> Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on average than men
Such statistics are meaningless without more context. For example, are women over-represented in entry level positions? Do they work the same hours? the same overtime? And so forth.
Articles that present such statistics are pushing propaganda.
I've always wondered why companies don't overhire women to save on labor costs.
The only explanations I can rationalize is that management isnt aware of the pay difference, or they are aware but they're more sexist than they are greedy.
> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary
It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.
If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.
One explanation I've heard is that companies don't extract the same value from women as they do from men because society's sexism causes managers and peers to assign "low value tasks" disproportionately to women even when they have the same job description as their male counterparts.
I think that today is very interesting in that a lot of the R neocons of yesteryear have shifted to D neolibs today. It's really weird in a lot of ways.
Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.
It’s not meaningless if you want to see women making at least as much as men regardless of the job and their skills. That’s the obvious implication of such statistics.
But is that really a valuable goal? The market determines wages, and usually it's willing to favor sacrifices like a 24 hour oncall rotation. Don't those people deserve for the value of those sacrifices to be reflected in compensation?
"Equal pay for equal work" is a much more compelling goal in my view than "equal pay for unequal work".
Not to mention it's incentivize companies to cut the roles with artificially inflated wages. Imagine a government mandated that some component or material cost 15% more than market rate. You'd refactor your design with that new cost in mind, and reduce usage of that component. Similar deal with labor.
I'd counter it's more likely that you'd see even more corruption and revolving doors between civilian and govt roles. It's very easy to spend other people's money (govt spending from taxes).
It's not a straw man. In the UK, the government has stepped in and mandate that two different jobs be paid the same, in the pursuit of pay equity.
Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).
The intended implication of the presented statistic is obvious, but the actual disparity is impossible to realize without context on the types of positions being included in the statistic.
The above commenter is asking for relevant facts. If Job A pays more than Job B and there's a larger proportion of men in Job A then men's average pay will be higher, but both genders are receiving equal pay for equal work.
If anything, your allegations of sealioning are violating HN's guideline "Assume good faith."
did they commit thought crime or something? any even semi-competent statistician would have these questions, and any semi-competent journalist would question numbers being produced by an organization that are being used to promulgate that organization's agenda. and, moreover, we both know that the likelihood that these numbers actually properly control for these things is essentially 0. the sad thing is that if they did actually do the right thing, the numbers would be not as fair, but much more heinous and actionable. as it is there is absolutely no conclusion to draw for anyone involved-- how is the NYT supposed to fix the policy when they cannot even divine whether it's an underpromotion problem vs a recruiting problem vs an outright racism problem? isn't the goal to get them to fix things? the fixes for those three things are DRAMATICALLY different from one another.
If we look at past times these things are brought up; almost certainly not. Often things like part-time vs. full time aren't considered or amount of overtime hours worked (for hourly jobs).
This kind of thing is impossible to control for, though. How can you tell whether someone's success or lackthereof (including via degree of responsibility) comes from earnest evaluation of merit or social bias? I have a difficulty imagining trusting any kind of confident assessment of the bias at hand.
Sure, but people are always going to make their own judgements, so why bother complaining about it? It comes off like you're trying to defend the industry as being equitable when it clearly caters to people with certain skills.
Yeah it's really difficult, but that doesn't mean you should just give up and take the average.
There was a case recently in the UK where Next (high street clothing chain) were paying their warehouse staff more than their shop staff for (apparently) similar work. The shop workers had a higher proportion of female workers than the warehouse workers (something like 70% vs 50%).
Next claimed this was because the market rate was higher for warehouse workers. They got sued by the female shop workers for discrimination.
They lost and have to pay back pay. Now... you might think 70% vs 50% is barely a difference - did the Next bosses really discriminate? Surely not. Well, that's what the court thought too. Apparently even though they accepted that there was no conscious or unconscious discrimination, the effect of the pay difference was in itself discriminatory.
I dunno how that makes any sense. The shop workers should have sued the IT department and then they'd be in for a serious pay day!
I think the problem is that often the solutions are worse than the problem... price controls, wage ceilings, protectionism, etc. As opposed to offering negotiation training to women to push for the highest wages you can achieve.
I've worked pretty hard to teach my daughter than it doesn't hurt to ask for more than offered, or even to price yourself out of a job if there are multiple opportunities on the table. Women tend to naturally optimize for stability over maximum income and other factors and to accept a given deal vs negotiate. Much like men are far more likely to move to another location for career advancement and higher pay. There are natural tendencies that training can overcome which is likely better than trying to price control.
> Yeah it's really difficult, but that doesn't mean you should just give up and take the average.
Presumably the rational approach would be mild skepticism about confidence, not specifically accepting or rejecting any claim. Which leaves this well within the grounds of "plausible".
The reasoning I heard is that it's explained by differences in personality across the two populations. One group is, on average, more assertive, and as a result more likely to negotiate higher salary.
Which is reasoning that's difficult to prove. To the contrary women and underprivileged minorities also feel like they can't be assertive without being labeled as shrill.
The wage gap, at firms without a history of discrimination, is almost entirely determined by women having their first child and the support structures around it (subsidized childcare, paternity leave, flexible hours).[1][2] This suggests the assertiveness is probably not the issue.
It's funny, every hedge fund and tech startup I've ever worked at since roughly 2001 very proudly boasts about how they pay women more than the men.
But as my career goes on into the years I find that I'm working with less women and less minorities and not more. Despite the best of efforts...
If I were to look for evidence though, I would point things squarely at the interview process... In the past if you could operate a computer you were hired and assumed you would figure it out. Nowadays it's much more about fitting a certain narrative that's largely down to socioeconomic factors... I don't think I've ever worked with someone in tech who went to an HBCU, but lots of people who were token at NYU, Yale, etc...
I conducted around 500 interviews at my last company at all stages: initial screen, technical, architectural, etc. There were simply far more white men applying. (And this is in Atlanta where we have a highly bimodal racial distribution.)
It wasn't like we weren't bending over backwards to attract diverse candidates. I personally went to HBCUs on outreach programs, and there were dozens of annual Girls / Women Who Code programs and partnerships that other folks on my team participated in.
I was once even told I couldn't recommend someone for a role because they weren't diverse.
You're looking at it too narrowly. In fairness, I should have said "it's the recruiting process".
It's not the "interviewing" itself but it's the recruiting stage. If you're looking at fresh graduates you're already significantly skewing things. It's hard to blame companies for this, but a few of the bootcamps are cranking out nontraditional candidates and many companies still overlook them in hiring.
Remember that story from the other day about founding Valve and Gabe recruiting game modders to his team? Two of them were pizza delivery guys and thought they were being called on a prank.
To be honest though, I think we're all lying to ourselves. The job isn't about ability to code. We're not looking for people with those skills. Most companies hiring are looking for stable clock-punchers who will do things that make their manager look good.
In today's market, most companies will automatically filter out bootcamper applications regardless of candidate background. It shouldn't be considered unusual that a subset of those are not being hired.
About 3/4 of the bootcamp learners I've interviewed only did the minimum to get through the course(s). I've found the biggest differentiator for bootcamp learners are those who did more than they were assigned and those who only did what they were assigned. There seems to be a very significant basic knowledge and skill gap between those two groups. It's even more significant in my experience than those with a more traditional education or self-taught.
This line of questioning is often brought up in response to pay gap conversations. Universal trends do not explain individual data points, but in general, studies do seem to indicate that pay gaps are real.
It's difficult to parse, because it says that experience and occupational choice does pay a significant role in the gap. But then editorializes and claims that less experience and occupational choice are due to discriminatory issues in the broader culture.
Culture war issues like this are unfalsifiable in either direction and largely reflect the political persuasion of the person making the argument than anything quantifiable.
Here's another example from the American Progress article:
> Women of color disproportionately work in jobs within the service, care, and domestic work sectors—jobs with historically low pay.
This is an empirically verifiable claim.
> This is due to occupational segregation, which is the funneling of women and men into different jobs based on gender and racial norms and expectations
This is an unfalsifiable political claim. Some unknown force, by some unknown mechanism, forces people to make certain choices.
If not, then that's also an equity problem. If the "dog jobs" are mostly offered to women and minorities, that should also be called out as a problem for employers to solve.
This presupposes a lot of pretty nasty things. It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job based on your gender or race which is obviously not the case. That lack of equity (which is equality of outcome, not opportunity) is itself a problem and not simply a byproduct of different people being different. That when your entire sample size is 622, you can make broad generalizations based on the pay of ~37 of them. Even if you can, it also assumes that your salary in your job is based on objective set criteria and not a) whether you negotiate, b) how hard you negotiate, c) whether you have a BATNA that makes you need the job less, d) whether you had breakfast that morning or were more tired than normal or were coming down with a cold or any number of a myriad of other things that could affect a high-stakes negotiation.
The pay gap as a systemic issue (for equal work for equal hours with equal qualifications) has been debunked a thousand times over. But while it's certainly possible (likely?) that some individual companies have a racially or gender-driven pay gap, it's a far stretch to assume that the NYT is one of them.
Equality of opportunity is good, giving people a leg up early in their lives when they've been disadvantaged, regardless of their race or gender, is good. "Equity" for the sake of it is racist.
> It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job based on your gender or race which is obviously not the case.
Obviously? A newspaper is exactly the kind of business to hire based on your personal narrative (including 100% of protected class intersections). That's the entire point of the opinion column. Granted, I don't think that the folks being discussed here are publishing any personal opinions, and I doubt the times is doing anything legally actionable or we would have heard about it, but the idea that they don't consider these factors just because it's illegal is laughable.
Yeah I didn't phrase it very well, what I meant was that you're not applying for any old job on the tech team. You apply for a specific job, presumably one you're qualified for that would be a step up in your career.
If you look at a very small sample of people and one racial minority or gender has all the "lower" jobs, that doesn't tell you what jobs they were "offered" it just tells you what jobs they applied for.
I'm pretty conflicted answering this. On one hand reporting is miserable; on the other hand it's virtually impossible to exclude bias in hiring, especially if the hiring requires skills that people pay to learn.
man the downvotes on this thread are all over the place-- people need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about what discourse they actually tolerate, vs what they tell themselves... it's absurd. at best this comment is mildly combative, but it doesn't seem like OP took it personally, as they shouldn't have, but yet... downvote city. it's especially bizarre because i couldn't even tell you what ideological trigger shibboleth is being triggered here, even...
I try not to talk about voting on here per the guidelines, but it is pretty interesting to me the cross-section of completely legitimate, valid viewpoints that will get obliterated if they're mentioned on the wrong thread. Like everyone else I'm predisposed to think my particular ideology is slightly more persecuted than the other one but it doesn't even seem to be liberal v. conservative, authoritarian v. libertarian, or Democrat vs. Republican. I'm sure the initial thread topic has something to do with it and I do recall dang saying they keep an eye a little more closely on threads that are particularly political.
I'd be curious to see an analysis of downvoted comments in political threads and what their general ideological bent was.
- african americans are statistically more likely to originate from lower on socio economic ladder than, say, asian americans
Thus when you get a bunch of job applicants, you might get an asian american with a Yale degree (James) and an african american with a community college degree (John). Affirmative action or other DEI pressures might force you to hire both James and John, but James will probably be able to outperform John due to higher initial degree of education. Furthermore, James may have had parents who networked and ensured he got good internships and experience growing up while John didn't have that opportunity.
So it's not that the company is offering John a "dog job", it's just, James's capacity to perform in current role and take on new responsibilities is at a higher initial state than John's, so it's not unthinkable he would climb corporate ladder faster than John given those initial advantages. Pay gap is a natural consequence that follows.
I don't really think a Yale degree makes you better than someone with a community college degree. There's no magic at Yale. The education you get everywhere is pretty good now because of all the resources universally available to all students.
But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.
And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.
There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.
As someone who has studied at both kinds of schools I can tell you there is a WORLD of difference.
In a middling school the professor was constantly providing remedial education to the students and had to cut down the curriculum breadth and depth.
When we are talking about the elite 0.01% of students the professor is irrelevant for regular coursework. They are almost uniformly autodidacts. A mentor is of course useful at the very boundaries of knowledge that textbooks and papers don't cover. But by the time you are in that range of work, you will be recognized through your performance, and you can find mentors by reaching out to them with links to your work.
Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.
Employers are not responsible for forcing people to do the work required to be qualified for a position the employers are trying to fill.
Among the people who are qualified for the position, they are prohibited by law from considering race or gender or other protected characteristics when making a hiring decision.
Not really. Imagine if it takes 20 years to acquire some senior status, and the world was 100% sexist/racist/whatever 20 years ago(so only white men were allowed) but 0% now, you would have a bunch of white men as senior rank even though the world isn't sexist/racist/whatever any more.
Affirmative action at the companies I’ve worked at was hard to hire less qualified individuals into roles. Those folks were often under performing but marked as “meets” at request of hr. Now with economy and other factors, they are being performance managed out given a worse output/impact than peers at same level.
this seems like it could easily be a symptom of aff action policies. Making it so firings have to be perfectly representative will discourage companies like these from taking a chance on an underrepresented candidate who might have a slightly weaker resumé if they are stuck with the decision
The bit you’re quoting is one of the complaints people have raised. It is not the only complaint, and given the near unanimous support for the strike it is not even likely the biggest complaint. They also mention the company handing out PIPs like candy and fears from automation, problems I think many people on this site can sympathize with.
A lot of comments on this thread seem to feel like the “why” of this matter is settled with an answer of “The men have more experience and are working higher-level jobs. Therefore, they receive higher pay.”
This is not the equilibrium we are aiming for as a society, and the matter is not settled here.
The point of these measurements is not to demand that women are paid more for less work. The point is for us to keep asking “why”, and not just stop after the first one.
“Why are women earning less at the New York Times?”. Maybe the company is just top-heavy with men in leadership roles. This has been floated in this thread as a common cause.
“Why are there more men in leadership roles?”. A few commenters have shared anecdotes of having far more men in their recruiting process. More men applying would help explain more experienced men higher up in the company.
“Why are there more men than women applying?”. We’re getting closer to root causes now. In software engineering, for example, there are just more men in the workforce.
“Why are there more men in the workforce?”. It gets more difficult, but also more important, to investigate the answer at these lower levels. Girls Who Code and similar initiatives are tackling this behemoth cultural problem. It will take years to see the effect of their work, but their success breeds hope that someday, the gap in this New York Times statistic will close a little.
At any of these levels, a company can step in and try and correct the natural bias in their hiring or development pipeline. That is, of course, the most sensitive topic for a lot of us here. Such initiatives should have buy-in from the workforce, and there’s an implication here that the (unionized) workers of NYT do support some kind of intervention.
Their choice, and above all the very measurement of a wage gap, doesn’t need to be threatening to anybody here. It will forever be important to track this number even if we “feel” like the explanations are simple. It doesn’t represent some kind of action the company should be forced to take. It measures where we are on every level of asking “why?”.
There is no need for a society that forces, top down, every possible occupation to be perfectly split 50/50 by sex. Just let individuals make their own decisions.
In this case, why do we "need" more women coding? Maybe they are doing other work that is just as important and fulfilling and useful to society?
