Bangladesh’s Daily Star starts firing employees as pandemic bites

The Daily Star has started sacking the first batch of employees as the English-language newspaper’s circulation shrank and ad revenue collapsed amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The newspaper has drawn a plan to sack about 35 employees, asking them to resign by Aug 19 or be terminated, three of the employees who are facing the axe told bdnews24.com on Monday. The employees will get eight months of basic salary as the exit package.

The employees declined to be named in this report citing the sensitivity of the issue as they fear reprisals from the top bosses of the newspaper.

“I was taken aback when I received a phone call around 1 pm from the HR Department. The HR guy said there were two options open -- resign or get terminated. I’ve served the company so well for so long. Now I have to go,” one employee told bdnews24.com by phone.

The job-cut plan mainly targeted the newspaper’s support and non-news staff, especially those employed to its IT and production units.

The dismissals, one of the biggest in Bangladesh’s overcrowded newspaper industry in recent times, came a day after the Board of Directors finalised the decision on Aug 16.

The plan for job cuts was in the making for quite some time, but it was expedited after the death of Transcom Group Chairman Latifur Rahman, one of the owners of the newspaper, according to the employees.

“It wouldn’t have happened if Latifur Rahman had been alive,” said one of the 10 “computer operators” who were asked to resign. The man is losing his job, nine years ahead of his retirement. “It’s hard to believe it came in the midst of a pandemic,” he said as he spoke to bdnews24.com from his home. He worried about his future as it will be difficult to secure another job during the pandemic.

A wave of panic spread among computer operators, a key element in conventional news production, after The Daily Star switched from CorelDraw, a graphics-related program, to page-design software InDesign about two years ago, and trained newsroom editors on how to bring out pages without assistance from those operators. 

Only seven computer operators were left unscathed.

Mahfuz Anam, editor and publisher of The Daily Star, warned the newspaper’s employees of the financial rout ahead of the job cuts.

The Daily Star disbursed 50 percent of the basic salary of employees as Eid-ul-Fitr festival allowance, which was equivalent to 25 percent of the usual festival allowance.

In a note to his employees on May 13, Anam cited the crunch time the newspaper was passing through in business due to the coronavirus pandemic since the end of March.

The newspaper’s circulation has decreased by 75 percent and revenue has fallen by 80 percent. This has resulted in a revenue loss of Tk 80 million in just two months -- in April and May, according to the note seen by bdnews24.com.

“I would like to point that when several national newspapers and TV channels are unable to pay monthly salary and when big newspapers in the region and around the world are cutting monthly salaries we are still trying to maintain full salary payment,” Anam wrote.

As the financial haemorrhage continued, the newspaper again reduced the Eid-ul-Azha bonus by 50% in July.

bdnews24.com sought comments from Anam on the job cuts, but he refused to speak on the issue in the middle of the night.