PD: Union card? Leave the county! Firing squad next? 

Newhouse Advance Publications has unveiled its latest union-busting tactic. 10 of the remain 14 Guild employees will be banished to out-lying county bureaus so that only non-union Cleveland.com workers can work in Cuyahoga County or Summit County.

The next step is obvious because it’s been done by management for a century: Put everyone you don’t want into a department or category, then a few months later eliminate the department or category. It’s capitalism version of the firing squad. No bullets needed.

Once the 10 are banished from Cuyahoga County the next step is to close down the PD bureaus in Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina and Portage counties. It’s coming. Count on it.

Those truncated ten might as well send out their job applications elsewhere. They are living on borrowed time.

With no union protection the final step also is obvious for those at Cleveland.com: Slash their pay. They’ll be lucky if they make minimum wages.

Putin couldn’t be more merciless and effective. At least there are no bullets in the PD firing squad.

The banished union members are investigative reporters Rachel Dissell and John Caniglia, arts and culture writers John Petkovic and Laura DeMarco,  real estate reporter Michelle Jarboe, medical reporter Ginger Christ, education reporter Patrick O'Donnell, features/Friday Magazine events writer Greg Burnett and photographers Gus Chan and Lisa DeJong.

The only exceptions, for now, are superb sports columnist Terry Pluto, once at 44 E. Exchange Street who writes a book a week, or so it seems, about sports; columnist Philip Morris; art and architecture critic Steve Litt; and travel writer Susan Glaser.

To read the excruciatingly painful Cleveland Scene article, click on https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2020/04/07/plain-dealer-put-out-to-pasture-in-final-death-blow-remaining-reporters-given-impossible-choice