The issue is that we can’t make reliable judgements about the hiring or promotion process based on the outputs without more information about the inputs. But I agree, the answer is more information, not less.
the editorial bias from management of NYT has always been skeptical of Google and Facebook and perhaps all of big tech because big tech was a threat to their business. Most newspapers in the US have been hollowed out because of social media and the tech industry, NYT ironically has not because they hired a real in house tech team that has kept their paper relevant.
But that doesn't mean they like paying their tech workers any more than any other management. It's just about money. Big tech is a threat to management's profits, just like workers demanding better salaries is a threat to management's profits.
> Most newspapers in the US have been hollowed out because of social media and the tech industry,
They've been declining ever since radio and TV started doing news broadcasts, early to mid 20th century. Internet tech has played a role too, but the whole newspaper industry should have seen the writing on the wall several generations ago.
sure. Not making excuses for any business decisions by newspaper management, just pointing out that that their criticism of the tech industry isn't out of character with a company that also is hostile their own workers' union.
Isn’t it a little ironic that NY Times, and most east coast media, is very anti big tech and pro union while their own employees are protesting because of low wages?
Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?
> Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?
Being anti tech has nothing to do with salary, it’s centered on what big tech is doing.
The people actually writing articles tend to be in Unions which may help explain their pro Union stances. Both from below and management being concerned with union relations.
You're thinking of editors, and journalists do choose what they cover to an extent. Management ostensibly sees that everything goes according to plan/schedule. Fair point though–if mgmt is pushing some initiative, that pressure is felt in a newsroom.
Always the same story... A few years ago a big left French newspaper (Libération) always pushing for "diversity" published a photo of their staff, which was like 98-
100% white.
Just over a decade ago, there was a job ad for a host role with the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that explicitly required applicants to be "Any race except Caucasian".
The reason it's not a useful comparison is that unnamed, nonspecific "employer who has quotas" is assuming that many employers have quotas. Who? How much? And did they eat my cat?
>> “Incredibly non-diverse”? No. They are in a better position than most
Absolutely not. This is typical trickery of stats. They have diversity at lower levels. But unlike SV almost no diversity at senior ranks. I think its past time that we consider janitorial and admin jobs as a win. If we have legions of educated minorities, why aren't they making it into executive roles at the NY Times?
A citizen journalist I follow on YouTube pointed out that for having 5900 employees, they have fewer than 10 who are veterans. It explains why they get so much wrong when reporting on the military.
I'm sure that both of those people would feel very vindicated in their career knowing that the person advocating for further affirmative action calls them "tokens".
If you read some of the linked articles off of the one posted a few comments back, then you will see that the recent cuts have disproportionately affected minorities, minorities are making less, and that minorities are receiving lower evaluation scores. So it seems they do have a diversity problem.
I want to see the actual studies that the guild has used to generate the numbers for their claims so I can see what possible mechanisms might be at play and what sort of level setting they've done for the data. Unfortunately, I didn't see any of the studies released.
It’s “true” only according to a custom definition of diversity common in newsrooms and universities - but not, apparently, the Times’s own diversity report - where some groups which become too included no longer count as diverse. I think this standard, whereby I’ve had a non-white yet non-diverse manager for 95% of my career, deserves an extraordinary amount of scrutiny.
"Feels like this deviation is always used as a distraction to divide and conquer the workers and voters on race and skin color and have them fight against each other to prevent them collectively allying against those from the top actually oppressing them and eroding their rights and wages."
It does seem that way, slightly. There seem to be some natural causes for misalignment that I would think are more influential. One main issue is that different people and groups of people have different experiences. If you've never been screwed over, you might not see the problems in the current system. If you have been screwed over and seen other screwed over, you might just think that's the way it goes.
What are the alternatives proposed to the unfair impacts? I want to see the objective rating criteria that can reduce or prevent people from getting screwed over. I do think tech unions can help with this a little, but I haven't seen any successful approaches to things like ratings. Even the places that set standards seem to have subjective criteria, or you work is subjectively applied.
I've been screwed over and passed over multiple times. I also have a disability, no less it's one that causes inconsistencies with policies and treatment to jump out to me. I still haven't seen any solutions that will work until the members agree on what are the problems and how do we fix them. Many of my coworkers think my company is great, but those also tend to be the people that consistently get high ratings and promotions. Meanwhile, I struggle to point out all the contributions I made, align them to the standard, and otherwise do my manager's job of rating me for them only to get an average rating. It also doesn't help that I have to tell them what the corporate policies say when they try to misuse them against me (holding time off against me, holding prior period performance against me for this period, not providing accommodations that were promised, etc). Nobody else seems to have this hard of a time so why would they risk anything to speak up for people like me? I've learned to live with the disappointment by giving up any dreams of advancement and just trying to keep the job I have while fending off as much BS as I can... and perhaps complaining about it on HN.
Having cleared the lowest bar, society is demonstrably less racist than a century ago. The next bar is much more difficult; we may be less equipped than we were for the last one.
We can measure some more nuanced outcomes of racism. Past that we are struggling to even qualify successes and failures. Instances & causes remain tied to systems & psychology that seem too complex for current skill sets to parse well. As a result, poor performance and less-poor performance are happening all at once.
At this level of the challenge, failure is one of the best learning tools at our disposal. Bad actors are quick to see that and are doing what they have always done - exploiting our poor valuation of failures to derail progress.
What about the other color of skins who are also part of the "have nots"? Are they not also affected? Why must the focus always be on the skin color instead of on the "not have" part? What's with this racism shit?
You're only proving my point that I made above, that people care more about punching up against a skin color they consider have an unfair advantage due to past history, but which won't improve their situation anyway, instead of focusing on the economic and political issues made by the ruling elite of today that impact those of all skin colors who are on the wrong side of the financial fence.
Our modern economic system is based on "time in the market beats timing the market", that's all. So of course those who come from a well off background of several generations will be even more well off today, while those who come from an impoverished background will have a hard time building any wealth and most likely stay impoverished, but that's nothing to do with skin color since money doesn't get transferred genetically though osmosis where one skin color somehow is born with more money in their account and the other not otherwise there would be no broke white people. If your parents were broke AF, most likely you'll also be broke AF no matter your skin color, unless you bust your ass in school to escape poverty.
But if you have an alternative answer please go ahead.
Of course people with other skin color are also affected by poverty, or whatever it means to be a have-not, why wouldn't they be?
I didn't say the focus must be on skin color. I'm saying to disregard why certain groups are represented in the haves/have-nots, you must ignore history.
I don't believe you're arguing in good faith if you think point out that racism exists/existed, and you call that "racism shit"
I called your argument "this racism shit" since you're trying to argue how some people today are poor because of events from 150 years ago and not do to their own actions or inactions. That would be like me blaming my lack of financial success in life on the Ottoman empire's occupation of my country.
How about personal responsibility? How can you blame people you've never met and who are long dead for why you're poor today.
Why is it that Iranians, Indians, Taiwanese, Chinese, and other Asians who emigrate to the US with little to no money can become very successful within 1-2 generations despite being poor foreign immigrants while a certain minority of the US citizens who enjoy rights and benefits immigrants do not seem to be stuck in poverty/crime and keep blaming history for it? Is it because some cultures value education highly while a US minority does not?
It's not your fault you are born into poverty but it's your responsibility to do your best to get out of it. Who is stopping that minority group from going to school/college or trades to escape poverty?
I dunno, you tell us why, since so far you haven't made any arguments, but kept baiting and beating it around the bush with loaded questions. Just say what you want to say.
> the reality is much simpler than you're making it be. The present day issues aren't caused by skin color or race
This strongly implies that racism is no longer a meaningfully impactful problem. That would not be true.
> Core issue is not social, it's economical masquerading as social...
If this were meaningfully true, police & justice stats for poor white populations would be indistinguishable from poor black and brown populations - across the country.
> ...to divide and conquer people
Planned and coordinated division is most visibly on display when a marginalized group is suddenly, widely demonized. False rhetoric and tightly crafted language indicate that fascism is a factor.
>This strongly implies that racism is no longer a meaningfully impactful problem. That would not be true.
That was the point I weas trying to prove from the start. The moment you point the fingers at the causes of our massive problem (ruling elite, economy policies, etc) and away from racism, people will immediately accuse you of discrediting racism as a problem. I never said racism it's not a problem, I said as a society we have much bigger problems that impacts everyone, not just this or that group.
Like I said above, the elite take 9 out of the 10 piece of the wealth pie, give half a piece to one class, half of piece to the other, and say "hey look, the other guy's class is why you only have half a piece, go fight him over it to claim back what's yours", and you keep focusing on that other half piece instead of the other 9 pieces.
If you can't afford a house anymore, and inflation ate away your savings, and your wage has stagnated, it's not because one skin color made a targeted attack on precisely other skin color. Like I said, it's haves vs have nots now, not one race vs another.
>Planned and coordinated division is most visibly on display when a marginalized group is suddenly, widely demonized.
Who is currently being demonized, where are they being demonized, and who is the one demonizing them?
>False rhetoric and tightly crafted language indicate that fascism is a factor.
Can you point that out where you see it? And please let it not be Twitter or other social media garbage.
And, funnily enough, this kind of divide-and-conquer exploitation also happens to create incredibly homogenous workplaces. The reason why these horrible workplaces have fewer black people or women is because the business practices - i.e. lots of crunch time, toxic workplace environment, shitty mismanagement, etc - filter out people who don't have the tolerance for that shit. It just so happens that young white men happen to be the least sensitive to bad business practices (because of all that stuff the woke left packaged into the word "privilege") so they're the last one standing.
Most corporate DEI is less "what can we do to retain power minority employees" and more "how can we turn minorities into more effective worker drones that we can then abuse". This is less because they actually want diversity and more because they want to be able to put the word "diversity" in a mission statement. It's left-wing[0] language being coopted to serve the purposes of cutthroat capitalism. "Diversity" happens to be a popular term with the people who are currently their most abusable worker drones. So they apply it liberally to make them think they're winning when they're losing.
This works the other way too - effective labor organization and opposition to corporate power needs (actual) DEI just as (again, actual) DEI needs organized labor. Collective solidarity cannot function if you leave out certain groups of people, otherwise you're not doing a revolution, you're doing a changing of the guard.
[0] Libertarian left specifically. Yes, there is an "anti-woke left", it's called the Chinese Communist Party.
Is big tech non-diverse? It seems to have a higher non-white population than the US itself according the numbers I've been able to find. If we count contractors and off-shore, it will become even less white. I'd bet tech has a higher proportion of LGBT+ people as well (without looking at numbers, admittedly, but I'd be surprised if I was wrong). Gender diversity is an issue; but not for lack of trying. Cis women are probably 5% of the resumes I see.
The NY Times is pro-union and anti-big-tech in large part because its journalists are unionized and tech platforms disintermediate unions. The workers that produce articles and create the newsroom culture have a conflict of interest that affects its editorial slant. There is also the factor that tech threatens the ad revenue of traditional news media.
Kelsey Piper, a journalist at Vox, leaked two years ago that the NYT has had a years-long top-down directive to only write negative stories about tech [1]. Plenty of journalists have confirmed this since. Since you worked at the NYT for seven years, want to explain that particular policy in light of your rebuttal that the NYT had no conflict of interest and wasn't trying to smear tech companies?
You are making a very different claim here. The parent comment says:
>> The NY Times is pro-union and anti-big-tech [...]
That is the claim. These are the reasons it sues, and my notes on each:
* journalists are unionized and tech platforms disintermediate unions
Thats a broad generalization based on the authors opinion and not necessarily true. The attitude was not reflective of my interactions with journalists either. I would dispute this from personal experience. We can agree/disagree forever, I'm just giving my IRL experience.
* workers that produce articles and create the newsroom culture have a conflict of interest
It could be said that any journalist who covers any subject has a conflict of interest by covering that subject. Thats a bit weak.
* tech threatens the ad revenue of traditional news media.
Yeah. Rising costs of paper also threaten traditional news media. The NYT is profitable and not reliant on ad revenue streams for survival. They have a health revenue stream in number of other areas. In addition, for better or for worse, most journalists don't actually know/care that much about ad revenue given the tradition divides between business and editorial sides (I see that at many media orgs I have worked for - its not just the NYT)
So.. that was what I was talking about ("workers", not a "top-down directive").
In regards to your point: Thats a new and different claim so hard for me to speak to that.
I would note that the claim came from Matthew Yglesias. He since deleted the tweet. I would note that he never worked at the NYT as far as I can tell.
I don't know much of Kelsey Piper, but she "heard it from NYT reporters at the time" so not quite first-hand account either. Her tweet is not a "leak" (thats very different) and I see nothing to prove or substantiate it - just she "heard" it.
It could be said that that any journalist who covers any subject has a conflict of interest
I think that's a really weak claim. Journalism has had significantly reduced revenues in the late 2000s through today due to the rise of tech platforms that let people learn about what's happening in the world for free online. Both print and online newspaper combined revenue has been wiped back to the 1950s [1], for example. Journalists covering, say, election politics have no more conflict of interest than any other American. But they definitely have more of a conflict of interest covering tech than other Americans! For most Americans, tech has largely contributed to economic improvements: you can buy more advanced products for less inflation-adjusted money, pretty much every year. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and you can talk to your lights and tell them to turn off while you're lying in bed. For journalists, though, tech has been devastating.
You might try to claim that because journalists don't set their own salaries, somehow this removes the conflict of interest. But that implies journalists are incredibly stupid. You can't work in a vastly diminishing field and not realize that it's going to depress your salary and job opportunities over time, regardless of whether you set the salary or not: there's just vastly less money to go around. And that's what tech has done to traditional journalism.
And the NYT is not immune. While it's doing better than its peers (many of whom have gone out of business), it's not doing well: it's experienced approximately zero market growth since its peak in 2002 over twenty years ago, when shares traded for about $48. Today, they trade for $52. And working at the only institution in your field that hasn't experienced total collapse, but has achieved no growth in 20+ years, is obviously going to color your views on the sector that did that to your field.
Their current CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, is about as let-them-eat-cake as they come. She was doing a town hall years back when they were forcing everyone to “hotel” desks so they could lease out more floors of their HQ in Times Square, when she mentioned she’s giving up one of her two offices in the building but it’s ok because one was “mostly for shoes, anyway”.
This is a journalism industry problem, not a journalism content problem. Journalists trying to get paid more doesn't exclude Big Tech from criticism it deserves
A lot of the East Coast media, like the Times, has a lot of downwardly mobile people in them from wealthy or upper middle class families. And they aren't any longer in many cases and they are full of resent and bitterness that their turn has been looked over. That they aren't getting what "they deserve" as they did "everything right" like join a bunch of clubs in high school or w/e and go to college and get a degree that shows the world they are the continuation of their family legacy. But it's not there any longer and there's jealousy of of the new middle class that tech has built.
...Just because you're being payed absurdly doesn't legitimize your work any either. There's a lot of work that's aimed at getting done where the big fat paycheck is considered "STFU and do what you're told. with what we're paying you, we own you."
Just because you're potentially paid 500k to essentially implement the basis of metadata leakage and privacy compromise on scales that previous century actual dictators couldn't even reasonably dream of does not make the work of implementing it more "legitimate". It just makes it easier to attract people who value naterial comforts right now over safety from systemic abuse later. It's all tradeoffs.
