The Gannett Company, the nation's largest newspaper publisher, said on Wednesday that it would force thousands of its employees to take a week off without pay in an effort to avoid layoffs.Gannett, which owns 85 daily newspapers across the United States including its flagship USA Today, said it could not say exactly how many people would be required to take time off, or how much money the company would save. But it said it would require unpaid leave for most of its 31,000 employees in this country.
Also on Wednesday, USA Today notified its staff of a one-year pay freeze for all employees.
"Most of our U.S. employees -- including myself and all other top executives -- will be furloughed for the equivalent of one week in the first quarter," Craig A. Dubow, the chairman, president and chief executive, wrote in a memorandum to employees. "We sincerely hope this minimizes the need for any layoffs going forward," he added.
The company cannot impose the measure unilaterally on employees covered by a union contract, but Mr. Dubow said Gannett was asking unions to participate voluntarily. Tara Connell, a company spokeswoman, said about 12 percent of Gannett's domestic employees were unionized.
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With the newspaper industry in increasingly dire financial straits, Gannett's mandatory week off takes its place in a growing list of grave moves like widespread layoffs, the newspapers in Detroit halting home delivery four days of the week, the bankruptcy filing of the Tribune Company and warnings from the owners of The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer that those papers could shut down.
A second memo to Gannett employees says that some categories of "essential employees" will be exempted from the enforced time off, as will newly hired employees, but it adds, "there will be no individual hardship exceptions." It also says that to comply with federal and state labor laws, a furloughed employee must strictly observe a no-work rule, not even "reading or responding to e-mails, calling or responding to calls from colleagues."
Gannett eliminated 3,500 jobs throughout the company in 2007, and a similar numberlast year, though it has not provided a final 2008 figure. The deepest round of cuts came last fall, when it laid off some 2,000 or more newspaper employees in little more than a month.
Most of Gannett's newspapers are small, but they include some major papers, including USA Today, The Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic. In this country, it also has hundreds of smaller, nondaily papers and 23 television stations.
In Britain, the company publishes 17 daily newspapers and hundreds of smaller publications.