Los Angeles Times Management sent buyout offers this week to a small group of employees that the paper’s union say “egregiously” violate employee contracts, Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday.
According to Darcy, the staffers in question, largely newsroom veterans, had volunteered to accept buyouts during an earlier series of cuts. They were given just 48 hours to decide whether or not to accept, an offer LA Times guild chair Matt Hamilton said in a memo to members was “rushed/botched” and also “egregiously violates our contract.”
Hamilton also said that management failed to notify the guild of of the buyout offers as required by the current contract, and worse that the offers were “roughly half of what select members were entitled to,” Darcy reported.
Representatives for the LA Times Union didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from TheWrap. Representatives for the Los Angeles Times also didn’t immediately respond.
This all comes amid a brutal year for the storied west coast paper, which has been beset by a series of layoffs and buyouts, as well as an ideological shift mandated by billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
In early may, 14 staffers were let go, with Carrillo Peñaloza, an assistant editor on the breaking news team, art director Susana Sanchez and investigative reporter Ben Poston among the casualties.
In march, dozens of employees in operations and communications sections were let go, a culling that came shortly after 40 newsroom employees accepted buyouts. These cuts came after the paper lost at least 25,000 subscribers in the weeks after Soon-Shiong overrode the paper’s editorial board to cancel a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
AdWeek reported in April that LA Times lost “around $50 million” in 2024.
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