Someone'll pay you well to do ultimately horrible things, and make it sound like you're doing everyone a favor.
Juniors, take note. You set the bar on the hell you'll be trapped in down the road. Always, always, be suspect.
>> Isn’t it a little ironic that NY Times, and most east coast media, is very anti big tech and pro union while their own employees are protesting because of low wages?
It is more than a little ironic that the NY Times complains about a "lack of diversity" in silicon valley, when practically the entire NY Times senior staff are generationally rich white people who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
There are >64 million Hispanics living in the United States, yet not a single one on the NYT exec team. They have 1 token asian, 1 token black person. Half the staff is Jewish. Yet they are complaining about diversity in Silicon valley.
As a person of asian origin, there is probably no way I can get a non-crappy role at the NY Times, yet silicon valley offers enough of a meritocracy that I can get a job there without having a rich uncle.
Remember, when the establishment complains about diversity, they are actually complaining about themselves losing control to the general population. That is why colored people in executive roles in SV is so scary to newspapers.
It's funny, my experience with NYT and tech has been the opposite as a minority -- probably a lot easier to get in than many would think, but talent is not the fulcrum.
"Half the staff is Jewish" made me laugh though, perhaps closer to true than false. It's funny how people call The New Yorker the pinnacle of privilege as a writer-type, and their staff writer team is more diverse than just about any other East Coast bigwig outlet.
That lists the pay discrepancy but doesn't mention if there are literally any factors for the disparity such as role, responsibilities, performance, etc. It just mentions race, which gives me absolutely no usable information to give credibility.
If we are to assume black and women workers have historically been missing entirely from tech then the efforts of recent initiatives would bring fresh people in? Those newer people wouldn't have the same length of professional experience but the expectation is to be paid equal?
Put another way if the CEO is white and they make 50m and you have two employees, one black and one white who each make 50k, the average for white workers would be skewed higher? Before anyone replies "um actually, it's only workers within the guild, the CEO isn't included", okay, but does everyone in the guild have the same job title, experience, and responsibilities?
As an aside, they've structured that website like trash. Yes, I'd love to click a link to see the pay study which is just duplicated below the link without any additional information. It's like they purposely are trying to say nothing but be loud.
In my experience, Mismanagement, both in personnel and compensation, seems to be commonplace, as corporations seek to lower costs in response to our changing economy. Corporations looking to find an advantage may shortchange employees, overwork them, and not train managers but rather expect everybody to "just work well together", deflecting responsibility.
Unionizing provides a relief valve where unions can strongly argue for better working environments. The individual no longer has to have a half-baked idea and be afraid to raise it, for fear of retribution or simply for fear of being proven to be an impotent cog mating to a very large wheel.
If you read books from the early 1900s (Radium Girls, Rocket Boys, Seabiscuit), it's painfully obvious to see how incredibly exploitative industries can become (literally working people to death) without something like a union to check corporate greed against worker well-being.
It's a fine balance though. Unions are organizations very similar to companies and can fall victim to the same sins as exploitative companies (or worse, like in the 60s when the Teamsters Union became controlled by the mafia and was used to further organized crime goals)
> it's painfully obvious to see how incredibly exploitative industries can become (literally working people to death) without something like a union to check corporate greed against worker well-being.
I don't think the missing mechanism is unions, I think it's an aggressive monopoly-busting government. What we're talking about is an industry outstrippinng it's competition and harming people - basically the definition of a monopoly.
Totally free markets are self destructive. Well regulated free markets are the greatest driving force for human quality of life we've found.
>Totally free markets are self destructive. Well regulated free markets are the greatest driving force for human quality of life we've found.
Pretty sure limited liability exists in every 'totally free market' you are pointing to. That isnt really a free market, that's a government giving an enormous generous power to owners that is kind of a legal oddity.
Why does the owner of a corporation not have to pay for damages? Why is it limited to the assets of the corporation?
I wonder how careful companies would be if the owners and stockholders could lose their entire fortune and go into personal debt when they are caught poisoning the air that affects 500,000 people.
Part of the problem with unions is still due to anti-union laws which effectively locks existing unions into place and not allowing members to be like "Nah fuck yall, ill make my own union without you corrupt cats in charge."
It should also be painfully obvious that, during those times, the alternative — subsistence agriculture — was much worse, and people working in factories no longer starved. The industrial revolution, AKA "greed", has ended starvation and slavery, so when socialists of late 1800s or early 1900s talk of exploitation, that should raise an eyebrow.
Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.
> the alternative — subsistence agriculture — was much worse, and people working in factories no longer starved.
It's not straightforward as that. In Europe, or at least in countries that are relevant "subsistence agriculture" had stopped being a significant thing centuries before the industrial revolution (outside of relatively rare periods of very bad weather).
By the 1800s there were generally too many people and not enough land (the real problem short term was that land being very unequally distributed and landhorders preferring to use it for less labor intense and more profitable purposes and significantly reducing the amount of "common land" available). Productivity was also increasing meaning there was a lower demand for labor. But that's the opposite of subsistence agriculture.
However it's not really that obvious that conditions for factory workers were meaningfully better than they would have been 50-100 years earlier until at least the mid 19th century or so when the labor market became more balanced and workers permitted to organize to some extent without the fear of extreme repression).
In most extreme cases like the Great Famine in Ireland the outcome was the opposite. There was enough food (or at least enough to significantly reduce the death toll) it's just that local people couldn't afford it and it was shipped off to feed the workers in the more industrialized parts of UK. That period probably marked the heyday of 'free market' and laissez-faire ideologies.
Just fyi the UN estimates 25,000 people die from hunger everyday and there are currently 50 million slaves around the world. Easy to forget but these things still exist.
Yes, in the parts of the world that are still not industrialized, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
It's also easy to forget that during 19th century, 90%+ of the population suffered from hunger and malnutrition. Right now that's around 10%, but it's less than 2.5% in the highly industrialized countries.
IMO, the parts of the world still suffering from hunger could use more "corporate greed" and industrial exploitation.
They are dying of hunger because of corporate greed. Africa has many of the world’s most resource-rich areas, but they don’t realize the profits: Western corporations that extract the resources using local slave labor do.
So what's been stopping African companies/government from exploiting their own natural resources for all of these years?
"Corporate greed" is a fun slogan, but means nothing in reality. In the few areas where the government is exploiting its own natural resources (instead of outsiders), the working and living conditions are not inherently better. If it worked that way, all of the middle east and large areas of Africa wouldn't be so destitute.
Control of the resources or territory wasn’t magically delivered to the people with equity. The colonial infrastructure of control was turned over to local friendly interests and their successors. (Through revolutions, coups, etc)
You're trying to move goalposts (unsuccessfully) if you pretend that "today" is meaningful in geopolitics. If a country was a colony => invaded after independence + has a currency tied to and manipulated by the former power's currency + has internal powerbases built off the colonial satrap structure and corporate equivalents in oil etc ... it's the height of naivete to think it will "shake it off" a mere 20-30 years later, because some version of democracy was installed.
These are as a category unstable political situations and it is vanishingly few who manage to develop their way out of it. More common is descent into further chaos, with major powers standing by to ensure that it does not disrupt resource extraction.
The people who control the resources control the armed forces or paramilitary forces.
Plus, if there’s a popular revolt, they are usually motivated by religious, ethnic or ideological factors. Status quo is the interest of the big powers. That tends to bring direct or advisory intervention by western military forces.
I’d suggest spending a few minutes googling, you’ll learn alot.
That’s worldwide and vastly represented by countries that missed out on the industrial revolution or have corrupt and/or authoritarian governments, no?
Drug addicts and alcoholics often are malnourished - not because food is withheld from them, but because they are more interested in drugs and alcohol than food. The same goes for seriously ill people.
Edit: The parent appears to have committed the cardinal sin of believing CNN, which made this claim here[0], but cited a CDC report[1] does not support the assertion. I went looking for the underlying NCHS data, but couldn't find it.
A sure sign of a really bad argument is when the protagonist uses “not dying” as a justification for horrible actions.
Particularly entertaining is when apologists for the British Empire justify starvation events in Ireland and India. Particularly in Ireland when one of the peak famine years was a year of record exports of meat and wheat. The British government was of course, helpless to do much - they were concerned about the moral hazard of handing out food to dying people.
> Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.
The government has intricate voting protections for organized capital: oversight of the voting process with minority shareholder rights, stringent rules for the board and corporate governance, allowed cross-company collusion through mergers with very little checks, especially if the merger crosses industry lines. And they get extreme protection from liabilities for damages they cause.
For organized labor there is little in right-to-work states: "minority" voter rights that say anyone can defect from the majority, in many right to work states the majority can't even freely negotiate a contract that says new hires will be bound to the voting process (each new hire can defect), most of the voting rules there just make things almost impossible to organize as a whole rather than protecting the equivalent minority stakeholders, and collusion between unions isn't possible in the same way due to federal laws making secondary strikes illegal.
Organized capital gets a great structure to collaborate together that would be illegal if they were owners of separate businesses, workers get forcefully atomized even if they try and set up the organization through a freely negotiated contract (due to freely negotiated contracts not being able to set terms for new hires, through the outlawing of "Union Security Agreements" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_security_agreement). So things like dues don't have to be paid by new hires but the get the protections, then the collective action free-rider problem takes over and eventually dues for funding things like support during strikes dries up.
Imagine if new shareholders who bought some shares through an existing holder didn't have to be bound by the share-majority vote and could just sandbag mergers etc. by not agreeing to go through with it for their portion of the shares and they couldn't be forced to through the normal state collective action enforcement mechanisms that shareholders today all enjoy.
> The industrial revolution, AKA "greed", has ended starvation and slavery,
it was not the industrial revolution that ended either starvation or slavery
> Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.
Firstly, unions are not state-funded institutions, and secondly, it seems you don't understand how unions function.
Whether state-funded institutions and unions are more corrupt than private enterprise is an empirical question. Do you have empirical data to back this up?
You're talking about <1% of a massive piece of legislation. If you've never seen a sprawling corporate project where the worst 1% of the budget turned out poorly you've led a much more charmed professional life than I have.
The Biden Admin didn't spend the money, it made the money __available to the States__ to fund proposals and contracts which the __States__ are responsible to manage.
The money is __allocated__, but it's not __spent__ until the States finish viable proposals, and with a completely new technology, that takes the States time.
> “State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," ... “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.” ... the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved.
You know the White House isn't personally building these charging stations, yes? The money is available and awarded to state entities that have to approve and bid out contracts, which come with their own set of local legislation that slow down the process. The Biden administration claims the process will advance faster now that states are enacting their own legislation and rules regarding charging stations. And you can guess that some states, operating on partisan lines, might not want to do anything that benefits the Biden administration--why care about their constituents' interest in the future when you can deny the opposition a win now?
Also, Washington State is completely controlled by the Democrats - all three branches of the state government. Where are the charging stations? What about the other Democrat run states?
Do you know of any private company that moves that slowly?
I don't think it took years and $45 billion for Musk to install a national network of charging stations. Heck, even the local supermarket put in their own charging station.
Honeywell, for one, with whom I worked for eight years. It's incomprehensible, the wasted money I saw, easily reaching to billions over the same time frame. The difference is that you hear about large gov't spending initiatives, but not about those from Fortune 100s, whose incentives are to hide such inefficiencies and waste in their required reporting.
Enron. Boeing Starliner. Coke wasting $2B on a failed rollout of SAP. There are endless examples of huge piles of money pissed away in the private sector through inefficiency and incompetence, or outright theft.
However, we were discussing corruption, not inefficiency, and your example of Biden's EV program included no evidence of actual corruption. Can you think of a concrete example?
Googling for "corruption us government" provides endless examples. I remember reading about the disappearance of vast sums of government money sent to help the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Your example is fraud, not corruption, meaning parties external to the gov't are the guilty parties, not gov't employees. Corruption is carried out by insiders.
I'm not saying there's no corruption in the public sector. I'm saying it's not a given that it's greater than in the private sector, and asking for comparative data.
Does Rose-Ackerman argue that corruption is more prevalent in the public sector than the private sector? I've already said that I don't believe the public sector is free of corruption. Most of the hoops my employer jumps through with gov't bids has to do with anti-corruption processes.
i'm guessing this comment won't be popular, but i defy any downvoter to explain what part of it is wrong, much less downvote worthy. are we really gonna stick our heads in the sand and pretend like unions aren't (1) famous hotbeds of corruption (not the only one in society by any stretch, but let's be honest) (2) artificial scarcity of labor supply-- guess who that benefits? those specific workers... at the expense of literally everyone else in society! is that ok? probably / it depends / who knows. but it is true. why do you think going to the doctor is so expensive? well, lots of reason, but artificial scarcity is a huuuge one (3) the source of all kinds of asinine rules and regulations that are actually really annoying to deal with if you're trying to do stuff. like having to pay a "union guy" if you want to have any sort of nontrivially elaborate display at a convention, etc.
i get why people have this kneejerk reaction about "union good" because it is good... for the union members... and having a middle class in society is definitely good. aesthetically, at least-- i couldn't really tell you why from first principles, but it does just seem better, intuitively. but just because we all hate "capitalism" now doesn't mean we should forget that shit being so cheap on amazon is actually a good we all can enjoy, including guild-i-mean-union members!
it's sad that i feel the need to point out that i am pro-labor (whatever that means), pro-the-little-guys, fuck billionaires, etc. because i dared say anything negative about a protected class... that's just a fact of life in the 2020s i guess... i just think this stuff is all WAY more subtle than people give it credit for, and that is part of what gives bad actors carte blanche to... act badly... and that is something everyone should be against, no matter how red their favorite book is.
If that was really all unions did that would be great.
Unfortunately, unions also do things like
* keep bad police in their jobs
* keep bad teachers in schools
* add massive costs by protecting positions by forcing specific rolls. "You're not allowed to carry monitor into a trade show for your indie game booth - only union members and specifically union members who's title includes -equipment carrier- are allowed to carry equipment". "You're not allowed to plugin your monitor for your indie game booth - only union electricians area allowed to plugin equipment". Those are actual examples I've run into. I've heard of many many others for different industries. You can't write a unit test, only a unit-tester can write a unit test (made up example)
Is it not possible for "proper" management, rather than mismanagement, to result in downsizing a bloated org that over-hired, or lowering compensation in an employee-friendly hiring environment where a bunch of senior employees where laid off across the industry?
Both of those goals seek to lower costs, and goes counter to the interests of the union without being considered "mismanagement"
Absolutely. This is the worst job market for tech workers in probably 20 years. Many employed in tech are hoping to keep their job, let alone bargain for higher wages and remote work.
Hard to imagine this effort having as much leverage if it were to happen after the election.
In fact I'd wager that one of the reasons for the urgency on the workers' part is to lock up contracts before the election in order to prevent mass layoffs right after.
> urgency on the workers' part is to lock up contracts before the election in order to prevent mass layoffs right after.
If workers fear mass layoffs, going on strike is a bad idea. Instead, in such a situation the union should attempt to make an agreement with the employer of the kind "no salary increase (as it would be appropriate in consideration of the inflation), but job security for the next years".
