Resolutions passed by MEAA members at Fairfax Sydney, May 10, 2016

Resolution passed by staff at Fairfax Metros during a stopwork meeting in Sydney on May 10, 2016:

We, the staff of the Sydney and Melbourne editorial news floors want to recognise the decades of experience that are walking out the door. We are disgusted that the company did not take all the steps it could to minimise these job losses, and has broken hearts while still paying exorbitant bonuses to executives. We are losing some of our best journalists and artists. This is a decision that has caused considerable angst and misery to the people we have worked with for many years. We resolve to support them through this difficult period and give them a big send off as they leave their respective mastheads.

Additionally, the staff of the Sydney newsroom unanimously passed the following resolutions:

1. We believe the quality of the journalists leaving our newsrooms is not matched by the overpaid and underperforming executives Greg Hywood and Allen Williams, who have demonstrated no strategy to adapt to a fast changing media environment beyond cutting jobs;
2. As such this meeting passes a vote of no confidence in Fairfax senior leadership who have been unable to present a coherent and viable plan to raise revenue for this company. We condemn the ongoing lack of vision being presented to Fairfax staff and we call on Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood and APM Director Allen Williams to address the floor to outline their plans to slow decline and raise revenue to ensure we can continue the important work of delivering quality journalism to our readership;
3. That Fairfax management censure and counsel those managers who breached their commitment to respect and dignity through the inappropriate and highly insensitive manner in which they informed staff of their compulsory redundancy;
4. To reconvene again in 24 hours to hear the response from Fairfax management to these resolutions.