Skip to content

As The Guardian finds out, this capitalism stuff is tough

The Guardian delays pay rises in struggle to break even

Hmm.

The Guardian is attempting to avoid the full impact of staff pay rises this year as managers struggle to meet their pledge to end a long run of heavy losses.

The news publisher is in the final year of a three-year turnaround plan and chief executive David Pemsel and editor Katharine Viner are aiming for its operations to break even for the first time in two decades.

But of course all employers should be providing good jobs, at good pay, the capitalists and their profits be damned, no?

31 thoughts on “As The Guardian finds out, this capitalism stuff is tough”

  1. Bloke in North Dorset

    If they haven’t turned a profit for 2 decades that means the mid ‘90s when the Internet and more importantly WWW we’re about to take off. Google was formed in 1998.

    So, either they were the very first victim of a company that had only just launched or their business model was crap and their failure nothing to do with the rise of the Internet.

  2. Thankfully for them they avoided a great deal of tax on the sale of Auto Trader worth about £1.2 billion at the time.

    Still, I’m sure all the staff will forgo their very jobs, let alone a pay rise, to enable the Grindad to come clean and cough up.

  3. Another big corporation with no sense of social responsibility.

    Well over 200 million in revenue, and they won’t be paying a penny in corporation tax. Yet again. And while attempting to impose austerity on the staff by ripping up a pay agreement.

    We can only hope that Owen and others fight back against neoliberal farce.

  4. None of these people can be let go:

    https://www.theguardian.com/index/contributors

    Because we have questions we need answered:

    ‘Fit in my 40s: is it a good idea to go running with my dog?’

    As long as Moonbat is on staff, they aren’t serious.

    And how did this article get in the Telegraph? Did the Guardian ask them to publish? The article has too many details to not have been provided by the Guardian.

  5. In the interests of promoting the Guardian’s point of view, the following may be willing to offer their views for free. Many of them are, after all, fvcking minted.

    Richard Ackland
    Reza Aslan
    Van Badham
    Frankie Boyle
    Adam Brereton
    Emma Brockes
    Oliver Burkeman
    Megan Carpentier
    Rebecca Carroll
    Aditya Chakrabortty
    Nick Cohen
    Victoria Coren Mitchell
    Barbara Ellen
    Jonathan Freedland
    Hannah Giorgis
    Will Hutton
    Simon Jenkins
    Martin Kettle
    Antony Loewenstein
    Jeb Lund
    Syreeta McFadden
    David Mitchell
    George Monbiot
    Hugh Muir
    Anne Perkins
    Andrew Rawnsley
    Eleanor Robertson
    Rebecca Solnit
    Jeff Sparrow
    Ranjana Srivastava
    Polly Toynbee
    Jessica Valenti

  6. They piss money away. Their event space in London, the American project. They have tons of people in King’s Cross who could be in Swindon like the web or app teams.

    The media is going to end up being like Quilette, Red Letter Media and Guido. Run it with off-the-shelf stuff with a small number of people writing good content, and no chaff.

  7. Talking of Guido, he’s been running a series of stories for the last week or more about the national Student’s Union also on the verge of going bust. This after (surely) their numbers being lifted lads by all the increase in ‘students’ over the last 20 years or so!

  8. Lockers,

    The reason about 99% of people joined the student union was for the discount card. It easily paid for itself just on the National Express discount.

    What’s happened over the past few years is that there’s other student ID cards that have appeared like ISIC cards, Studentbeans, all fighting for the same people.

  9. The NUS has been fucked by individual unions dis-affiliating because the NUS appears to be run by Jew-hating lunatics. So, less money coming in, but the nutty spending goes on regardless.

  10. Pingback: You’d Need A Heart Of Stone – Longrider

  11. Edinburgh was non NUS for centuries, then post 2000 snowflakes voted to affiliate.

    iirc
    votes was something like 300 join, 100 don’t – ~9,000 students didn’t vote, probably didn’t even know there was a vote.

  12. Surely the journalists at the Guardian will defend the staff right to have a pay rise against the evil owners determined to keep staff down.

  13. “How long can the Scott Trust support the Guardian?”

    A long time unfortunately. I think they have a billion in net assets roughly, and I don’t think they have many liabilities beyond the guardian.

  14. Odd isn’t it. The Guardian is stuffed full of contributors who are constantly telling us how businesses should be run along fluffy unicorn and rainbow lines and how brilliant this would be and yet they don’t seem to be able to run their own business….

  15. All Guardian employees should be paid a living wage. Of course, the living wage for Polly, George et al is considerably more than that for one of the ordinary little people, and rightly so given their importance to the national discourse.

  16. To defend George ever such a little bit. He publishes his Guardian contract on his website. From memory it brings in maybe £40,000 a year. That’s only a little above – and I do mean a little – normal freelance rates.

    Yes, I know, different paper, but do a 1,000 word proper column for The Times and it is – or was at least – £600. Do 50 of those a year and that’s £30k. Getting £40 k as an above the line and mainstream named columnist isn’t excessive pay at all. Daily Mail pays £1,200 for a standard column and Liz Jones certainly used to get £1,750 a piece.

    Polly on the other hand is on well over £100k.

  17. I thought I was seeing things & Owen Jones had got a new gig. Wife was caching up on Coronation St, I happened to glance up from the laptop and there was this young lad, the spit of OJ, talking to the gay vicar character they have on there.

  18. @Tim Worstall, December 17, 2018 at 5:48 pm

    Liz Jones certainly used to get £1,750 a piece.

    Really? For her weekly “have pity me on me, I’m bankrupt and single” whine? Is that what woman want to read?

  19. Thank God we have all these other papers bulling up property prices so smelly old ladies can rent out houses for £850 a month to couples trying to bring up children where there’s no jobs and braveheart Brits can make a years wages in capital gains from straight house price inflation in places they also live in.Fucking moral degenerates.
    And its not as if the country shoes any notional profit; nothing works.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *