Comment by bwestergard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bwestergard | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not a New York Times employee, but I do work at another large American media organization as a software developer, and was elected to our bargaining committee to represent software developers. We are part of the same union[1].

I have met many bargaining committee members at the NYT and they are all extremely sharp. The tech guild is well organized and I think the NYT management has much more to lose than the workforce in these negotiations.

Per the article, there are two main issues behind this strike: remote work and open bargaining.

We have a tentative contract agreement that we're voting on this week; it would guarantee remote work for devs for three years, and put caps on days in office for some workers who have on site job duties. The NYT is trying to avoid bargaining over remote work full stop by making unilateral changes before they bargaining a full contact (their legal obligation).

The other issue is open bargaining, which simply means that that union members can observe the bargaining sessions that will produce the agreement they will vote on. Without open bargaining, it's very difficult for members to be involved in improving proposals. Every single one of our bargaining sessions was open, and I can't imagine doing it any other way.

The NYT would prefer closed door meetings because it gives them opportunities them to drive a wedge between the workers who do the bargaining and their peers. Unfortunately, many unions have been cowed into accepting this employer demand, such that the NYT can present closed door bargaining as "typical".

[1]: http://code-cwa.org

One of the things I've noticed with a number of recent strikes (not all, but a bunch) is how many are not over pay but primarily over working conditions. E.g. there was a big strike by nurses in Austin whose primary concern was woefully short staffing that was leaving nurses burnt out and making it difficult to provide adequate care.

It feels to me like the pandemic fundamentally changed many people's mindsets with their relationship to work: while I think some people went off the deep end with the r/antiwork crowd, others just reconsidered the amount of time and effort they wanted to put towards work so it wasn't detrimental to other aspects of their lives. They still wanted to do good work and have pride in their work, it was just no longer their primary focus.

So I feel a lot of these union battles are primarily about control. Many employees basically did get a bit "woke" (not in the woke-liberal sense, but in the "my eyes are opened to why am I killing myself at a job" sense), and employers are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

> is how many are not over pay but primarily over working conditions.

A lot of the OG strikes in the US were mostly about working conditions too - e.g. coal wars (which ended with literal armed conflict between thousands of strikers and the military...), railroad strikes, etc etc.

Back then the working conditions were like "we don't want to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week", "we don't want to die from toxic fumes", etc.

A good number of people also died from being in person during the height of COVID. IIRC line cooks had the highest mortality rate of any profession and deaths were more heavily concentrated in lower wage, in-person work.

How many people over 65 fit this description? [1]

I’m really tired of this narrative. Older people died by orders of magnitude more than younger or working class people. Orders of magnitude. Don’t try and say “hindsight is 20/20” because this was known from the start. Ask any nursing home.

This comment is NOT meant to at ALL be political. Fuck Covid. Fuck making masks a political issue. Fuck all the Covid deniers. Fuck the anti-vax people.

Covid killed old people and those with co-morbidity. If we took all the money given out and gave it ONLY to those people such that they were mandated stay home and survive, however that needed to happen to ensure they avoided infection, imagine how different the would world be right now. /rant

Unpopular opinion on this site and I expect I’ll see that reflected here.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a4.htm#T1_down

Edit: typo

A complication is that the employees who work in the nursing homes are likely to bring covid in if it is spreading in the community and the community is acting normally (eg parties are happening). Not to say that your plan wouldn't be overall better (I'm not sure), but just saying it would likely result in more death.

That is a fair point, absolutely.

I don’t think the would should have shut down instead of tackling that problem.

More death for the old, more life for the young?

> If we took all the money given out and gave it ONLY to those people such that they were mandated stay home and survive, however that needed to happen to ensure they avoided infection, imagine how different the would world be right now.

I'm similarly angry that we don't put substantial sums of money toward teaching people to use GPG encryption for confidential emails, however that needs to happen to ensure privacy. :)

>Older people died by orders of magnitude more than younger or working class people.

You don't just stop being working class when you grow old.

Agreed. I was suggesting (albeit poorly) to pay those people to stay home instead of going to work.

Old people work in low wage in person jobs too.

Agreed. My suggestion was to pay them to stay home instead of going to work.

You are comparing the dirty real world with an idealized “only pay those at risk” scenario. Anyone over 35 had a pretty high death rate - as you said due to comorbities but how many of those were clearly identifiable?

Additionally, imagine the optics of “anyone fat can stay home while the rest of you have to go in to work.” How would that work in practice?

And finally, populations did not fully isolate. How much more quickly would things have soread (and overwhelmed the healthcare system) if folks just went about their business? How likely is it that the “not at risk” population (now with higher likelihood of having covid do to freer movement) would stay away from those at risk?

I’m not disagreeing with some of the ideas you put forth, but your comment comes across as absolutely certain. The world doesn’t work with that kind of certainty - we can’t all even agree on what did happen/work. Heck - lots of people don’t think the vaccine itself is necessary!