Sure, but every time I see 'It has been a very lean year for us' from executives, I immediately see Simpsons Burns cash fight. It is annoying how well they captured some US time transcending rituals of the upper class.
Blocking off the other side is also a negotiation strategy; one that one applies for example if one considers the demands of the other side to be nutjob
insane.
This is trade-off that a company (and thee employee, too) has to make:
- does the company want to be able to easily get rid of "undesired"/"lazy" employees? For this option, it will likely have to pay bigger salaries.
- on the other hand, for the option to have job security, an employee will have to accept that the expected salary is lower, i.e. the company can save money on salaries, but cannot easily fire the employee.
this only applies to the very senior and experienced people, like staff+ engineers who are not easily replaceable + have so much knowledge that company will suffer if they leave.
the rest of your average tech worker who pushes jsons from front-end to backend does not have much leverage and is easily replaceable with new college grad with chatGPT
Usually people can still be fired if they aren't performing their contractual obligations. That might get tricky for stuff like code, but the same can be said of the current performance structure.
Hanging the threat of layoffs over employees certainly motivates employees, in much the same way stack ranking does, but it does it in such a way that is ultimately destructive to the organization.
Presumably striking isn't a great sign of motivation already. If you think you're so unimpactful that your job is at risk, you probably aren't very motivated.
Layoffs at big companies have nothing to do with individual impact.
There might be exceptions, and with companies that are cash-strapped (or smaller companies in general) the situation might be different.
But for big companies, it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck.
But presumably NYTimes doesn't employ that many people, and even fewer tech workers
> it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck
This seems really simplistic. It's certainly happened before, but it seems ludicrous to just assume that executive whim is always the cause. Another reason is if a company is doing badly financially, something needs to change.
It's not an either-or. When the company's doing badly financially and something needs to change, the mechanics of figuring out what needs to change involve a lot of executive judgment, which is not necessarily correlated with facts on the ground as the members of specific orgs or projects might see them.
Last recession was 2008 and job prospects for a software dev are much worse now compared to then. Go back further and it was dotcom bust a little more than 20 years ago.
I think that's highly dependant how many years of experience you had. 2008 was definitely worse for inexperienced new grads than today, but today is probably worse for people in their peak earning years as companies are trimming the fat.
There are plenty of jobs out there right now, you just have to be willing to move and take a lower salary, which is much easier for young people than mid-career folks. The same definitely wasn't true in 2008.
The juniors say that juniors are most affected. The experienced developers and engineers say that it is the experienced developers and engineers most affected.
I'm a senior and I would say juniors have it way harder. I could find a new job, new grads - yeah, gonna be hard. Money is tighter, and new grads are oftenly money sinks, thus no hiring.
In case of a recession, fresh grads are usually affected the worst. Really it makes sense, because work experience tends to be valued more than a degree.
There are still plenty of great high-paying jobs, they are just more competitive.
If you are a good engineer you won't have a problem aside from having to play the numbers game a bit more. There are still new grads being hired but it's definitely not as easy as it was.
> 2008 was definitely worse for inexperienced new grads than today, but today is probably worse for people in their peak earning years as companies are trimming the fat.
I'm not entirely clear that going into a potentially rough storm is a great time to rock the boat? Curious if you have any studies that show this is a good time?
Agreed that getting a contract sooner than later has to be a good idea. I'm actually surprised they have gone as long as they have with no contract.
Do you actually delegate your thinking to studies like this? If someone linked a study covering strike timing would you read it and make your opinion? this almost reads like a parody
If I was in a position where a decision impacted me directly, I would, of course, be willing to act on what information I have. As a non-impacted person, I'm afforded the luxury of seeking more information.
I am not, despite the tone from this discussion, specifically anti-union.
In the spirit of your post, though; I have grown rather suspicious of any cause that is so against getting more information. Putting the question back to you, if you saw data showing that going into a potential bad market was not the time to play extra hardball when you already lack a contract, would you consider it? I would hope the answer in both directions would be yes. (That is, if it shows this is a great time to do so, then they, of course, should!)
i don't handle difficult tactical political situations by resorting to academic studies because that's dumb so it wouldn't matter to me what a study says
This is dumb, though? For one, I don't necessarily care if it is an academic study. If you have any writings from experts, that would still be of interest to me. Hell, the entire point is to try and learn from something without having to do it.
For two, if you have so settled your view that you won't take any criticism or advice, why bother engaging in discussion? You are actively harmful to the public discourse, at this point. No?
I'm sympathetic in thinking someone is stalling in bad faith. But bad faith denouncing of their seriousness is not good, either. :(
It is not clear to me whether going on a strike is a good idea for the New York Times tech workers:
Since media is not a sector that has high margins, when a company gets under pressure to have to increase the salaries (e.g. by strikes), the management better starts to analyze how you can reduce the number of, in this case, tech workers because with thin margins, budging in these negotiations is much more dangerous for the mere existence of the business than if the margins are high.
Instead of going on strike, it would in my opinion be a better idea for the tech workers to look for a better paid job in an industry with higher margins.
> Instead of going on strike, it would in my opinion be a better idea for the tech workers to look for a better paid job in an industry with higher margins.
If they alternative is quiting, than they don't have very much to lose by going on strike.
That's only true if you are guaranteed to find another job that pays at least as much as that one you are striking against before running out of savings money, otherwise it's always best to look for career movements while still employed.
If I were looking for jobs, I wouldn't want it on my resumé that I came from a company whose workers just voted to strike - even if I wasn't a member of the union. I would not want it to be assumed that I might be a troublemaker in a not great job market.
Presumably, the tech workers at NYT have a better idea of if striking is a good idea, as they’re employed there and have better visibility into motives and margins
That's nowhere near to the level of detail you'd get by attending management bargaining sessions as a union member, knowing union proposals and counter-proposals by mgmt, etc.
It seems that subtlety doesn't cut through the 'akshually' layer. The point I was trying to make is that regardless of what the company files publicly, employees will have more relevant information than an external observer such as us. There may be internal memos announcing upcoming changes in working conditions or benefits, chatter about SLT, chatter about acquisitions, layoffs, etc...
So, the argument that we can better figure out if the strike is worth it or not is bullshit.
Ok, I still doubt they have a better idea about that. Plenty of outsiders know more about my workplace than I do simply because they bothered researching, and the internal comms are more a distraction than actually juicy.
Maybe they want to stay in news media. When I worked at The Atlantic, a lot of my coworkers were highly motivated by the subject matter of their work and perceived quality of their newsroom.
Maybe the New York Times will end up both with a unionized tech workforce, and a lower-paid one. Personally, I would never want to join a union or work as management at a company with a union, but I am still kind of curious to see what the result of a tech workforce unionizing would be.
Have the mass layoffs every single year taught people nothing? Newsflash, every company treats every single one of their employees as another replaceable cog in the machine. Even if you're the supreme grand wizard of space time and SQL at your FAANG job, you are still fully replaceable and will be if the business sees it as profitable to do so.
For now SWEs have it good, but this is quickly changing and techies are letting them do it because many of them have superiority complexes and naively think of themselves as indispensable to the business, as if there isn't an ocean of Eastern Europeans who'd happily take their place in the rat race to the botto.
And if you don't like treating employees with a modicum of respect, then you deserve a union to put you in your place. Good luck with the business when people refuse to be taken advantage of.
It's a two-way street, and the companies spend a lot of money and resources to make sure people don't realize it is.
Tech salaries have ALREADY fallen and tech workers have already been largely treated as cogs. Yes it could get even worse but I get why they’re taking their chances
It would codify this even further. Salaries have fallen but under a union any raises will be slow and require strikes and other job action and not be based on individual performance but on time served. Once time served is in play it doesn't make sense to switch jobs because you start the bottom.
It's true playing companies off each other isn't possible anymore. Switching jobs use to be a formula for a high rate.
But switching roles allowed people to grow and work on new and different tech. Leaving toxic situations was possible. Under the New York times union model you need to suck up the toxic environment.
The other issue is skills rot. The longer you stay in the same role the more the rot grows. At some point you can't find another role so you have to setup silos and protect the system you are working under from change. If someone tries to move your crystal report to power bi you've got to out politically muscle the request or you will be fired. The union may step in and protect you but can't forever.
This doesn't seem like a purely economical strike. It's not a coincidence that the most unionized tech workforce in the country is the New York Times, an organization that is fundamentally pro-union in its politics. When the organization as a whole is consistently delivering a pro-union message, doesn't it just make sense that the employees would tend to be ideologically pro-union?
> the New York Times, an organization that is fundamentally pro-union in its politics
No, it is definitely not. NYT is neoliberal. Don't confuse the cultural left with the economic/social/fiscal left. NYT is not at all pro-labor. Other people have discussed this extensively in the comments below.
Labor organizations often use a deliberately over-the-top definition of "pro-labor", where you ought to support most labor actions without interrogation or criticism out of solidarity. Is the NYT there? No, of course not, that's not really a practical position for a news organization to take.
Does the NYT newsroom generally report from a perspective that unions are good and we ought to have more of them? I don't see how you could argue otherwise.
> the management better starts to analyze how you can reduce the number of, in this case, tech workers because with thin margins
This happens anyway, regardless of how well a company is doing. Tech has been laying off workers with record profits and very high margins. But I trust the workers to have better insight than you (or me) of whether the strike is beneficial for them or not in the long run.
Let’s all remember that the vast majority of programmers are not mathematicians, nor logicians, nor authors, we are tradespeople. And you’ll notice that tradespeople in almost every other industry unionize.
I've always thought that if a union is good enough for LeBron James and Tom Brady and Mike Trout, it's good enough for anyone. The same reason professional athletes have a union and would not dream of doing without one still fully applies to everyone else.
I agree with you, but consider the "outplaying your contract" and bad blood via arbitration problem we see in more and more (American) sports. Tech jobs aren't like being a plumber, one can't exactly say you need X amount of hours to be ready to do something, even only in the eyes of the law.
Not all programmers have high comp, and high comp are extremely dependent on market conditions and skills. And a programmer career can be rather short too due to ageism. Doctors have a much more stable and predictable compensation.
it only limits as a Cartel to limit the supply of new doctors (and keep foreign licensed doctors away from the market) - this is typical cartel behavior, not union
Not even close to comparable. Becoming a doctor takes many more years than becoming a programmer. They have legal ramifications if they make mistakes instead of “teehee oopsie all our data leaked sorry”. The vast majority of programmers have a bachelor’s degree or lower. It is actually laughable to me that you would compare programmers to doctors.
In any case, we should aspire to follow the model of unions and not cartels.
becoming a good engineer takes a lot of years too.
your average 4 year college degree does not guarantee you become an engineer, plenty of new grads are without jobs.
the best engineers I know have been coding since middle school and by the college graduation have 10+ experience coding at internationally competitive level.
this is comparable to medical profession.
if you ever meet an exceptionally good engineer - just ask him for how many years has he been coding? plenty will say at least high school if not earlier - all the way till their PhD that makes it two decades of learning+coding+improving.
as for model: I am anti union and anti-cartel. Just free market as it works in the silicon valley. The competition is actually good, even from offshore workers - because it forces productivity to increase and constantly filters out the bottom ranks of the profession - they leave coding to something they are more capable of: people management, product management, program management, etc etc
Has anyone studied career satisfaction among licensed doctors versus unlicensed software developers? It seems very common for doctors to feel locked into a choice they now regret. In equilibrium a barrier to entry benefits the marginal successful entrant not at all.
these are people who go to medical profession for money and prestige.
same regrets exists among engineers who go to CS for money and faang jobs, and then realize how miserable they have become in the process of chasing the gold
Most tradespeople are not unionized. Even the most highly unionzed trade - electricians - are only 1/3rd unionized. The most unionized jobs are not tradespeople, they're teachers and police officers. https://smartestdollar.com/research/the-most-unionized-occup...
A lot (not prepared to say majority) of tech workers aren't programmers. If you spend your day plugging services together through standard interfaces, that's very much akin to plumbing, just without the occupational hazards.
> Kathy Zhang, a senior analytics manager with The Times and the guild's unit chair, said, "Management has really dragged its feet when it comes to bargaining," between the union formation and now.
Maybe tangential, but I would have guessed people managers were not eligible to be a member of the union. Does anyone know how eligibility is determined?
Generally anyone below director level makes sense imho.
The biggest advocate of pay rises and improvements to conditions is often the line level managers and those one step up from the line level managers. If this is a typical corporate job title this is a manager of line level managers. He probably has quarterly 1:1s or at least office hours supporting those at the lowest levels. It’s not like you become a line level manager, accept the 20% pay rises and suddenly change your outlook on everything. You’re never that far removed. Advocacy is important for management so I have no issues with this.
There's been a sucessful corporate ruse to make line level managers seem above line level workers and make line level works side against line level mamagers, while both sides are of the same labor class.
I consider anyone who doesn’t have the power to spend money a supervisor (or someone whose role is to cover in the event of short staffing) instead of a manager. What are you even managing if you can’t spend a little more to ensure you have the people you need?
Kathy isn’t a people manager, the Times just has confusing titles for its data folks. Product managers and project managers likewise often have “manager” in their titles without being people managers. No one with direct reports is allowed to be a member of the union!
The NLRA doesn't protect "supervisors", which is mostly anyone who can hire/fire/discipline/etc. They technically are still able to unionize, but there is literally nothing stopping a company firing them for it.
Good for them. More workers need to be understanding just how much they are being exploited by their leadership and demand a more equitable piece of the pie.
So, what's reasonable? Would giving everyone a $65k pay raise and zeroing out the profit for the company be correct? Would that put them close to what they'd get if they worked in big tech? ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Apple%2C+Meta%2C+GOO... ). We're dealing with very different numbers there.
If you want the Union's opinion, their strike demands are the place to look.
If you want my opinion, what you've described would be a start. Or at least the workers there should be parties to a decision on whether that's the right decision. I'd consider lowering executive compensation as well. But there's many ways to achieve a balance within an organization that benefits the product and the workers.
> The New York Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 staffers, on Tuesday voted to authorize a strike in protest of stalled contract negotiations with The Times' management, sources confirmed to Axios.
I haven't found anything else. While stalled contract negotiations would be reasonable ("we're not going to work without a contract"), it appears that so far those negotiations aren't public for what it is that they want.
...
> I'd consider lowering executive compensation as well.
The CEO has a total compensation package of about $10M per year. Lets slash that to $4M (average for the size of the company of NYT is $8M - so half of what a CEO would get somewhere else) and divide that $6M up between 600 tech workers and they got a $10k pay raise. If this to be divided between all the workers for NYT, it's a $1k pay raise.
While we can bemoan the amounts that CEOs get, slashing the salaries will not often produce significant increases for the rest of the workers.
> The Tech Guild, which won its union election by a landslide in March 2022, is negotiating its first contract. Times management has been dragging their feet in bargaining and attacking the Tech Guild every step of the way since workers first announced their intention to be a union in 2021.
> Among the major issues at stake for the Tech Guild is job security, which is under threat from the rise of AI and the company’s discriminatory practices around discipline and termination. Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from underrepresented groups. Union members on visas have had their lives thrown into chaos when the company arbitrarily put their immigration status at risk. Members called out the Times for this practice in a reply-all email action in June.
