New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

“Incredibly non-diverse”? No. They are in a better position than most

https://www.nytco.com/2023-new-york-times-diversity-and-incl...

The my don’t complain about tech being non-diverse, they report that it is non-diverse - which is true.

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.

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.

in terms of binary black-white thinking, NYT is definitely more diverse than tech

I worked at NYT for seven years and I can say from direct personal experience that your many points are not true.

Are you saying that management doesn't have input on editorial direction? sounds pretty hard to believe

I wonder if the NYTimes journalists will sympathy strike. (They won't.)

I think it's more like:

- 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.

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.

I don't know if employers can solve the issue of not finding qualified candidates coming from minorities if there are very few such candidates.

how do you know the problem originates with the employer and isn't supply side?

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

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.

The statistic, just like the other ones, doesn't tell you whether these firings were reasonable or not.

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

That's worthy of further investigation to understand if there's bias in these decisions or some other explanatory factor.

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.

Note that a majority of the employees can easily be from underrepresented groups.

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.

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.

I scanned the first article.

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.

There's not enough information to derive this. Mean is a subset of things we call average, not a synonym of it.

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.

Just a quick look, here's one that plays into the mainstream narrative that Hamas is hiding out in hospitals and schools and therefore it's understandable to bomb them: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/world/middleeast/airstrik...

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.

Ross Douthat is still employed so your assertion falls flat on its face.

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/opinion/kamala-harris-dem...

This was on the front page a couple of weeks ago

find anything about gaza

When I visit now the screen fills with headlines that are sympathetic to Harris and seems to support her candidacy.

Obviously not a leftist bias.

Find me a single article currently on the front page that's negative about leftist policies or politicians,

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

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.

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__/

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From that page:

Editorial Review: Sep 2018

The NYT's slant has shifted post 2020.

And yet, downvotes. I feel like it's pretty objective that NYT isn't leftist in any meaningful way.

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.

People working minimum wage at fast food restaurants are not "essentially slaves".

What you're describing is relying on the generosity of the corporations who employ them

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.

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.

- "There are thousands of highly qualified tech workers currently working as Starbucks baristas who feel the same way."

Do you have a source for this data?

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?

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.

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?

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.

This is a distinction without difference.

If you want the Union's opinion, their strike demands are the place to look.

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.

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".

Nope, hence the word probably. 100% anecdotal.

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.

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

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.

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.

Solid burn

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.

I was concerned you broke your streak on 6/23/23 but I heaved a great sigh of relief when you picked it up again on the 24th

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.

No I am not.

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.

The person you're replying to isn't correct. Last month they got 536MM visits. Ranked 92 globally and 29 in the US according to similarweb

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.

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.

In that case, why is there such a thing as insider trading?

10% 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.

That’s not anything like working there

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.

And they’re protected by a union

nyt is the most pro labor major print news i can think of

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.

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.

Why is that an uncomfortable question?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Basically it means they want job security no matter what.

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.

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

this is due to increasing productivity of the market.

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).

AMA does not negotiate paying wage though.

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

But how's that relevant to this?

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?

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.

It looks like this is the union's platform: https://nytimesguild.org/contract-campaign/

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?

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.

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?

Them >_<

tech salaries have bloomed massively because there isn't a union

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.