This morning's monthly IDA hearing, though, was widely anticipated for a different reason: One of the items on the agenda was $24 million in sales tax breaks on office and building materials to Thomson Reuters, the news-and-information-services giant created when the Canadian firm Thomson bought the wire service Reuters in 2008. Ten years earlier, Reuters had gotten approval for $26 million in tax breaks from the Giuliani Administration, but never used most of them, in large part because it never met its goal of maintaining 1,800 workers in the city. The new proposal would essentially tear up Thomson Reuters' old deal and set out a new job goal of 3,744 workers; if it falls short, it would forfeit some of the cash, and if it exceeds that threshold it would be eligible for bonus credits.
The added attention was not because of the subsidy proposal, which is unremarkable in the annals of city tax breaks. Rather, it was because Thomson Reuters is in the midst of a labor dispute with the Newspaper Guild: This January, the company unilaterally declared an impasse in contract talks, and imposed a set of pay cuts (including no longer paying extra for off-hours work) and new work rules that "are aimed at nothing less than eliminating the Guild as the employees' representative," according to Chris Shelton, vice-president of District 1 of the Communications Workers of America, the Guild's parent union. The Guild currently has an unfair labor practice charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board against Thomson Reuters.
Yesterday, public advocate Bill de Blasio and councilmembers James Sanders and Margaret Chin held a press conference on the steps of City Hall calling on the IDA to spike the Thomson Reuters tax breaks, with de Blasio asserting, "Looking at what's happening to our economy, looking at what's happening to government budgets everywhere, we've got to get more return for investment."
None of these elected officials showed up at the IDA hearing, leaving it to Shelton to state the case against the deal. "Thomson Reuters shouldn't be rewarded for losing jobs, not creating jobs," he told the IDA board."And that's what Thomson Reuters has done over the years." (Thomson Reuters said this was largely because the company had divested itself of a New York-based subsidiary, which no longer counts toward its job count.) Guild president Bill O'Meara added that Reuters has been at the forefront of outsourcing journalism jobs, earning notoriety for hiring reporters in Bangalore to cover Wall Street.
When Economic Development Corporation president Seth Pinsky noted that the new deal would require Thomson Reuters to adhere to any resolution of the NLRB dispute, Shelton replied: "Under federal law they would have to abide by them. So they're giving you ice in the winter."
In his testimony, Thomson Reuters marketing president for the Americas Chris Perry said the new deal is needed to "get the commitment of the merged company to stay in New York City." He added: "We have several unused facilities that include Stamford, Connecticut, Hauppauge, New York, Nutley, New Jersey, and Jersey City, all of which are available to look at as options," and complained that the IDA shouldn't listen to "attempts to transform this proceeding into a referendum on a private labor dispute."
