And the Guild blinks

Not that they had much choice. I think the Times had the stronger hand to play due to the undeniable industry-wide stress and the economy.

Besides the fact that it could unilaterally impose the wage cuts after making its "last best offer" management did have a powerful argument that the very survival of the paper and therefore all the jobs was at stake. The lifetime job guarantee was not a popular position to defend to the public and it created a divide in interests between those older members of the union that it applied to and everybody else. As a general rule I think union bargaining positions are badly compromised when management can exploit a division in the ranks.

Of course, there's a very good chance that the union's sacrifices will be in vain and the paper may fail anyway, but like many emergency measures you simply do what you can now and hope for the best.

I do think there is a lesson to be derived from this for unions (and similar lessons from the fate of the autoworkers) and that is unions should be very wary of making concessions on current interests in favor of promises for the future. This is not only because management has an incentive to make promises that it cannot keep (and may have no intention of keeping. While this is a possibility, it's also true that even if management is making the promise in all good faith the simple fact is that management can't foresee the future. There is no telling what the economic reality will look like 10 or 20 years down the road. And if the money isn't there then to keep the promise it will not be kept. Only in the case of pensions -- which have some legal protection, insurance and government backing -- has that long-term bet paid off. Any promise not backed up by that kind of a system is at the mercy of conditions when the bill is due on the promise. And if the company is doing well, it's probable that the union could get a better deal then anyway.