I can tell this subject frustrates you. One way to help yourself be less frustrated (and more correct!) would be to think more probabilistically and accept that all of the options are bad ones, and your preferred intervention might have been better but it also might have been worse. The world is dynamic and we don’t have any counterfactuals that we can use as comps.

I agree. I do feel strongly about this, and my stance is absolutely not completely thought out. I appreciate your comment and I agree with the thrust of it. I shouldn’t make comments when I’m anxious or irritated.

Thank you for your rational response to my not-so-rational post.

Since it was my comment you originally took great umbrage at, I would also like to point out that the order of magnitude difference between COVID deaths for over and under 65 looks to be about 1.3 (log(over 65 deaths)-log(under 65 deaths)):

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=log%28868831%29+-+log%2...

The risk obviously trends upward as you get closer to 65, but quite a lot of people under that aged died with what you might think of as people having taken excess precaution. This also excludes other forms of harm short of death, such as the increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and developing of diabetes that have been shown to occur post COVID. As the parent pointed out, we have no idea how this would’ve have played out with even less caution, but I think it’s difficult to argue that things would’ve necessarily been better given these statistics.

I do not agree with your last sentence, at all. I also don’t think it is worth my time or yours to debate it. I’ve stated that I need to and am willing to keep an open mind about all of this. You doubled down.

Take care.

Insisting that words like “orders of magnitude” have meaning that aren’t consistent with what you stated is not “doubling down.” But I agree that someone incapable of acknowledging this is not worth engaging with.

Given the political climate surrounding COVID I find it difficult to trust any numbers from any source, with even the raw data having potential for obfuscation and ambiguity.

Even ignoring my personal bias on biases, a pandemic is by nature transient, whereas the working conditions cited prior were (presumably) typical conditions that could be expected.

All that to say that your comparison strikes (hah) me as at best immaterial to the comment you replied to.

> Given the political climate surrounding COVID I find it difficult to trust any numbers from any source

Just look at all-cause mortality, and assume that the observed excess mortality is because of covid.

The government sources that I was able to find for mortality statistics 'revamped' their reporting and data gathering around 2019/2020, which leaves me with enough doubt.

I was quite a bit more rigorous than I usually am when trying to formulate my position on the matter, and even still the only conclusion I could come to was that (for me at least) the information I could gather was simply not trustworthy without specific expertise that I lack. To this day, I simply let the scope and impact of COVID remain an 'unsolved mystery' in my broader world views.

To add on to the start of my response, correlation does not imply causation. I can postulate numerous circumstances that, to a layman such as myself, could plausibly explain why there was an increase in all-cause mortality. Things such as an increased scrutiny on data collection pertaining to this specific circumstance could feasibly result in a change in data gathering practices favoring over-reporting, or even an improvement in report accuracy.

> assume that the observed excess mortality is because of covid

This depends on what you mean by "because of covid".

If you just mean "the primary cause of death was covid", this is not a valid methodology.

But if you mean "the primary cause of death was something that wouldn't have happened without the covid pandemic and the responses to it that were mandated by governments", then yes, this is probably a valid methodology--but then you can't lay all those deaths at the door of covid itself, you have to also hold governments responsible for their incompetent handling of the pandemic.

(Btw, all cause mortality in countries that did mass vaccinations with mRNA vaccines is still above the pre-pandemic baseline, even though covid deaths in those countries are minimal. So there's another item that would need to be taken into account when looking at the overall all cause mortality numbers.)

This is objectively false. You'd have to show they wouldn't have come into contact with someone who had COVID if they didn't go to the workplace.

I support union representation and negotiation.

> others just reconsidered the amount of time and effort they wanted to put towards work so it wasn't detrimental to other aspects of their lives... employers are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

On the other hand, reading the Sony e-mails hacks: Sony did every negotiation with its team of finance people to tell their execs a number. The other side, a bunch of ICs as it were like production companies, actors, whatever, always asked for their money or needs "formatted" some weird way. This rider or that weird royalty-esque thing or some dates and terms that made no sense.

It's apparent that the people who were on the other side of the Sony execs always lost out. The thing they valued was not as valuable as it seemed. From Sony's POV, Sony was taking all the rewards from the risk, and they were thankful the ICs asked for weird stuff that was no risk no reward.

IMO compensation should model the banking industry. It has sophisticated employees and at major banks something like 40% of all costs are employee compensation. Not trying to turn this into a model but the bonus structures are aligned and the payout you get is in a sense quite simple. However maybe country-wide if everyone operated like this - like if people hated nurses guts as much as they hate bankers' - the reactionary politics would not be pretty.

Having worked in the finance industry, I'm glad that my compensation no longer works that way.

In years with good recruitment or lean profits or really whenever the hell the bosses feel like, the company will stiff everyone in the back office on their bonus compensation regardless of performance and make some weak promises about how next year will be better. Everyone competent will leave for other companies, or if they're smart and competent other industries.

