MONTREAL – Issued on the lip of Labour Day, the signal appears unmistakable.

A long-running labour dispute at the Journal de Montréal is now expected to extend into another phase in late October – with an announcement issued before the long weekend that the newspaper’s locked-out editorial and office employees are gearing up to begin publishing and distributing a free, weekly, French-language newspaper to hit Montreal’s streets this fall.

The tabloid will be called Rue Frontenac.

At least for the duration of the dispute, the new paper will extend into print the ruefrontenac.com brand of online journalism established on the Internet in early 2009, a week after 253 members of the Syndicate des travailleurs de l’information du Journal de Montréal were locked out.

The lockout took effect Jan. 24, 2009.

The Journal, part of the Quebecor media empire, has continued to publish.

The new paper will be launched even though a mediator appointed by the Quebec Labour Department less than a month ago continues to try to help settle the dispute, said Richard Bousquet, vice-president of the union’s editorial component.

At the outset of the dispute, “about half” of the 253 workers were in the newsroom – reporters, copy editors and others, he said. “Maybe 10 or a dozen” have since retired or quit for other jobs. Equivalent figures for the office-worker component weren’t available.

The new tabloid, expected to appear every Thursday, will start at 48 pages with a “minimum” press run of 50,000 – offering a considerably broader variety of content than ruefrontenac.com, Bousquet said Saturday.

Special investigative features, analysis and columns will augment news, sports, business and culture coverage, he added.

The paper will be distributed at newsstands across the Montreal region, from St. Jérôme north of Montreal Island to St. Jean sur Richelieu to the south, he said, and in person at street corners by locked-out workers bringing attention to the dispute, “especially in central Montreal.”

Exactly like ruefrontenac.com, Bousquet said, “it’s a pressure tactic” – but, equally, he added, the paper will provide and maintain “the level of journalistic credibility and rigour we’ve established with ruefrontenac.com.”

The website pulls in “more than 300,000 unique visitors” monthly – a majority in the 25-44 age bracket, “mostly males,” he said. The site each month serves up “more than 2.2 million page views,” he added.

Just like the website, Bousquet added, Rue Frontenac on newsprint will be designed to cover its non-labour operating and production costs through a combination of advertising revenues and contributions. The Canadian Auto Workers union recently contributed $25,000 to the battle, recognizing that “it crosses traditional union lines,” Bousquet said.

The support by the broader labour movement has been “very good, very encouraging,” he added.

The website “is doing better than break-even,” Bousquet said.

The same approach is planned for the new tabloid.

Bousquet wouldn’t specify the size of the website’s surplus.

Conventional wages aren’t part of the equation, for either the website or the planned newspaper.

That’s because since the start of the dispute, union members have been getting lockout pay amounting to 76 per cent of their usual after-tax income, furnished by various union strike funds.

Because such income is tax-free, “we have in effect each been losing about one-quarter of our purchasing power” for the duration, Bousquet said.

Meanwhile, with the lockout approaching its 20th month, an agreement by both sides not to provide details of negotiations remains in effect.

Jean Poirier, the mediator named in early August by the Quebec Labour Department, “is meeting with both parties.” That’s as far as Bousquet would go.

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