executive Rich Zannino’s car allowance: ‘In 2006, Mr. Zannino received $173,441 to cover commuting costs from his Connecticut home to Manhattan. That means that each and every working day, the company pays $667 just to get him to come to the office. He gets more to sit in the back of a limo than we get to go into combat… To us it seems very clear: we take the risks, top managers reap the rewards.'”
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