> These actions by management are among the many reasons why Tech Guild members are fighting for “just cause” protections in their contract, an industry and labor standard which requires management to have a just and fair reason to discipline an employee. Times management is attempting to force tech workers to accept a carveout that undermines that standard of due process in the workplace and puts more of their colleagues in the line of fire.
> Correcting pay inequity is another critical strike issue. In June, the Tech Guild released its pay study which found that:
> Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on average than men
> Black women and Hispanic or Latina women, who make up just over 6 percent of the Tech Guild, make 33% less than white men in the unit
> Black workers, who make up 7 percent of the union, earn 26% less than white workers
> Pay inequity isn’t new at The Times. The Times Guild, which represents nearly 1,500 workers in the newsroom, advertising and other areas of the company, has also taken on pay inequity.
---
As far as I can see it is:
Slow negotiations
Job security: AI, discriminatory discipline and termination.
Pay equity within the tech workers (as part of a larger pay equity issue at The Times).
There are potentially many reasonable things to negotiate for. So far, all the information I can find is "stalled contract negotiations". Working without a contract is a perfectly valid reason to strike.
Things like making sure that AI isn't used in certain capacities to reduce the staff size wouldn't be unreasonable.
As of yet, the contents of the negotiation aren't public - so we can only guess.
In the meantime, the idea that everyone should be able to make Big Tech wages ignores the reality that most companies aren't Big Tech and have a revenue per employee that is a small fraction of it... and are running on much slimmer profit margins.
There's likely always going to be tension between how many people management thinks are necessary to do the work and the reality of people not working like machines.
If the union workers think that management would like to cut things so much that it will cause the quality of the resulting work to suffer drastically, to say nothing of their health, then they're not arguing for inefficiency.
And if they don't trust that any sort of metric for "good enough" wouldn't be gameable since the management has more expensive lawyers to write contracts than them, a blanket rule makes more logical sense than trying to bet you didn't leave a loophole.
Absolute hogwash. The existence of people being exploited more does not mean that people being exploited less are not being exploited.
Like, yes, these workers are probably in better conditions than many global workers. But that doesn't mean the NYT isn't exploiting them.
Also, consider showing some solidarity -- these people are workers, and have more in common with other workers than they have different. Support their strike, and expect them to support yours. Or at the very least support them advocating for better working conditions and expect they will support you in improving your workplace.
As long as they're not forced to work, I don't see how NYT is exploiting them.
What harsh working conditions are they working under that makes their situation so untenable at NYT but aren't willing to go looking for better conditions elsewhere?
So then nothing done by anyone throughout history can ever be considered exploitative because you can go back and point to a slightly older period in history?
Exploitation involves some level of unfairness, deceptiveness, or coercion. How are NYT employees being exploited? I could think of some scenarios: e.g. being hired with the promise of indefinite remote work and subsequently being given an RTO mandate. But I haven't seen any such situation at the Times described.
Overall, it's hard to exploit a workforce that is in high demand. Oftentimes people talk about "exploitation" when industries can pay less than average wages because of some unique draw to that industry. For example, game development is known for subpar wages and long hours. But people are willing to take those jobs because of the allure of being a video game developer instead of a typical software developer. Some would call this exploitation, but it's a misuse of that term. The workers chose to accept the job at the compensation offered, and if they took a salary cut to work on games that's their prerogative - not exploitation.
I think it's likely that this is the latter situation. The NYTimes is a household name, and is a big draw for workers. Because of that prestige, they're able to meet their personnel requirements without competitive salaries.
> So as long as the level of exploitation decreases
This Is America, so we have a long way to go in this regard. Attempting to denigrate this specific example of workers flexing their rights is anti worker rhetoric, plain and simple. Arguing over coffee is bikeshedding. If you as a worker don't have a union, you have no protections from an org, its management, and shareholders. If one does not support them, that's fine, support of the minority is not needed. Popular support for unions continues to be high (historically) @ ~70%, so Labor Mode continues.
There is no other solution to the brutalist US labor market, from first principles.
In a future where the world keeps getting better, would it be fair that "exploitative" could fall to such a weak use? By your logic, that would be acceptable.
Yes not offering workers coffee could be considered exploitative in a hypothetical future, same as how not giving workers water and bathroom breaks and overtime pay is considered exploitative today while it was perfectly acceptable a few generations ago (and still is in plenty of cultures/jurisdictions).
I wish everybody in this thread could have just said what their opinions were, instead of masking them behind increasingly leading and ridiculous rhetorical questions.
I agree with you the exploitation should not be measured by some absolute bar based on the expectations of some lost past era with bad labor laws.
But Star Trek hypotheticals could be the most productive perspective, could they?
I'm not familiar with regulations on strikes, if any. That aside, you don't need to be exploited to have a moral reason to go on strike. A strike is roughly equivalent to a mass layoff, but from the employee side. We hear often how employers can let people go "for no reason, at any time", so the same should apply to employees. Employees can "let go" of the employer for no reason, at any time, and agree or not to "rehire" the employer "at will".
Please note that I'm not supporting or criticizing this particular strike. I'm just saying that if we understand unions (at least voluntary ones) as a way to increase employees' bargaining power, they should be able to engage in cutthroat, "Greed is good" negotiation under free markets; all they need is to feel that they can get more, irrespective of what they have.
These "X has it worse" arguments are tiresome and lack any sort of rigor.
There's modern day slavery in the world. Today. Even in the US we have compelled labor - it's a whole thing in the Georgia prison system. Those McDonald's burger flippers are essentially slaves, and I bet you didn't know that.
But if we subscribe to the ideology of "X has it worse" nothing would get done, ever.
The reality is even in seemingly prosperous industries workers, laborers, DO NOT have equal leverage in negotiations. Not even close. What you're describing is relying on the generosity of the corporations who employ them. A fine strategy, but hardly sustainable. They, too, can look to improve their situation.
> it's a whole thing in the Georgia prison system. Those McDonald's burger flippers are essentially slaves, and I bet you didn't know that
The prisoners yes, the McDonald’s workers absolutely not. The avg McDonald’s worker tenure is quite short and having briefly been one, I can assure you it’s nothing like slavery. Get a grip.
Absolutely yes, it's a whole program for coerced labor. Like I said, I bet you didn't know about it because this shit is absolutely under the table in regards to our media.
But yes, we do, to this day, have prisoners who are mostly black forced to work for well under minimum wage in private businesses, such as McDonald's, Wendy's, Golden Corral... sounds a lot like slavery when you put it like that.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
People act like the US abolished slavery but it instead institutionalized it and then later (of course...) privatized it.
You're 100% right, but I avoided touching on this more deeply because if you make any mention of institutionalized or systemic racism then a lot of people will stop listening.
Right, I got downvoted for my comment (with no rebuttal). People get uncomfortable when you point out the truth. Oh well, they can keep getting butthurt and I'm going to keep spewing anti-establishment comments.
we need class solidarity regardless of industry / perceived level of exploitation. all workers have a common interest regardless of industry, income level, working conditions, skill, etc.
If they don't work, they won't get parole. If they call out or otherwise don't work their 40 hours, they get reprimanded. They lose "good time" - no phone calls, no visits, no outside time, etc.
They don't earn minimum wage - much less, because the prison garnishes half of the wage for the opportunity to be forced to work.
Parole rate in Georgia is about 8%, and it's a tough on crime state. Their parole rate should be around 80%, but it's not. Getting 25 years for possession or other non-violent crimes, you have no choice but to participate in the South's modern-day slavery.
> These are high paid tech workers in a high paid industry. How are they being exploited
Nail on the head. I'd be grateful to do their job for half of what they make (and I could probably do it just as well). There are thousands of highly qualified tech workers currently working as Starbucks baristas who feel the same way. I don't know exactly what the legal options NYT has to handle this are, but I imagine the union isn't in a strong place to negotiate beyond "it would be the most inconvenient time to replace us right now."
Honestly, how many of these jobs can be not done by hard working folks in Nigeria, India, or wherever? I understand that outsourcing is a contentious issue, but the fact remains that the most probably outcome is to send these jobs off to people who are happy to do it for 1/5th the price and with 1/100 the number of complaints.
Workers also have a common interest to take a bigger share of the pie that they deserve. Everybody has this interest. It doesn't make any side of the labor market moral or immoral, its just how any market works, and that's absolutely alright.
<< Beyond fighting for wages, it's also bargaining for various workplace policies, including remote work rights, and unique just cause protections.
I say it is about time. We recently got a management recognition of the simple fact that remote works better for some cases ( where we had to say that if they want ridiculous project done on time, I want to not travel to office ).
We need this shit in writing, in policy. Fuck old guard management.
How does one refrain from crossing the virtual picket line of such a strike? Is it to not do business with any company with this union's workers, for the duration?
Continuing to do business with a company whose employees are striking isn't "crossing the picket line". Crossing the picket line means undermining a strike directly by supply labor when organized labor is using a labor embargo as leverage. To avoid crossing the NYT picket line, don't write for the NYT.
Yup in most cases striking employees don't want the end consumer to boycott the company, because ultimately it hurts them as well. Picketing is done to (1) raise awareness and (2) discourage non-union/temporary labor from replacing them during the strike.
I think at least these days, usage of the term can include customers. For example, this from the University of Maine's Bureau of Labor Education: "Customers may refuse to cross a picket line and picketers have the right to ask customers to honor their picket but should not intimidate, block customer access, disparage a company’s product, or say anything that is untrue or casts the product in a false or misleading light."
Or this, from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee: "Lastly, customers also have the right to honor the picket line and arguably have the most important role in influencing employers’ decisions, outside of the workers themselves."
Or this, from NYT writer: "Having walked a picket line before, I try not to cross anyone else’s. The W and its parent company, Marriott, know there are lots of people like me. So why hadn’t they disclosed in advance what would greet me upon arrival?"
Not transacting with a business in solidarity with an ongoing strike is a boycott. People can boycott the NYT in support of the strike. But crossing a picket line is a much, much bigger deal than not participating in a boycott. If you skip the NYT Mini Crossword for a week to support the strikers, I respect that, but I'm going to keep pushing for that sweet 15s finish this week and I'm going to sleep fine doing it.
I agree that a boycott is different, and for the NYT the terms are pretty distinct. But when employees are picketing a retail business, the two are much more entangled, so I think the common use of the phrase has shifted away from the precision you're expecting it to have.
It’s not a shift in usage, it’s a term of art. Informally it could mean just crossing the line to enter the business, but unless you live in a turn-of-the-century company town, no one in the union is expecting anything related to that by default.
In labor, “respecting the picket line” is a moral action for union members (or scabs) which by definition couldn’t apply to a spontaneous self-directed consumer boycott.
Not to put to fine a point on it: if you show up to someone else’s labor action claiming solidarity, and then independently decide to pivot the action to a totally different set of economic incentives, you are — almost literally! — a scab.
Ouch! Fair cop since we’re nitpicking, but I was trying to be cute about that — the joke started out more like “you’re technically crossing the line to scab as a strikebreaker”. I’m aware that it still doesn’t make sense unless there’s a sympathy action by the strikebreakers’ union, unfunny and unhelpful in the first place, thanks for the correction :)
Edit: Ah shoot not again. What I meant to say was “scabbing as an agent provocateur”. Sorry, I’ll quit while I’m ahead!
In many cases (though not all!), when workers are striking against a retail business, they want the customers to keep coming. Showing the strain that gets put on the system in such cases can be part of the leverage the union exerts.
This is why we, on the outside, need to listen to what the union is asking of us, and not just loudly announce that we are boycotting in solidarity, or "refusing to cross the picket line", if that's the opposite of what they want.
Or don't! It's fine to be pro-labor but for your interests not to intersect with every strike. One might have a different opinion about the moral weight of an NYT strike versus that of the Marriott hotel housekeeping staff, for instance. You might personally find yourself morally aligned with every strike, and in that case you should pay attention to what the strikers are asking. Or you might not. Things are complicated!
Either way: it is not in fact a given that customers are obliged by solidarity to boycott businesses dealing with strikes.
There's no need to justify how you do business with the NYT, whether it's playing a crossword game or accepting a job. But either one is referred to as crossing the picket line.
Surely playing a crossword game is only "crossing the picket line" if the workers on strike have asked you not to play that crossword / called for a more general boycott?
I think there's a deeper and more important subtlety here: there's a sort of moral obligation not to break a strike, but except in some specific circumstances, there really isn't an obligation to support a boycott, any more than there's an obligation to put a pro-labor bumper sticker on your car. Breaking a streak and ignoring a boycott are not equally weighted.
(My kid brother is a labor person, so really I'm just venting some stuff here to keep it from coming up at Thanksgiving).
The way you're using it, it sounds like a pejorative... Which puts something of a spin on your particular pedantry here.
> there really isn't an obligation to support a boycott
I think the Irish - who invented the term - would disagree with you on that point.
Not every boycott is worth supporting, sure. But if a boycott is worth supporting (say, divesting from genocide supporters) then yes there's a bit of an obligation there.
My honest opinion, asking customers not to do business doesn't really make sense as customer demand can add to the pressure on management when their workers are not to be found and all they have are temps who are, actually, crossing the picket line. I never understood this stance. It sounds much more like a morality stance than one based on strategy to get management to the table.
tbh consumer boycotts can be very effective for organizing. not having workers to serve your customers is a lot less scary to a business than potentially losing your customers
crossing the picket line is not the same thing as scabbing and as a phrase often can apply to consumers.
I believe the NYT guild has asked ppl to pause reading NYT in the past, however in many many cases the unions do not want a consumer boycott. so it really depends
Sometimes unions will call for a consumer boycott during a strike, but sometimes they won't. Unsure what the NYT tech union is asking for (or not asking for) at the moment.
And I can see why it can make sense to not call for a boycott. If workers are on strike, but consumer demand remains strong and their needs aren't being met, it puts pressure on management. Like if mail drivers go on strike, everyone stops getting deliveries, and suddenly it's obvious how critical those drivers are.
They're not actually on strike yet, and they haven't requested any action from customers. Sometimes a union actually wants customers to behave as normal, because typical customer behavior in concert with a work stoppage will apply the most pressure to management. Sometimes they ask customers to boycott, to apply financial pressure. Sometimes, though rarely, a union will ask customers to threaten to divest or cancel accounts.
The best way to make sure you're in step with what the union is asking for from customers is to keep an eye on whatever they seem to be using to communicate the most - in this case, it seems to be their twitter: https://x.com/NYTGuildTech. I think it's fair to assume that if they have any requests for customers of NYT, they'll put them there.
I remember during the screenwriters guild strikes in the Movie and TV industry, many writers were advocating _not_ to boycott movies/TV. Mainly in order to show that the people still wanted to watch the media that these people were writing for and creating, so that the strike held more legitimacy: we are needed to produce more content for your business.
I suppose sometimes it makes sense to boycott, but not all the time.
I don't know why you are being down voted, this is a fair question.
The answer is: don't make assumptions, listen to what the workers want. If they call for a boycott, boycott in support. If they say, "don't boycott", please don't encourage others to boycott.
