The Boston Globe is discovering the difficulties of practicing the liberal polices it preaches in its newspaper. Its parent company, the New York Times, has ordered the numerous unions at the paper to accept pay cuts, the elimination of corporate funding of pensions, and more elastic rules on firing union members. I can't say the Globe's hypocrisy surprises me. I delivered the Boston Globe for more than five years in the 1980s. Over that time, I held three different paper routes--delivering two routes at once for a prolonged period--and temporarily absorbed additional routes when friends went on vacation. I'm not complaining. I earned a paper-route-to-college scholarship and forged intergenerational friendships with people born in the 19th century. But consider the flagrant disregard of so many of the labor laws that good liberals like the Globies champion in their treatment of paperboys, a profession that is about as thriving as door-to-door salesman. Child-labor laws aside, I started delivering the Boston Globe when I was eight years old. Minumum-wage laws aside, I initially made about thirty-five cents per full-time subscriber, deriving almost the entirety of my profits from customers who tipped, making probably $15-20 a week. And all fairness aside, when my customers refused payment, or feigned already having made the payment, I was responsible for paying the Globe for their paper. I'm sure there were lawful exceptions to minimum-wage and child-labor laws for paperboys, and I am grateful for them. It just seems strange that the primary beneficiary of these exceptions, and the primary beneficiary of the current beatdown of the union--the Boston Globe--sings such a different tune in its newspaper.

It’s funny that you have this story to tell Dan, because I had a similar story but a decade before you.

I delivered the Globe in a certain burg of Boston and had a three pickup route (that would be three legs of one route where I had to pickup and fold at stash point) making it a long slog everyday.

The pay stunk and the tips were the only reason getting up at 5am and walking miles would make the work worthwhile. But, the Globe people balked at having me or any other new deliverers scam our own tips until they said so. So I was busting hump for, essentially, nothing. Until I promised to quit.

So if it wasn’t for some threatening arm-twisting of the Globe’s lower management in their delivery department, they were more than willing to continue paying me jack while collecting the only supplemental cash that was making it worth getting up to do the job.

But, we know the high-minded hypocrisy, do as I say not as I do, of the liberals, don’t we? I expected no less and nothing has changed since. Mostly though, it’s the paper’s content and liberal lying that has me happy when bad things happen on Morrissey Blvd.

Ha, I also delivered the Globe, like '89-'90 in Framingham. I loved making about $13 a week, just enough to "rent" a Nintendo game for the weekend and get a couple slices from Subway Pizza. Ahh what memories of my indentured servitude.....

You should submit this in a letter to the Globe and the Times.

"There’s a mutinous mood on Morrissey Boulevard, as Boston Globe staffers lash out over a stunning ultimatum from parent company The New York Times [NYT] Co.

“They’re nickel-and-diming people,” said a Globe union official who spoke on condition of anonymity, adding that top executives at The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, “have ruined” the sagging broadsheet.

On Thursday, Times executives told representatives from the Boston paper’s 13 unions that they must trim $20 million from their budgets by May 1 or the Times would shut the paper down."

Will someone name the thirteen unions and state the number of emplyees they represent? I can find the Guild (700) and the Teamsters (200).