Journos talk back: Publishers fight unions unfairly, in press pages

Canadian journalists took to the streets yesterday, clamoring for discretion in their collective bargaining process with La Presse, North America's largest French-language publication, Radio-Canada reported yesterday. The staffers say that as long as publishers leverage thinly-veiled threats of job loss reported in their pages to wage their labour-and-employment battle, workers will be forced to air publicly their side of the struggle, too.

"You feel the pressure, you feel your jobs are threatened, so, inevitably, you're weaker and the feeling is very palpable in the people and this fear becomes an asset to the employer," Karim Benessaieh was quoted by Radio-Canada as saying in French.