By DPA,
Paris : Employees for France’s most prestigious newspaper, Le Monde, went on strike Monday for only the second time in the daily’s 64-year history to protest planned job cuts.
The evening publication, which calls itself France’s newspaper of record, did not appear on newsstands Monday afternoon and was not available on the internet.
On Monday morning, employees voted overwhelmingly to demand a renegotiation of the plan put forward by owners to address the newspaper’s financial difficulties, which called for the axing of 130 jobs, 85 to 90 of them in the newsroom.
The 24-hour strike is the first at Le Monde since 1976, when employees stopped publication of the paper to support their colleagues at France Soir, which had been sold to a new owner.
In 2007, the Le Monde group lost 20 million euros ($31.4 million), with debts of 150 million euros.