Plenty in the media industry make money from engagement, and they might not want you to stop engaging! The writers strike, for instance, said keep watching but consider not producing content that builds off our content. Plenty of podcasts switched to other media for the duration.
Watch for public statements from the union. A striking unit will generally inform the general public if they are looking for any show of support. No need to assume that a boycott is desired!
Some people care about highly talented software engineers.
But not all corporations do. Many just want somebody to make the app go boop. Or the website show a bigger picture.
Rhetorically, Wouldn't it be nice for those people if there were Fair rules that protected against abusive hiring, abusive firing, abusive management, which can wreck a person's career trajectory.
We technology people invest our brains into specialties. We solve the specific problems of a business. There is no one size fits all solution in our industry. So as we specialize for each job, if that job terminated us unfairly, that would just suck. So Unions may help balance the scales when working for the powerful corporation.
This is because software dev is a volatile market. It doesn't matter how "talented" you are, it's about your rank in the social circles and it shows in the product.
There is now far more devs than there is work for them. This is a planned strategy to reduce salaries.
If you're "talented". Make your money and get out asap.
This is what I preach to my kids. Get to work, live at home, save everything and invest. There is a huge difference between kids attitudes these days and those of the gen-x crowd. I loved my first jobs, they were so fun and people treated me very well. My children have dipped into the work force a bit and found it very nasty and hostile across various industries. My son trained as a machinist. A job that is very well suited to him. He asked for PPE (respirator, gloves) at his first job and was educating himself on the chemicals used in his area. After incurring chemical burns and respuratory issues he had them put the labels back on the barrels and again requested PPE. They threw him out on his ass, but not before attempting to humiliate and denigrate him. He is traumatized now and seeking disability benefits from the government. I don't have much to stand on when trying to convince him to keep trying.
It's among the most meritocratic I have a view into (from conversations with friends in.. mechanical engineering, entrepreneurship, academia, nonprofit, sales, education, ..)
All of those things are based overwhelmingly on social circles and politics. Not merit. If the world were based on merit we wouldn't be afraid of free markets and we wouldn't have mega corps. Yet, here we are.
You're not getting a job in programming without a social in. The people hiring you don't understand the job. That's what happens when things become big, bloated, and need to be popped. Tech has control of all modern nations down to the military and infrastructure. Nobody is tangibly regulating and pushing back on their power.
I wonder how long it'll stay. The poor strikers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been going for 22 months[1] (!) so far. It's impressive. Until then, they've set up the Pittsburgh Union-Progress.[2]
What's weird is how no one seems to mention it, even in Pittsburgh. How can a strike go on for 22 months with (almost) no one noticing/caring?
[2] Which is somehow only one of several nonprofit news outlets covering Pittsburgh? Aside from the Union-Progress there's Publicsource, the Allegheny Front, WQED, WESA, the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, and the semi-local 100 Days in Appalachia, Belt Magazine, Spotlight PA. (As well as the just-closed Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.) It feels weirdly disproportionate to its population. Is there any data on the cities most overrepresented in nonprofit news outlets covering them? Or just news outlets?
As a former Sunday NYT subscriber I would like to see more pay go to hiring and retaining journalists and less to so-called "tech" workers. The web development nonsense has made the NYT worse, not better to this reader. Other readers may disagree.
This could be a blueprint for how other tech departments unionize, but I suspect NYT is a unique case because of their politics. Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look anti-union inside their own house? This gives the workers more leverage than they would otherwise have in other companies.
In any of the places I worked at in the past an anti-union consulting firm would have been called in to bust things up before it ever got this far.
Regardless of what infographic makers declare, the NYT newsroom is not “left” leaning.
Their coverage is much more complicated than left vs right, but one theme is they don’t question the loudest narratives, and they hold grudges when they perceive someone to not give them enough access.
The right tends to be louder and more uniform and persistent in messaging, so that coloring often gets unconsciously added to articles rather than the journalists taking a step back and analyzing the whole picture.
It’s the quick/lazy way to write stories after all, and journalists have deadlines. The author may be left leaning and some of that may even show, but a little left leaning flavor doesn’t mask that it’s based on the right’s take.
The choice of coverage also is very herd like, not left or right.
The NYT also goes out of the way to appear fair and balanced, trying to find the “average” in stories. But as anyone but the NYT knows, averages are skewed easily.
Well here's a challenge for you, we can easily put your viewpoint to the test:
Go on the NYT website right now and find me a single article currently on the front page that's negative about leftist policies or politicians, or a single article that's positive about rightist policies or politicians.
I bet you can't find any.
Repeat this experiment, any minute, any hour, any day, any year, for the last 10 years, and you will get the same exact results.
Regardless of whether or not Hamas is hiding out amongst civilians, those civilians are still entitled to human rights protections under international law. The comment section on that article says it all; a bunch of people largely agreeing that it's the Palestinians fault they are getting killed in their shelters.
But that is tangential to the discussion in this thread, which is that the NY Times is leftist. It's not. It, along with most of it's readership, is your typical establishment news organization in the US. Nothing status-quo shaking coming out of the NY Times.
It's a fact that they've been using hospitals for non-medical purposes to some extent.
However, it's also a fact that the Israeli government has been attempting to milk these finds for far more than they're worth, to an extent beyond embellishment and closer to outright fabrication (c.f. the alleged "command center" under al-Shifa, the Hamas "shift schedule" that was really just an ordinary Arabic calendar, and so on).
In short: yes Hamas is bad, and all that. But for its own part, the Israeli government never seems to miss an opportunity to leverage available circumstances to undermine its own credibility.
It was, but it's fallen off at this point. Now most of the front page and editorial is about the US presidential debate that is about to happen, the coverage of which looks like any other mainstream establishment news publication in the US.
Does that make a difference or are y'all just constantly moving goalposts to fuel the narrative that media is inherently left-leaning?
Because it's really not - especially not in the US. Go look through their articles. How many serve corporate interests? How many are fundamentally ultra-capitalists?
You guys act like these are commies. No, they're right-leaning, just not far right insane wackos (Fox News). You're right, they're not out here questioning how black Kamala is. No, that absolutely does not make them left wing.
> ...to fuel the narrative that media is inherently left-leaning?
Right around this time 8 years ago, the election was over... in the media. Clinton won, trump didn't, in like September of 2016. Like, the world was collectively shocked. Because, according to the media, trump was cooked.
A big part of why Clinton won in the media while her rivals didn't is because she was the least left-leaning Democrat president candidate since, well, Clinton. Clinton's' vast corporate support is because she would lean to the right of the average American on most economic issues and was business as usual, in vast opposition to her rival.
Compare for example media treatment of Sanders or even Warren when he opposed her and you can see that it's not her leftist tendencies that made her win in the media.
> Compare for example media treatment of Sanders or even Warren when he opposed her and you can see that it's not her leftist tendencies that made her win in the media.
Respectfully I don’t accept your premise here. You’re saying she was center of left? But still “left”, as it were? And you agree the media crowned her king months before the election?
So the media ordained her the winner. You do agree or you do not?
I am saying that the media was enamored with her because she represented a shift rightwards compared to her predecessors, and that her campaign successfully shifted the leftmost acceptable economic policies to be to the right of the electorate.
In that the media vastly prefered her over Trump, it was because she was pro-establishment and better aligned with corporate interests, not because she was economically to his left. The case of Warren and Sanders (where famously the media was happy to compare Sanders to Trump, reinforcing the idea that their opposition to Trump is not due to his right-wing economic policies) as well as the comparison to previous Democratic candidates is evidence I think is much more compelling than the assumption of leftwing/rightwing partisanship.
> … her campaign successfully shifted the leftmost acceptable economic policies to be to the right of the electorate.
Huh. If that were true she would have won. So it can’t be true. Unless your claim is “the right was too far right” in which case your “right-of-the-electorate” cannot be mathematically true.
Were you trying to make a different point? The current one doesn’t hold water.
70% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton said that they voted against Trump, not for her. And people don't vote for whatever candidate is closer to them on the left-right spectrum, they care about personality, about how the candidate makes them feel. In those terms Trump was extremely polarizing, many people whose policies were closer to Trump than Clinton voted for Clinton because Trump was, as a person, unacceptable.
Besides, there are people who just don't vote if your platform or personality is not engaging. That was a big phenomenon with Clinton and is generally what decided whether or not Democrats win: the higher the turnout, the higher their chances. If a Democrat runs to the right, they lose turnout from leftwing voters who stay home, they don't (just) win votes from the center.
Also, Clinton did win the popular vote, despite all of this.
The person I was responding to said I thought Harris is a communist. Where did he get that from? Nowhere. He invented it out of whole cloth. He also implied that I am a supporter of "far right insane wackos" for asking for a basic confirmation.
He formed an entire narrative about me from asking a simple question. A question that nobody sane could really come to the conclusions that he came to.
Perhaps it would be better if I didn't word my response the way I did, but I am just so tired of being accused of all sorts of things just because people think I am opposed to what they believe for asking for clarification. He doesn't know what I think and instead of asking he went on a rant about what he perceived my views to be. It is utterly ridiculous and it is so tiring.
I said the NYT, and other media outlets, are not "far right insane wackos". Some people then run with that and say they're left-wing. That's not the case.
NYT is center-right, maybe center, and absolute worst-case slightly center-left. Our perception is warped, because we compare it to the likes of Fox News. Which is so unbelievably far right, that just about anything looks left-leaning in comparison.
> went on a rant about what he perceived my views to be
This didn't happen. Please, reread my comment and you'll notice I said absolutely nothing about you or your beliefs. I spoke of extreme right-wing beliefs. Whether you identify with that or feel shame about that is not my problem. If you're privy to creating personal attacks to fuel a sense of victimhood, that's on you.
Funny how you are now actually moving the goal posts. Originally it was "they're right-leaning". Now it is "absolute worst-case slightly center-left". You are admitting they may not be right wing and yet you accused me, who was simply asking for clarification, of moving the goal posts.
There is no point in continuing a conversation when you are just projecting exactly what you are doing on me.
You managed to ignore the rest of my comment, so appreciate the honesty.
I mean by "worst case" you could form an argument that says something like NYT is slightly center-left. And that's the best you can do.
The propaganda that the media is left-wing or left-wing extremists is just that, propaganda. On a related note, there are exactly 0 communist democrat candidates in the US.
In reality, most of our sources and policies on a federal level are strictly right-wing. This only gets more right-heavy when you consider that the US is the most right-leaning first world country.
What we, commonly, perceive as "right wing" is actually far-right politics. For example Fox News is not right-wing, they're far right. Trump isn't right-wing, he's far right. Biden isn't left-wing, he's center, etc.
Let's just assume you're right, and this experiment is true a majority of the time... wouldn't another possible explanation be that that's a perfectly fair representation of things? Both sides aren't always equal. Weighing the coverage of both sides to be equal would be misleading.
It's not left vs. right, it's establishment vs. anti-establishment. New York Times was a major cheerleader for the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and uncritically repeated falsehoods from George W. Bush, who is not exactly a leftist hero.
It also was unquestioningly supportive of any and all covid NPI's. NYT was one of the major publications that would routinely report the "covid kill rate" at like 4% despite massive data suggesting it was at least one or two orders of magnitude off depending on the age bracket.
NYT is a pretty solidly right wing organization (eg [1] and [2]) like most for profit media outfits in the US. I suspect they’ll react like any other for profit business. Previous leaks have shown this to be the case [0][3]
Unions sometimes hire on third party organizations to help them organize, I don’t think they are specifically specialized against anti-union consulting firms, but I bet that’s part of it.
"Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look anti-union inside their own house?" - The NYTimes isn't left wing and being anti-union is entirely within their wheelhouse. Now they won't come out and say "We don't like unions" all their issues will of course be why this specific union isn't a good idea at this specific time, but they'd never willingly accept a union unless they really don't think they have a choice.
Allsides media bias rating for NYT is lean left[1], a -2.2 with -6 as the most extreme and 0 as neutral. Rating is left for their opinion section[2], a -4.
I don't fully agree with how neutral is defined. The US has always been a right leaning country for better and worse. I might be able to agree with Allsides on a relative scale but I think all corporate media has a right leaning bias relative to what one would expect from non-profit media. Since very few people regularly consume non-profit media, it is not surprising to me that the NYTimes appears on the left even though I do not agree that it is on an absolute scale.
Perhaps the NYT isn't left-wing in a global context, and it is likely centrist in New York City, but it is definitely to the left of the median US voter. They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing, and unions in New York have a history of squeezing their employers out of business.
> it is definitely to the left of the median US voter.
No, it isn't, and it's not remotely close.
The median US voter is far more left wing than you would know from politics and media. Most voters actually support an arms embargo vs Israel, support universal healthcare, support action on climate change, want an end to the prison industrial complex, want minimum wage increases, gun control, an end to predatory college costs and loans, stronger worker's rights, reproductive rights, cannabis legalization, reduction in militarism, affordable housing, etc.
The NYT is central to fooling these "median voters" into supporting politicians and parties that have absolutely no intention of supporting genuine left wing action.
To say the NYT supports unions in general is to ignore very recent history, such as their coverage of Amazon and Starbucks union efforts. You also need to ignore a very very long and well described slant against left wing causes in general. Here, have a nice digestible Chomsky piece from nearly 30 years ago: https://chomsky.info/199710__/
See also: the NYT's coverage of trans issues, which in recent years has tried to both-sides the topic in a way that gives fundamentalist hate groups equal oxygen as the fucking APA. No self-respecting leftist publication is handing the mic to Mumsnet users and conversion therapy advocates. (Contrast that to the New Yorker, which is hardly a commie rag and yet has been unambiguously progressive on that front, among others.)
An apt quote from Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which was published in 2013 but set in 2001:
> How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper?
There's nothing particularly radical about wanting more fair healthcare, labor rights, education, housing etc.
As I pointed out, the majority of Americans want those things. It's pretty basic human decency, empathy, efficiency, etc.
And yet, when you raise these _majority_ viewpoints, someone pops up from behind a Bush to call you 'tankie'/'commie'/'literally Stalin'. That's not an accident. There are some people who like things the way thay are, and about 6 of those people own 90% of all media.
We spent over 8 trillion dollars (!) in the Middle East, murdering millions, all based on lies; and now our Democrat candidate is overjoyed to get endorsements from the architects of those wars... At every stage, from plotting to image rehabilitation, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon to Yemen, etc, to Gaza, the NYT was with those warmongers all the way.
> Perhaps the NYT isn't left-wing in a global context, and it is likely centrist in New York City, but it is definitely to the left of the median US voter.
That isn't true at all. You're probably thinking of the NYT 20 years ago, under the Bush administration. Do you read the newspaper, or are you parroting talking points? I used to subscribe until the blatantly conservative bias became overwhelming.
> They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing
Didn't they just report a 13.3% increase in YoY profits on their most recent financial quarter? Your chart shows a company with healthy growth for several years running. A billion dollars in profit last year and on track to do it again this year isn't "tenuous".
You can't just look at results over the last four years when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old. They've had massive declines in recent years, which caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.
Their methodology is literally, "We didn't like the results we got so we assumed they were wrong and ignored them."
