Le Monde Strike Stops Presses

Le Monde, France's newspaper of record, was not published today for only the second time in its 64-year history after staff went on strike over proposals for savage job cuts.

The evening daily was not available at Parisian newsstands at lunchtime and will not be available in other French cities later today or tomorrow.

Today's 24-hour strike comes after Le Monde's management announced earlier this month that 130 jobs would have to go - two-thirds of which would be in the newsroom - as part of a plan that they say would safeguard the paper's future.

The newsroom cuts represent one-in-four journalists at the paper or about 87 staff.

Le Monde's management also plans to sell several assets, including cinema magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma; a monthly title on dancing; a religious literature bookshop chain; and a publishing house.

Earlier today, about 100 people demonstrated outside the daily's Paris headquarters, most of them employees of Le Monde group.

Staff at Le Monde's website, lemonde.fr, which is published by a sister company of the paper, have also today not updated the site with articles from the print edition, in solidarity with their colleagues on the title.

Le Monde staff, gathered in a general assembly earlier today, voted to mandate representatives to negotiate a new plan with management. The motion was passed overwhelmingly: 251 people for, nil against and four abstentions.

Employees want management to make all redundancies voluntary and refrain from selling the assets it has planned to let go.

Le Monde, printed every day except Sunday, is available from about 1pm in Paris, while the rest of France gets it either in the evening or the following day. The edition that should have come out today would have been dated Tuesday, April 15.

This is the first time that Le Monde staff have stopped the presses over an internal dispute and only the second time ever in its history that the newspaper has not come out.

In 1976, employees stopped publication of Le Monde in solidarity with their then colleagues at the France Soir newspaper, which had been sold to a new proprietor.

Readers were warned in advance of today's non-publication. "Le Monde absent from newsstands" on Tuesday, read a headline on the front page of the weekend print edition, dated Sunday, April 13.

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