Newspaper Guild OKs Cuts to Keep N.Y. Post Alive : Media: Union members agree to a 20% pay reduction and the elimination of 43 jobs. They were warned that a ‘no’ vote meant death for the paper.

The long-ailing New York Post survived another threatened shutdown Monday as the last of its nine unions voted for contract concessions that management said were needed to keep the boisterous tabloid alive.

In a tumultuous meeting, members of the Post’s Newspaper Guild voted 242 to 45 to accept a proposal that will cut the guild’s workers to a four-day work week and eliminate 43 jobs. The paper’s eight other unions accepted concession packages in negotiations last Friday.

“A vote of ‘no’ and this paper is out tonight,” Thomas Pennuchio, guild secretary, warned union members at a 1 1/2-hour meeting that stirred anger and tears.

Guild members said the vote may have succeeded because of owner Peter S. Kalikow’s assurances Monday that severance benefits would be available to any guild member who wanted to leave. The assurances removed an incentive for guild members to vote no to ensure that they would at least receive severance benefits provided by the federal plant-closing law.

The law provides that employers must give 60 days’ notice to employees before their plant is shut down or give them 60 days’ compensatory pay. The Post employees would have been entitled to such assistance if the paper had closed its doors.

In a statement, Kalikow hailed the vote as a “victory.” “This is New York, 1990. The realities are harsh,” said Kalikow, who has lost more than $100 million since buying the paper in 1988. “But we can look to the future with confidence and measured optimism.”

For its Tuesday editions, Post editors were last night considering using one of two front-page headlines: “Yes!” and “Whew!”

New York’s third-largest daily, the 504,000-circulation Post has lost money for two decades and teetered on the edge of collapse several times in the past half-century. But its losses have worsened recently, amid a deepening regional recession and tough competition from the Daily News; New York Newsday, the city’s edition of the big Long Island newspaper, and other publications. (Newsday is owned by Times Mirror Co., which also publishes the Los Angeles Times.)

The Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton and others, and in recent years it has become a symbol of the old-style metropolitan journalism that entices readers with a steady flow of crime news, scandal and irreverent humor.

Kalikow, a real estate developer, announced three weeks ago that he would shut the Post unless its unions came up with concessions to reduce losses that he said would total $27 million this year. The package that received a final blessing Monday night would produce savings of about $20 million, including about $5 million from the guild’s givebacks, negotiators said.

Of the roughly two dozen guild members who spoke at the union meeting, many said the union should vote down the offer in an attempt to force Kalikow to make a better one. But the guild’s leadership warned that Kalikow meant what he said.

At a press conference later, Guild President Barry Lipton said he viewed the deal with “mixed emotions” because of the hardship a 20% pay cut would entail. And he predicted that many would take the severance package and leave the paper.

Bill Hoffmann, a Post reporter, said he loved working at the Post but planned to do “a lot of soul searching over whether I’ll take the money and run.”

“A lot of people are angry beyond belief,” said Hoffmann. “People have had no raises for almost three years; they’ve given their blood to this paper. Now they want to cut off a leg as well.”

As part of the proposal first put forth last Friday, the Post negotiators said the paper would offer voluntary severance packages to 36 guild members; it also would lay off seven junior members of the staff hired under a special clause of the contract.

But on Monday afternoon, management told guild members that there was no limit on how many employees would be entitled to apply for the voluntary severance package.

Guild members said the greatest opposition to the proposal seemed to be among the non-editorial members of the guild--the clerks, secretaries, artists and other employees of the circulation, advertising and editorial departments. The guild’s journalists make a minimum of $850 a week, but many other guild members make far less and don’t have the same opportunity to supplement their wages with free-lance writing assignments.

“We have people who will be taking home less than $200 a week after these cuts,” Harry Leykis, an advertising employee who is a member of the guild’s 10-person negotiating committee, said Monday afternoon. “I’m going to vote against this on principle, and I’m going to get up at the meeting and make some noise.”

Though the Post will continue publishing, the concession agreements haven’t removed the questions about the paper’s future. For one thing, the paper’s costs will continue to rise, and if the recession deepens, advertising may fall off further.

The Post has already been operating with a skeleton staff, and it remains to be seen how well it can function with 20% fewer worker hours from the guild members. And the other unions--for press operators, drivers, mailers and others--have also taken staff cuts.

The staff cutbacks have recently had effects on the paper’s editorial quality that are painfully apparent, some reporters say. The paper carried a wire service report, rather than a staff-produced story, to cover the recent opening of the Ellis Island immigration memorial.

But Jerry Nachman, the Post’s editor, insisted that the paper could function with an even smaller staff.

“These people are the commandos of journalism,” said Nachman, who said his “overwhelming emotion right now is gratitude.”

Many at the paper believe that the Post will survive only with the failure of the Daily News, which is also financially weakened and is most like the Post in its coverage. For the past six months, the Daily News has been locked in a bitter battle with its unions.