New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 17 states have not yet issued proposals

If anyone’s at fault, it’s the States.

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.

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.

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)

Both of those goals seek to lower costs, and goes counter to the interests of the union without being considered “mismanagement”

> * 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

Do they work equivalent jobs with equivalent experience?

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.

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.

And you should, as any selfish greedy company would do exactly that.

The beauty of the free market is it relies on selfish, greedy behavior to produce prosperity, rather than hopelessly trying to crush such behavior.

If anything, your allegations of sealioning are violating HN’s guideline “Assume good faith.”

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!

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”.

I don’t know if that’s the case here. But it would be good to investigate all the possible factors before coming to any conclusions.

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.

Look to undergraduate enrollment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

– 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.

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.

if above demographics aren’t getting CS majors (or whatever other educational equivalent), there isn’t much prospective employers can do about it

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.

> Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from underrepresented groups.

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.

Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?

The journalists (and tech workers) don’t decide their own salary.

You conflated “they” as both management and the people being managed, to make it “ironic.”

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.

not that its not limited to race. if an org wants more women they will actively select candidates based on gender first.

Introducing discrimination is often the explicitly stated purpose of quotas

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?

Here is the exec staff: https://www.nytco.com/company/people/ “Filter by executive”

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.

That is not “Better position than most.” That seems like 3x worse than your average tech firm.

Pretending that a sample size of 12 should exactly reflect the diversity of the whole population of the country is just weird to me.

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.

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.

It’s an issue of competence.

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.

Can you possibly think of a reason why black people might be highly over-represented in the “have nots” group in America?

Go out on a limb, what could it possibly be.

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.

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”

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?

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.

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.

almost all modern places that unionize have a liberal/left-leaning customer base the company is afraid of losing

1: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

>> 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.

I’ll keep an open mind but I’m skeptical.

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.

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.

NYT should be highly motivated to negotiate a deal as soon as possible.

Hard to imagine this effort having as much leverage if it were to happen after the election.

In the former case, you can’t get blood from a stone. However in the latter, strikes can still be effective.

“Give me a million USD, and I will smile!” – “No. That’s unreasonable, I’ll give you 100,000, and you’ll dance each time you see me.”.

“Make it 300,000,and I’ll fake that I like you.” …etc

Negotiating goes both ways.

– 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.

Both are economically sensible solutions.

Employees typically only have such a strong negotiation lever in good economic times, which I guess is currently not the case.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There’s so much of reporting and selection bias though.

Everybody has their perspective.

I’m in EU but in the eastern part of it.

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.

If companies on average knew who the ‘good engineers’ were, they wouldn’t be laid off in the first place. (Unless the layoffs are really big).

The recruitment pipe is so convoluted nowadays that connections and recommendations are way more important than they used to be. Skills not so much.

So same people affected both times?

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.

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!)

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?

(1) https://www.unionprogress.com/2024/08/24/a-22-month-strike-j…

(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?

Doctors have cartel though, instead of union that protects their jobs by limiting number of residency slots that limits number of new licensed doctors

lower tier productivity engineers are being filtered out continuously, and being replaced by higher productivity new grads with chatGPT types.

same as professional atheletes (like olympic athletes) retire rather quickly and do something else (coaching, brand advertising, etc).

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

In any case, we should aspire to follow the model of unions and not cartels.

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

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

I kind of doubt actual tradespeople would be fond of us referring to ourselves as one of them

Doesn’t mean they can’t create/join a union, but they are not really in the tradesman category. White collar unions are much tinier.

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.

If they alternative is quiting, than they don’t have very much to lose by going on strike.

So, the argument that we can better figure out if the strike is worth it or not is bullshit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Most tech “* manager” roles where the object of management is not a person or team likely qualify.

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.

> it’s about your rank in the social circles

It’s among the most meritocratic I have a view into (from conversations with friends in.. mechanical engineering, entrepreneurship, academia, nonprofit, sales, education, ..)

