[BC] Bonneville Makes Salary Cuts

[Brent Hall]

Bonneville International, the LDS Church-owned media company, is cutting salaries and taking other cost-cutting actions to cope with the recession and slumping advertising revenue. 
Employees who earn less than $50,000 will be exempted from the salary cuts, which go into effect Aug. 31. Higher-paid employees will lose 5 percent of wages exceeding $50,000, Craig Haslam, spokesman for Salt Lake City-based Bonneville, said Thursday. 
The company is also slowing the rate at which its 1,250 employees earn vacation. It is eliminating company-supported health-club memberships and reducing the value of food vouchers given to employees at Thanksgiving and Christmas time. 
"We actually are in better shape than many of our industry competitors who have done similar things and larger things long before we did," Haslam said. 
"We just feel this is a reasonable balance between the realities of the economy and still being fair to our owner and our employees," he said. 
Bonneville acted even though it sees some improvement in the economy. But the upturn isn't strong enough to avert the cuts, he said. 
"We're starting to feel like perhaps we are on a little bit of an upswing right now. But even the most optimistic predictions for 2010 are not overly robust, and so we're being a little cautious and trying to be prudent in what we're doing," Haslam said. 

Haslam said he didn't know how many employees will be affected by the salary cuts 

or how much the company expects to save. 
"Our management has carefully looked at this. We are not going to be able to save our way out of the situation, but this will help," he said. 
Bonneville owns KSL-TV in Salt Lake City. It also owns about 30 radio stations in markets across the U.S., including Salt Lake City, Chicago, Phoenix, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. 
The company has 390 employees in Salt Lake City. A little more than half work at KSL-TV. 
The company is owned by Deseret Management, the for-profit arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.