32. Downsizing celebrants should be seen to be hurting

Unpublished
20 March 1995

While we no longer shoot messengers who bring us bad news, we also don’t expect them to so openly enjoy the telling. During the expected years of deficit-cutting, is there any way to deter editorialists and columnists from their macabre celebrations of current and future job losses?
May I reverse the suggestion-flow from recent post-federal budget editorials (e.g. A new culture at the Canada Council - editorial, March 15) by recommending that we subscribers and advertisers demand from Globe and Mail management a more cost-effective product. Only the foolish would want to unnecesarily contribute to the salaries, security or comfort of the callous.
Here are some “tough love” possibilities:
1. In order to cut ”egregious levels of overhead” , The Globe and Mail can save money by moving its Toronto offices into cheaper, underheated, industrial premises.
2. To “cut waste,” at least half the administration and support service jobs could be re-allocated. Globe and Mail columnists and all Report on Business writers could be expected to form shifts to clean the toilets on weekdays, wash and scrub the delivery trucks and sell advertising on weekends.
3. Unfortunately, reductions in staff may no be longer enough. The entire editorial staff could profitably now be given pink slips. There is after all a surplus of well-educated unemployed with the necessary writing and information-gathering skills and compassionate ties with the mass of contemporary society. Such a labour pool could easily supply reader-wise editorial product for at least half of the current editorial costs.
Such measures may not in themselves act as an effective remedial treatment. Therefore should some of your current editorial ghouls think they could slip the net and find other media employers, may we further suggest for public contemplation that a list of those who have most vigourously advocated job-cuts be circulated. Those persons would in effect be blacklisted and be unemployable until the end of the next recession, that is until approximately the year 2000. Furthermore, and unlike in the past, their dismissals would not now be cushioned by institutions of education, government or the church as such employers have or will have decreased their own hiring needs.
These jobless editorial staffers should not expect severance packages. Additionally, their pension funds would have been liquidated to help pay of the national debt - the deficit having already been taken care of thanks to their many tirades, implorings and outpourings.
If ‘hurting’ is the new civic duty , then surely the job-cutting, debt-erasing celebrants who inhabit the punditry of journalism should expect to hurt and be seen to be hurting ?