Thanks for the advice Dave2009.

I'm retired. so I doubt manholes from overpasses will be dropping on me any time soon. One of the things that turned me into a Conservative over the years was seeing how corrupt Newspaper management can be and dealing with their lying carcasses while they made up the rules as they went along and people bought their BS because, after all, they ARE a newspaper and if you can't believe what you read in the paper what can you believe?

If it turns out these people are also involved than it is the newspapers that are being looked into and not the union.
http://www.accessabc.com/aboutabc/index.htm

Like I said ... you don't print thousands of extra papers every night {and manually override computers algorithms that would cut the draw} just to scrap the returns week after week after week for no reason at all.

My money says books are being cooked and that the number of newspapers returned every week never make it on to the ledger when advertisers are billed for the ACTUAL number of readers who saw the ad they are being billed for.

If a newspaper is billing their advertisers for a circulation of 200,000 and 450,000 readers when in fact the REAL numbers are 15-20% less than that because the Circulation Dept "forgot" to count returns the flim-flam quickly ads up to 6 and 7 figures.

This all dawned on me one night when I had an inordinate amount of returns and asked myself "WHY would any company that throws nickels around like they are manhole covers print all of these newspapers every week JUST to scrap them" ... "Unless ... they are cooking the books." Any time I ever explained this theory to a fellow delivery driver who also bellyached about the huge number of returns coming back every Sunday night always got me an "I think you are on to something" response.

I am a veteran of nearly 25 yrs of overnight deliveries at a well known Hudson Valley newspaper. My gut tells me it is not the Union that is being looked at in this case. Rather, I strongly suspect that the Newspapers are being looked at for fudging their circulation numbers.

There is a formula for how many readers read each newspaper sold. {It is somewhere in the 2.25 range} The more readers, the more advertisers are billed.

It seems that thousands of newspapers that go out of the printing facility every night and are very accurately counted. But, come Sunday night when "returns" are picked up no one ever has the business sense to do an algorithm and take the average sales per day for the last four weeks and adjust "dealer' draw" so that all of those unread newspapers never get printed in the first place.
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So, WHY would a tree hugging uber liberal company like a newspaper look the other way while thousands of extra trees are cut down every year to produce newsprint that has a known designation of "scrap" before it is ever printed?