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?”

(1) https://umaine.edu/ble/wp-content/uploads/sites/181/2014/11/…

(2) https://workerorganizing.org/how-to-honor-the-picket-line-an…

(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/your-money/should-hotels-…

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.

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.

Either way: it is not in fact a given that customers are obliged by solidarity to boycott businesses dealing with strikes.

(My kid brother is a labor person, so really I’m just venting some stuff here to keep it from coming up at Thanksgiving).

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

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.

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 suppose sometimes it makes sense to boycott, but not all the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Found on the front page of the NYT website, just now, after a few seconds of skimming:

  Kathleen Kingsbury
  The Question Kamala Harris Couldn’t Answer

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.

Here’s a quick search on how a leftist publication covered something like the bombing of al-Shifa hospital: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-gaza-propagan…

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.

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.

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.

How does that square?

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?

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.

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.

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.

There is no point in continuing a conversation when you are just projecting exactly what you are doing on me.

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.

I have no idea who that is.

> Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming Harris has flip-flopped on progressive policies.

I have no idea if this is true. Has she? Who is the authority on that?

Easier to align people when you remove the whole troublesome “money” part. Question is how to motivate Americans to work together if not for money?

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.

> 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.

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?

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__/

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.

They’re not left. Never were.

> 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.

The politics of the median voter in the US is not relevant for this discussion.

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.

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!

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.

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.

(1) https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b…

>Cheney with pretty unsavory characters in history, but now he’s lauded by progressives. This shit is getting weird.

We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

Ok I’m done with the clichés.

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.

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.

> Just because other countries are withering away under socialism

on the topic of preposterous things to claim…

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.

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.

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/10/nyt-tech-union-strike-vote

> 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.

Also you can get a raise without “costing” anything extra in the expense column, such as fewer working hours for the same pay/benefits.

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.

Yes it would. Explicitly demanding inefficiency is exactly why unions are terrible for innovation and progress.

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.

(All opinions my own, obviously.)

You can always (in a country like the US) find a group somewhere so much worse off that you can use them to paint US workers as greedy or spoiled.

The connection of these facts to exploitation is tenuous in this context, but it does make for good rhetoric.

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.

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?

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.

But instead of worrying about some far-off Magic Wish-Fulfillment Future, we could be discussing how they’re actually be exploited now.

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?

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.

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.

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.

No i’m not. I’m highlighting the market forces within a competitive, highly paid job market.

These people have options. Other industries, not so much.

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.

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.”

Edit: to those downvoting this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41504026#41506801 above. Just one example

ie it’s not because you are well paid that you are paid enough or fairly

The result is there some people take large part of the pie while not contributing to the baking in any meaningful way. Doesn’t seem fair to me

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.

edit: clarified ‘it’

I presume you support free markets, so I’m surprised that supply and demand never crossed your mind as the reason for high tech salaries.

Professional athletes, actors, and screenwriters enjoy both high salaries and union protections.

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.

Finally, if everyone just leaves their jobs without trying to improve them, won’t everyone run out of places to jump to eventually?

    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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 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.

the current structure mandates that other teams have to advocate for themselves, and we’ll find out whats worth what

I think people are underestimating how much tech it could take to run a company like the NYTimes.

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.

– ‘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.

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.

The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial.

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.

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.

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?

As bad as the modern web is, if you think embedding media is a hard problem, one of us has clearly gone bat crazy.

(To be clear, I welcome being told why embedding media is a really hard problem, but my experience hosting a self-implemented blog says otherwise.)

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.

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.

Everything they do today could be done with under 100 engineers, maybe less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This seems like a pretty reasonable reason to strike. Arguably it’s the most justifiable reason to strike.

The entire worker benefit of the union is collective bargaining and NYT has rejected working with the unions.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Is that actually a common thing that I just didn’t know? I’d not expect a union to impact interviewing practices for all entry-level jobs somewhere.

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.