Breaking News/08.29.2024
Justice delivered: Big win for star reporter unfairly canned by the Globe
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One of the Globe’s most dogged and resourceful reporters in years, Andrea Estes was unceremoniously fired last year after a T expose gone awry.
But Estes, now a reporter for the upstart Plymouth Independent, has emerged with a significant victory after having filed a union grievance following her firing in the spring of 2023.
After going into arbitration, the Globe was found to have erred in firing the veteran investigative reporter, according to a source close to the matter.
Under the arbitrator’s ruling, Estes is entitled to receive back pay for the time she lost at the Globe, and also has the option of returning to the Globe, the source said.
An investigative reporter, Estes and the Globe parted ways in the wake of an explosive story in April 2023 about managers at the woeful MBTA working remotely - literally dialing it in from other cities across the country.
The Globe has since published corrections to the original story, which reported that several top managers were working for the T but primarily living in other cities.
The corrections stated that three of the managers mentioned in the story were in fact living primarily in the Boston area and were not working remotely. A fourth correction was somewhat more ambiguous.
One of the big questions yet to be answered is where was the T in all this? Estes was far from a slapdash reporter. Did the T purposely withhold some information - that at least three of the managers had alibis, so to speak - in order to discredit the story after it ran?
Meanwhile, the Globe’s decision to show Estes the door puzzled insiders, who noted that other reporters, without anything like her stellar record, managed to stay on the payroll at the paper, despite significantly more egregious offenses.
As Contrarian Boston noted when it was reporting on Estes’s firing last year, compelling and consequential were the two words that best described the stories the veteran Globe reported produced over two decades.
Estes’ dogged reporting uncovered the sleazy kickback scheme that landed former House Speaker Sal DiMasi in federal prison in 2011.
And remember that Methuen police chief whose pay at $326,707 a year topped his counterparts in Boston and New York? That was another Estes story.
Will Estes now return to the Globe? We wouldn’t bank on it, but stay tuned.
For its part, the Globe, in a statement, say it is "disappointed" by the arbitrator's decision but will "nonetheless respect" it.
Here's more: "The trust of our readers and our community is our greatest asset, and we will always strive to ensure that our journalism is worthy of them. If it falls short, we will continue to take necessary action to maintain this trust. We are disappointed by the arbitrator's decision which deprived the company of our rights under our collective bargaining agreement with the Guild. We of course will nonetheless respect the decision."