> Surprisingly, ABC News was rated Lean Right (1.18) in the July 2024 Blind Bias Survey. A total of 478 respondents rated ABC. This rating differed from AllSides’ current rating of Lean Left (-2.40) at the time, and triggered the Aug. 2024 Editorial Review.
> AllSides speculates this outlier response is because the survey content was collected on July 15 and 18, 2024, which were just days after the July 14 assassination attempt of Donald Trump.
> The Lean Right rating was incorporated into the final rating for ABC News, but was weighted less to account for outlier conditions.
This is literally just putting your foot on the numbers to make it show what you want - the network showed more right-leaning content and they said, "Well that doesn't count." Why doesn't it count?
Look at the increasing number of criticisms of Times coverage from the Left. Look at their trajectory since the Cotton editorial. Look at how they're covering this election. It's not a left wing paper, under A.G. Sulzberger.
> You can't just look at results over the last four years when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old. They've had massive declines in recent years, which caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.
They had massive declines from the mid-oughts to 2018 in line with the rest of the newspaper industry. They've reinvented themselves as a tech media company and are on a better track now, so it makes sense that the employees who made that happen want the same union protections as the rest of the employees of the newspaper!
They also were never doing so badly that they weren't still making millions of dollars in profit, which I'm not willing to call "tenuous" for a newspaper that's 172 years old.
It's wild how few people in this thread are unaware of the massive blowback the NYT has faced from the left, but I guess most people are generally not in sync with the left to begin with :P
Really telling that the NYT's attempt to please everyone has pleased almost no one, though. Progressives are angry that hate groups get airtime in the name of "objectivity". Conservatives still think it's a left-wing paper and won't read it. Liberal centrists are playing Wordle?
The NYT isn't left-wing in any context, other than one a segment of the US inherited from Glenn Beck some time in the 90s. It is an establishment paper, and energetically capitalist and interventionist.
> They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing
Why does your link say that their profit is up 60%(!) since 2020?
-----
edit: tbh, I think people think the NYT is left-wing only because they associate NYC with Jewish people, and they're still steeped in conspiracy theories of "Judeobolshevism." So I guess that's on the Dreyfus affair (through Ezra Pound, Eustace Mullins and the Birchers.)
The NYT is a paper owned by a rich family that has always praised every dictator the CIA has praised, and passed on any lie they were asked to.
So what you're saying is that the NYT was doing badly, then had a massive bounce-back. I am supposed to ignore the bounce-back, and accept the contraction that ended at least a half decade ago as an explanation for what is happening today. Why would I do this?
Public opinion has little bearing on the decisions that NYT makes, until a critical threshold is passed. The aim of the union is to bring that critical threshold of displeasure into focus and to approach it until NYT relents.
The politics of the median voter in the US is not relevant for this discussion.
The NYT has been liberal since I can remember; however, up until relatively recent decades, it was respected by conservatives as well as liberals. Now it reflects liberal and progressive povs.
On the other hand I have recently seen George W. Bush being described as a progressive because he wouldn't say who he's voting for. Left/right determination seems to be made purely on loyalty to a single individual in today's US politics. So if that's where we're at, NYT is liberal because it won't endorse Trump. That's fine, but let's just say that.
In the world outside of petty dictatorships, though, left/right determination is made on the basis of alignment with various policies and philosophies -- so increasingly, people within the US are losing credibility when it comes to any conversation about left/right politics.
The neocon thing is weird. Bernie and others used to compare Cheney with pretty unsavory characters in history, but now he’s lauded by progressives. This shit is getting weird. Some weird realignment is happening where former enemies are bedfellows now with a new enemy. In very loose terms, Republicans are subverting previous Democratic issues and the Democrats are subverting previous neocon issues. The Dems now get most of “big money”, new Republicans are now the populists. Broad strokes of course, but that’s how it’s shaping up.
If anyone remembers, in the eighties the Repubs were into importing foreign labor (i.e. cheap; hence “no uvas”) and Bernie used to protest against dumping refugees in his state. This has reversed!
> Some weird realignment is happening where former enemies are bedfellows now with a new enemy. In very loose terms, Republicans are subverting previous Democratic issues and the Democrats are subverting previous neocon issues. The Dems now get most of “big money”, new Republicans are now the populists. Broad strokes of course, but that’s how it’s shaping up.
People underestimated how many Bernie Sanders supporters switched to Trump when he dropped out in the 2016 election. Some of us have been seeing this realignment coming for that long.
I haven't seen Cheney being lauded for anything other than maintaining his stand against somebody he has been calling a criminal, coward, and worse for years. I haven't seen a single democrat show excitement over policies supported by Cheney, except when he says that the law should apply to Trump as well as the rest of us. So, again, what you're calling weird is largely a result of loyalty to a person instead of actual policies.
And, yes, the world remembers Bernie's about-face on policy -- there's been quite a lot (e.g., [1]) written on the topic. But it's pretty normal for politicians and even political parties to change their minds in issues over a span of time as long as Bernie's career. This should be expected of politicians: they should be willing to change their minds and adapt their policies to new facts gained over time. Moreover, they exist to represent We The People, so when we change our collective minds, politicians who fail to keep up are replaced! Bernie is still around despite his change of heart precisely because it followed that of his constituency.
Do you remember when Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Progressive Party ticket? That party, founded by a lesbian, was eventually folded back into the mainstream Republican party back when Democrats were conservatives. There's nothing weird about parties and politicians changing their minds on stuff.
That's entirely in line with how I characterized the Democratic response to Cheney's endorsement. They still don't like him, but Democratic policy has been to reach across the aisle for most if not all of my lifetime -- so they'll accept that endorsement with aplomb.
I’ve always thought of NYT as pretty liberal too. Not leftist, those are two totally different philosophies. In the case of union organizing, they might be vaguely on the same side, but only after jumping through a couple hoops.
I think leftists are basically in favor of unions in the US because leftists are generally in favor of labor protections, and unions are the best we can get inside the capitalist system. More extreme leftists might prefer some kind of socialist system, but that’s not on the table in America really.
Liberals are, of course, typically market oriented (that’s what liberal economics are). A liberal point of view would be “of course people have a basic right to associate with people of their choosing, negotiate contracts, and a union is just a vehicle for doing that.”
A union is about as much collectivism as a liberal can stomach, more of a stop-gap for a leftist.
The NYT is not a left wing organization. It aligns, mostly, with a centrist Democrat politically. That position puts it pretty center right on the global scale.
A left wing paper would typically be pretty anti capitalist, anti imperial, etc. which the NYT is definitely not.
This is a global forum, it's important to remember that while the democrats in the US are called "the left" there, they really really are not a left wing party.
The Democrats are most definitely leftwing. What a preposterous thing to claim. Just because other countries are withering away under socialism, doesn't suddenly make the Dems right wing.
I'm sorry, you are simply incorrect here. Some members of the Democratic Party are left of center, but by and large they are a center/center right party.
They broadly support capitalism, broadly support imperial military power, broadly do not support single payer health care, broadly do not support nationalization of industry, oppose criminal justice reform, oppose upzoning, oppose transit, oppose large tax hikes, and are active in the eradication of minorities.
Biden shut down a major labor strike, he expanded drilling for oil, he made it easier for states to medically and socially discriminate against trans people, he's pumped up the police, and he's continuously armed a state accused of genocide. Biden has put forth one of the most restrictive border policies we've ever had, and kept many trump era policies. The democrats also had the opportunity, years ago, to permanently secure abortion access and chose not to. They have by and large expanded the carceral state (and coined the concept of super predators to ensure Black people remained incarcerated.)
Also, and this might be a shock, democrats are anti gun, while many many leftists believe in gun ownership. (Karl Marx, Martin Luther king Jr., Malcom X, etc were all believers in individual ownership of firearms.)
Leftists generally believe in nationalization, limiting corporate and executive power (or eliminating it), social housing, socialized medicine, free food and water, elimination of oil drilling, trains, dense urban areas, mutual aid, "wellbeing for all", free education, free childcare, etc.
I've never once seen a Democrat say that we should abolish private property. If you think democrats are left wing you simply don't understand what left wing means.
The NYT is corporate wing. There's no charitable way to look at their reporting on the current election cycle and make the claim that they've treated the candidates equally. Donald Trump hasn't uttered a consecutive set of coherent sentences where he starts with an idea and finishes with an actual conclusion that isn't "and it'll be better / worse than ever before" in at least 5 years.
How much of a comp boost would an average NYT tech worker get if the union succeeded? Let's say 10% for the sake of the argument. Please correct me if I'm way off.
Wouldn't they be able to get a much higher comp by interviewing with other local tech firms? If so, why don't they? Seems more effective than waiting and hoping for a small increase through the union.
This is such a weird response. Do you collectively interview for other jobs? No. Would you tell any other union this? No. Collectively bargain for your current job and raise the standards for everyone now and in the future. I don't know why tech is so hyper-individualist.
It doesn't raise standards. It squishes them at both ends, particularly the top. That might be what you want, but tech salaries have bloomed massively because there isn't a union. You might say "that's over; now let's lock in our massive salaries", but I doubt it'll work that way.
Tech isn't hyper-individualist. It just leans slightly to the individual, because any half-decent tech worker is worth a lot to an organisation, and they don't need a union rep to negotiate on their (and hundreds of other people's) behalf.
> I'm surprised that supply and demand never crossed your mind as the reason for high tech salaries
No need to be surprised - it more than crossed my mind.
> Professional athletes, actors, and screenwriters enjoy both high salaries and union protections
Well, screenwriters aren't in the same ballpark as the other two, but the highly paid athletes and actors are not having their wages negotiated by a union rep. They have agents. Most actors are barely paid anything, and have union membership.
You declared there are high salaries in software because "there isn't a union". Supply and demand didn't factor in.
Food service and retail workers are not widely unionized. Do they have high salaries?
> the highly paid athletes and actors are not having their wages negotiated by a union rep
So then you understand even with a union, workers can be free to negotiate their own wages. The union doesn't necessarily hold superstars back from earning their true market value.
Due to its infancy software's low regulation, barrier to entry, and capital needed makes for one of the few equitable areas left for a person from a disadvantaged background to wind up decently rich if they play their cards right and/or get lucky.
Precisely why it's always under attack. Corps with simple technical objectives accrue thousands of developers into an org chart so dense it's a productivity black hole: anything to justify keeping wages down for the actual workers.
Jeez why do people think I'm against the union? This is a forum for asking questions and understanding the world. I truly didn't mean to discourage unionization, I was curious about the thinking behind joining the union. It's sad that even on a tech forum people assume things about each other's political opnions instead of discussing.
I think this was a fair question to ask and I'm not really understanding why you're being attacked for it. For a strike to be effective, the union collectively bargaining via a strike needs to have clearly defined, but also realistic demands.
Humans tend to like to stay at there they are, in the tech context especially. It takes a long time relative to the length of a career to learn new systems, make new connections, and achieve some level of independence at a new job. There's also relatively few jobs that at least pretend to be somewhat beneficial to the world while paying somewhat competitive salaries (I can't think of any that I've worked at). Then there's relationships you may have developed with your colleagues.
Finally, if everyone just leaves their jobs without trying to improve them, won't everyone run out of places to jump to eventually?
> Subscription revenue in the quarter grew 7.3 percent, to $439.3 million, compared with the previous year. Total advertising revenue was up 1.2 percent, at $119.2 million.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
What? The commenter approached this just fine. They didn't state anything as fact and asked for others to weigh in. This is completely reasonable in a discussion.
it's been a while since I worked in adtech so unsure best where to source/verify those impressions but much of NYT views are by paid subscribers so I'd imagine that funds at least a good chunk of those workers salaries?
further, I also don't know much of of NYT's tech but it doesn't seem especially difficult or cutting edge so 622 tech workers does seem a bit bloated though I guess they might need a little staff for IT in various locations worldwide so that adds up maybe?
I think all we need to see is a compensation package equivalent to big tech or even greater, amplified by shares and the trendiest cliff for vesting, and tech unions will take off nationwide
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. There is a huge reason big tech can afford those compensation packages for employees, and the vast majority of companies can simply not afford that.
As someone who's been both a union member and on the management side, it's frustrating when all sides don't realize that unions don't magically make money available to distribute to employees. There is certainly the argument that money needs to be distributed more equitably, but in a lot of cases (having seen this directly) there is simply not much money to move around.
Certainly, I'd love it if Google's never-ending money spigot was available to all.
I wasn’t being sarcastic, NY Times is publicly traded too and is fully capable of the model where annual share grants are equal to the base salary, as opposed to a tiny sprinkle you’re supposed to be grateful for in leu of none at all.
Their tech team isn't that big, their $8bn marketcap could handle the share grants.
I had been critical of how wages haven't kept up with expenses for 30 years, while enamored by big tech compensation packages. In my analysis, big tech compensation packages are only reaching parity with the model of what wages would look like if they kept up with expenses, in which case I still shouldn't be impressed or worry about a comparison to what other fields are making. If value can be rationalized, and collective bargaining can extract it, then do that, I’m into it now since we’re close.
According to Google, the NY Times has a profit margin of 6-10% in most quarters. They're not exactly rolling in cash. Not to mention, there's a bunch of other teams at the NY Times that presumably want raises too. What's the justification for giving a raise to developers, but not to the writers that produce the company's main product?
Is there enough money to afford the proposed pay raises? 6% profit margin isn't much. Granting the proposed pay raises to both groups could easily put the company in the red.
Not sure where your 6% figure comes from, but you can easily find the 2023 Annual Report which states the following:
> Adjusted operating profit margin (adjusted operating profit expressed as a percentage of revenues) increased to 16.1% in 2023, compared with 15.1% in 2022.
You might also look into the NYT's recent history of stock buybacks while denying raises to their lowest-paid employees. The money is there.
There are a host of other real expenses that need to be paid that "adjusted operating profit" doesn't account for. I'd be really surprised if total net profit was more than 50-65% of that.
To emphasize: that point I can totally agree with. While I don't know the details of all the reasons this union is striking, I can certainly imagine lots of good, plausible reasons, and stock buybacks (if they are egregious) would be at the top of the list.
I was just pushing back against using "big tech comp packages" as some sort of baseline for what unions should be pushing for. It is completely unrealistic and people who say stuff like this hurt their own cause by not living in reality.
It does use cash unless the company dilutes the stock by adding more shares. And if they dilute stock, they're effectively taking money from the existing shareholders. There's no free lunch.
being a public company with a liquid market is a license to print shares and the market can decide if it wants to stick around at a similar company valuation
my primary observation is that the world NY Times was formed or floated shares in didn't have the same shareholder tolerances that exist now
tech companies are controlled by one or two key founders, which wouldn't fly at one point, with rampant dilution
they rely on the appetite of the market, and in some other risk on stock markets around the world, even more extremes are seen to fit the appetite of the market
nobody is suggesting its a free lunch, if the market tolerates it then its available to attract talent competitively, or for talent to collectively bargain to extract that value
with the dilution not occurring all at once, I bet you’d be surprised what shareholders would tolerate
The board of the directors represents the shareholders, and they would likely not approve of any significant dilution. Again, the money has to come from somewhere. Either from revenues, or from the existing shareholders. The latter would just tell the union to pound sand, unless the Times is genuinely struggling to recruit talent (not likely).
