This is tracking (overall character space) set negative, for whatever reason, usually ignorance. Kerning is the act of adjusting the space between two characters, such as an uppercase ‘A’, and an uppercase ‘V’, to fit more closely together. A good rule is to leave the typeface in body text at 0 tracking, default–most typefaces do just fine in body text with “metric kerning”. Manual kerning is only for headers, titles, signs, etc. and should be used only when needed.

If they needed the body copy to take up less space, they should have used a condensed typeface, instead of messing with tracking. People like to hate on Helvetica, but the inclusion of so many different fonts in the typeface make it very useful for this reason.