>One of the things I've noticed with a number of recent strikes (not all, but a bunch) is how many are not over pay but primarily over working conditions. E.g. there was a big strike by nurses in Austin whose primary concern was woefully short staffing that was leaving nurses burnt out and making it difficult to provide adequate care.

Actualized pay is often more the issue here, however we look at or segment it (working conditions, net pay, etc). It's about the net transaction of your time for labor vs compensation. Magnitude of compensation is important because people need enough money and free time to make it worth working, but there are many ways to squeeze this, just as your example points out. Understaffing, pushing increased productivity requirements, tucking in new responsibilities, reducing benefits in some way, slacking on safety or security, etc. It's difficult to quantify all of this for most people so we often just look at pay. We'll, getting paid more than enough to live comfortably.. sure, but maybe you're working long hours to get that and stressed out of your mind. Maybe you're losing sleep. Maybe you're sacrificing your health to focus on improved business outputs.

It's an in/out situation, are you getting enough out for what you put in and that's often the issue. Any business paying market rates will be quick to point at salary and ignore everything else because it's very easy to discuss, compare, and argue about.

But the labor market is not that liquid. May be easier to fight for changes at current employer than pound the pavement. This is compounded by seniority perks, insurance (COBRA costs), relocation costs (financial and personal), and to some extent non-compete clauses.

The thing with nurses is that there is no amount you can reasonably pay a nurse to risk their license by forcing them to provide literal medical neglect. I would rather strike, unionize, fight tooth and nail, if it meant I could avoid knowingly killing people because I don't have enough time to care for people. It is far, far more than just "working conditions".

>One of the things I've noticed with a number of recent strikes (not all, but a bunch) is how many are not over pay but primarily over working conditions.

Labor sellers have always evaluated pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay.

And increasing pay and quality of life at work always costs labor buyers more money.

Sure, I get that, but I think it's a mistake to think of these things as totally interchangeable, that anything can just be quantified to a salary number.

There is some threshold where many people simply quit or leave a profession, and basically no amount of salary would cause them to come back - I've seen this in droves when it comes to nurses and teachers.

Point being I guess is that, for employers, the total cost of, say, adding some additional workers to provide better working conditions for everyone is going to be a much lower cost in the long run than simply providing hellish conditions for fewer workers and then needing to pay them out the wazoo to keep them from quitting.

Inflation is also a factor. Wage increases kinda cancel themselves out, while working condition improvements stay around.

Often I find that union members actually want their employer to succeed and they tend to recognize that they can't just beat the pinata and expect infinite candy to pour out.

COVID also “pierced the veil” when it came to hard jobs with prestige; nurses and teaching were hit hard with an angry public accusing the frontline worker of conspiracy theories and whatnot. Though teaching has been on the decline with prestige for a while now.

> It feels to me like the pandemic fundamentally changed many people's mindsets with their relationship to work.

An underrated part of the pandemic was that baby boomers retired in huge swaths. And immigration for skilled workers plummeted.

There are simply MANY less workers in the economy now. So workers have a ton of bargaining power.

(Before we jump to the conclusion that everything is rosy, there is a huge downside to a labor-led economy: we'll probably start seeing declines in GDP eventually. Less total hours of labor productivity across the market divided by the amount of people means less labor per person).

Inflation is running at over 20% since Jan 2020.

I'm not sure how you measure metro-level inflation, but NYC got noticeably much more expensive post-pandemic, especially housing/rents but also food/entertainment/uber. A renovated studio apartment in a decent area is $4k in some neighborhoods now, and over $5k for a 1 bedroom apartment.

That has little to do with inflation and a lot to do with the greed and political influence of landlords.

Thanks for sharing. It's valuable to hear from so close to the situation.

I'm interested in seeing how the open bargaining turns out - my understanding had been that closed bargaining evolved to solve problems with open bargaining, but perhaps the situation has changed now, and unions need to prioritize member engagement more these days than in the past.

> NYT would prefer closed door meetings because it gives them opportunities them to drive a wedge between the workers who do the bargaining and their peers

To be fair, it also deters posturing and promotes compromise. Open bargaining means not only every employee is involved, but inevitably, the broader public, too.

I imagine unionizing software engineers at a media company is probably a bit easier since the equity side of NYT is likely not as valuable as tech companies in the Bay Area.

For instance there's also this news today out of union-heavy Sweden where a Tesla worker walk-out failed:

> Some younger employees also reportedly stated that their salary and career paths are much better at Tesla as compared to other automakers. They also appreciated the fact that they were issued stock options from the company, some of whom have reportedly seen an increase of several hundred percent to date.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38070432

Of course there's also alternative data points: such as most employees only speaking on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

Interesting that remote working is one of the key demands. I wonder if this is what will finally get tech workers to appreciate the value of unions.

Such good news that unions are getting more legitimacy in the US. Keep it up!

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