> while enamored by big tech compensation packages.
The thing I think that is highly ironic is that a huge reason you are "enamored with big tech pay packages" is that they're enormous, and a huge reason they're enormous is they sucked up a ton of the revenue that used to go to newspapers.
I think fair equity grants are a great idea, but as another commenter said I don't see why this should in any way be specific to the tech team. What I think is just darn right silly is to compare compensation packages at any newspaper with big tech. It's simply unrealistic to think that there is enough money at other companies to pay those extremely high salaries.
Here's a very easy exercise for you: I haven't looked it up, but I'd be definitely willing to bet per-employee average compensation at, say, Google or Facebook is higher than per-employee revenue at the NYT.
Always love seeing the temporarily-embarassed-billionaire-CEO type on HN espousing anti-union views. Such a fascinating indoctrination happening there every time.
It's not hard to understand, this is a site where people champion working overtime hours for the chance at a lottery ticket or prefer working for companies that are destructive to society and anticompetitive.
NYT is among the top 50 most visited websites in the world and gets upwards of 700M visitors a year. They have apps on every platform. They have interactive content. They host videos and livestreams. They have games. They have a huge social media presence. They have an ads platform. They have the same overall technical challenges as any large tech company.
I'm not OP, but I'm also irritated by these kinds of questions, especially during discussions about labor disputes. This is a well-established recipe to muddy the waters for all posts touching on tech workers and labor unions (all 3 are present in the comments, here):
- 'They make enough money, why do they need collective bargaining?'
- 'Why does NYT need SO MANY tech workers? It's a newspaper after all, right?'
- 'The job market is bad, so they should be THANKFUL to even have a job' OR 'They should just get a new job that pays better, the free market will fix it' - depending on how the job market looks.
Observation: answering the question you wished you were asked as opposed to the one you were asked is a conversation dominating tactic which reduces your credibility towards good-faith socratic dialogue.
To run a site with 1B views a month or more you don't need many people. At my $day_job we have hundreds of millions of views per year and we're less than 100 _tech workers_, of which about ~ 10 do infrastructure and the rest are developers.
In order to be successful you need to have quality, not quantity.
But to answer your statement, 600 is a lot of people to have around in the tech part of the company.
Maintaining the site, embedding rich media content in the site, managing dynamic elements including apis, ads, etc, managing the cms software, managing payments, building customer service infrastructure, internal tools for developing and launching, security personnel, all the games, tracking engagement and reporting business metrics, building software to manage the physical processes printing and distribution of a massive periodical, managing suppliers, managing access for authors, editors, guest writers, site commenters, and social media workers, managing internationalization and accessibility... and probably a million things I'm forgetting.
The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial.
> The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial.
I think that is the point. At face value what they produce, simply should not be that complex. It seems it’s complex for the sake of being a big complex organization. And unions will only solidify that into stone to prevent any sort of optimization that would bring the complexity down.
> And unions will only solidify that into stone to prevent any sort of optimization that would bring the complexity down.
It looks like you've bought into some anti-union talking points. Efficiency is sometimes good. But sometimes it's just a way of shifting profit from workers to capital. As an example: if I replace 100 workers managing a server farm with an AWS account - the money that would have paid 100 humans to have nice lives instead goes to a much smaller number of amazon workers, amazon shareholders, and whatever "savings" my company realizes goes to me the owner. So wealth concentrates in shareholders hands, and workers are laid off. Does that make the world better? Not really... more efficient, yes. More fragile and subject to one EMP or earthquake taking out trillions of dollars? Also yes.
I am not saying that, I am saying that if a division can be run with half the people, there is nothing wrong in firing 40% of the people in that division, just to have a little overhead in case of emergencies.
Sure, in the platonic ideal of that example. But in the real world, firing 40% of a division will almost always mean a higher workload for the 60% remaining, which in turn leads to lower quality of life for those people, which often leads to higher turnover and projects getting dropped / mistakes getting made / etc.
It appears you’ve bought into some anti-capitalism talking points. Wealth concentrating in shareholder hands may very well make the world better. A huge amount of that is in pension funds. This helps your parents remain independent in retirement.
And while I agree that eliminating those 100 workers is terribly painful for many of them, it’s incumbent upon them to plan ahead for those contingencies. Likewise the investors must be ready for the Times to go out of business if the strike hurts them enough. The stock market is a brutally zero-sum game that doesn’t guarantee success to anyone.
From long before I embarked on my tech career I was always studying for the next job. To me it was evident that high paying tech jobs that required relatively little investment in learning were likely to be volatile. Lots of competition.
I subscribe to the Times and am not anti-union. (I also dislike the Times corporation and its owners.) Because the economy is so bad I wouldn’t recommend a strike at this time. In the 70s I watched in bafflement as the auto unions lined up unsupportable contracts that brought Detroit to its knees during a period of economic malaise very similar to this one. I couldn’t see how they could continue, and they collapsed under the weight of those contracts. I think the Times strike will backfire and hollow out he business just like the auto and recent Hollywood strikes did.
> It appears you’ve bought into some anti-capitalism talking points. Wealth concentrating in shareholder hands may very well make the world better. A huge amount of that is in pension funds. This helps your parents remain independent in retirement.
So all the people in my generation who won't be able to save up the ~1mil required to retire comfortably? or the people from previous generations who worked until they literally dropped dead because of a lack of access to excess funds and planning? those people don't seem to exist in your story of capitalism working perfectly for everybody. There are alternatives to maximizing profits, that allow everybody to retire comfortably - rather than just the lucky few.
> From long before I embarked on my tech career I was always studying for the next job.
I'm happy you've been able to manage that. If you're a barista, what is the next job if you're replaced with a robot vending machine? Should baristas not have good quality of life? Does you getting a good cup of coffee necessitate suffering from someone else?
So your justification for unions being bad is “capitalism works for some people”? So does a monarchy. So does fascism. I’m not even arguing against capitalism here - just for more worker power in a capitalist system.
Did you read the list of things I posted they have to do to ship their product? It's non trivial because those are hard problems and their space is large. It should be that complex because it is that complex.
The New York Times has a bunch of media visualizations that are often quite dynamic. Building those requires engineering and ux time. Then, ensuring they play well with their custom page layouts takes time.
I'm not talking about embedding video, I'm talking about custom built JavaScript data visualization elements.
No. I did not read your comment until now. Not sure how I replied to it.
But anyways much of what you are listing is just more stuff that sounds complex or is not needed. It exist because there was money and it was a big bloated organization. It’s not needed to run the core business and frankly the cost of those things are still small. The number of users don’t change their engineering cost, or at least should not.
The promise of software is exactly the return on investment is not affected by the number of people who use it.
Also. You got me at dynamic content, that is the job of the software, not a human. If they have yet to provide user friendly interfaces down their editors to manipulate the content on their site without the need to interface with an engineer then they have already failed.
I know this sounds like a rant, and maybe it is. But I am tried of poorly ran companies justifying outrageous team sizes because they simply ignore any good design with their software and how to organize a company to be lean agile and successful.
So is what you're arguing really that because its complex it shouldn't be done? So Netflix should never have been developed, because it wasn't needed and is very complex to run. You could already get videos at your local video store anyway.
And how are you deciding what is or is not needed. You're basically saying the company should never innovate or try anything new outside of their existing core business, and should minimize their chances for monetization in new verticals which basically no corporation would ever do. They're always looking for other sources of monetization since thats what investors want.
This type of comment shows up on every single post about unions or layoffs.
The answer is always the same: It might take you and a friend a weekend to build a [insert company] clone, but by the time you need to support the level of customers as [insert company] it'll certainly need a lot more work.
Additionally, we have no idea what kind of internal legacy services need to be maintained inside the organization - I’m guessing the Tech guild doesn’t just cover the externally facing website.
You could probably build something with modern technologies to satisfy internal requirements, but plenty of businesses look at the risk of moving to something new vs something that’s worked for a decade, and justifiably say let’s just pay the maintenance cost.
Right, to deliver their product over a tech channel to their many millions of customers. No, that's not easy. Yes, that's necessarily complex.
You and your buddies can build a crossword or whatever the hell in a weekend. You can't deliver is to 100 million people tomorrow, while also maintaining one of the US' largest newpapers online.
For a crossword, which shards pretty trivially, while already having a database team to deal with that side of things? Large orgs move slowly so there are many reasons why you couldn't write something over the weekend and deploy it that quickly, but the challenges at that level are bureaucratic, not technical.
NYT is by far the biggest success story in digital news. They are still building their subscriber base by making themselves a full-on lifestyle brand. Aside from being the preeminent newspaper in probably the whole world, they are driving a ton of engagement with games, cooking, wirecutter and The Athletic. Not to mention how much they leverage visual and data-driven journalism. I'd also imagine they are a huge juicy target for hackers of all stripes with all the info they are sitting on and the people they piss off.
You think the unions own the paper? The editorial board? I have news for you, if there is bias it's not coming from the people not in control. It's coming from the ultra-wealthy people who own these media outlets and I promise you they are not pro-union.
If the editorial board and these ultra-wealthy people want to stay on the good side of the news guild that all of their journalists are members of, then they have to be pro-union. They have to accept the very premise on which the laws that advantage unions were passed, which forces the employer to engage in collective bargaining with the union to the exclusion of all other parties.
The pressure for the management at news media companies to pander to unions on these issues is enormous and inescapable.
As I understand it, the earliest they could actually strike would be 80 days from today, as per the Taft-Hartley act, putting the strike on November 29 (after the election).
Something seems broken when a group is paid relatively fair wages (https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/...), works 35 hours a week before overtime, and is talking about going on a strike. I don't think that fits with the original purpose of unions.
It means that even though there are members in the guild/union, the company NYT negotiates individually with every member of the guild/union instead of going through the guild/union.
The entire worker benefit of the union is collective bargaining and NYT has rejected working with the unions.
No, once you have union representation here, the company can not legally negotiate individually with members. That's an unfair labor practice!
What actually happens is prevailing trends basically continue. Management can still hire people, etc. but must continue more or less as before unless they are willing to negotiate those specific changes.
The point of organizing a union is to negotiate a contract. One that includes terms that individual workers wouldn't have been able to secure on their own.
A union that's recognized but doesn't have a contract may as well not be a union at all. Basically the only power they can exercise is to strike.
Didn't you get an offer letter? I assume it stated the terms of your employment like the work expected, the consideration (compensation) to be provided, and, most likely, the at-will nature of the agreement.
In this case "secure a contract" means terms that are somehow perceived as more favorable than employment-at-will.
NYT is the premier digital news outlet. Why should a principal SWE there get paid less than a senior SWE working on Google News, for instance?
If NYT has the money it makes sense to me for the employees to ask for higher pay. What else is the original purpose of unions than to give workers power to bargain with the company?
> NYT is the premier digital news outlet. Why should a principal SWE there get paid less than a senior SWE working on Google News, for instance?
Because it’s a different job at a different company?
I get that if you have leverage you may want to exert it (either individually or through a union) to get higher pay, but the argument that 2 different companies should pay the same amount seems ridiculous. Go get the job at the higher paying company if that’s what you want.
That's not an uncomfortable question at all. SWE (and all employees) should be paid to the point that the owners of their company, while well-rewarded, are not sucking up a large percentage of global wealth personally...and that's the less adventurous answer.
... right, because people start companies out of their philanthropic desires.
It is funny here how all the people are pro-union don't start their own companies to compete with the ones that exploit people and offer employees all the perks they ever dreamed of.
Companies choose what they pay their employees (within the bounds of the law) and that might be influenced by what another company pays similar employees.
Imagine somebody at Google saying, “Sorry we won’t pay you more — just found out they pay less at the NYT.”
> If NYT has the money it makes sense to me for the employees to ask for higher pay.
Nothing is stopping an employee from asking. Can they get more money? It depends on NYT if they want to pay more or find another employee who settles for less and fires the demanding employee. Win/Win for the company. Greed is good if it is within bounds.
Those wages are absolutely not fair in the era of modern tech comp. But IMHO people should just find a different job, there are plenty available that pay better.
> But IMHO people should just find a different job, there are plenty available that pay better.
Genuine question, why is that better? There are plenty of reasons why employees might be overall ok with the job and prefer to work out improvements in specific areas. The generally accepted implicit rationale of all of the accommodation needing to be done by the employees(including finding another job) is honestly puzzling. I'm wondering if that is the consequence of employers having vastly more power over employees(esp in the US, with healthcare being tied to employment)
Should the default be a reasonable compromise between the two sides, vs the only recourse being employees leaving?
Unions are not effective at getting you to high comps. They will only get you to a middle of the road comp.
The seniority based structure is effectively a penalty on high achievers. Why should a union member be paid more just because they've worked there longer?
Big tech is a fantastic example of employment working without unions.
But unions don't automatically imply seniority based wages, or even uniform wages. The SAG and the NFL players unions are the most obvious examples.
Also the last two years should have taught the tech rank and file that the good times don't always last. As much as we'd like to believer we all are 10x rockstar devs, the reality is that an overwhelming majority are not. Further, even being the 'best of the best' engineer is no guarantee that you won't be screwed over by management. Woz is a highly visible example and I guarantee you that the odds of anyone on HN(let alone the overall tech industry) being a better engineer are essentially zero.
Many media companies do not have particularly good pay, nor interesting work, for their developers. I spoke with someone who worked as a dev at Bloomberg, and he described his job as "hooking up javascript listeners all day".
I honestly wouldn't expect many to notice, all told. If Google can't index them so that headlines can be shown on searches, I'd expect larger losses.
That said, if the state of the tech there is such that a strike will cause it to immediately stop working... that doesn't exactly speak well for the work they have done.
Unless they are allowed to shut that stuff down as part of their strike? That feels very unlikely to me; but I don't know.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but most non-managerial employees at the Times are now unionized. It is no one’s goal to improve the labor standards of the union members at the expense of non-union employees. It is nearly impossible to obtain contract language covering anything other than workplace and employment conditions for union members, as the company isn’t legally required to negotiate over any other topics, which is why you’re seeing reference to requests “for members”. That said, it is very often the case that wins for unionized employees benefit non-union workers as well, because it’s almost always not worth the administrative overhead for the company to have multiple separate policies for similar jobs.
Many of the concerns listed seem to call out jobs that are not part of this union. Stuff like, "Women and people of color are significantly underrepresented in the most highly compensated reporting and editing roles in the newsroom." I agree that is a concern, I'm not clear that "reporting and editing roles" are part of this union's leverage, though.
I think that is the worst of them, so maybe it impacted how I read the rest? And, again, if this is normal for union concerns, so be it.
Oh, this is because the page linked above is for the “Times Guild”, not the Time Tech Guild. Times Guild is the journalists; the Times Tech Guild is the product engineering folks that just authorized a strike. They are two separate unions within the Times. They support each other but do mot have precisely the same platforms or negotiations with the company.
Ah, that makes things much better for the platform page linked earlier! I see now that there was a selector at the top of the page to move specifically to the Tech guild. And it is spartan, but that feels expected for such a young guild. Huge thanks on pointing out that misread of mine!
https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes...
I wonder how other news outlets will cover this, if at all. They’re probably afraid others will get the same idea.