New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
axios.com
axios.com
https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes...
I wonder how other news outlets will cover this, if at all. They’re probably afraid others will get the same idea.
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.
Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?
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.
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.
>> 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.
I think that's a really weak claim. Journalism has had significantly reduced revenues in the late 2000s through today due to the rise of tech platforms that let people learn about what's happening in the world for free online. Both print and online newspaper combined revenue has been wiped back to the 1950s [1], for example. Journalists covering, say, election politics have no more conflict of interest than any other American. But they definitely have more of a conflict of interest covering tech than other Americans! For most Americans, tech has largely contributed to economic improvements: you can buy more advanced products for less inflation-adjusted money, pretty much every year. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and you can talk to your lights and tell them to turn off while you're lying in bed. For journalists, though, tech has been devastating.
You might try to claim that because journalists don't set their own salaries, somehow this removes the conflict of interest. But that implies journalists are incredibly stupid. You can't work in a vastly diminishing field and not realize that it's going to depress your salary and job opportunities over time, regardless of whether you set the salary or not: there's just vastly less money to go around. And that's what tech has done to traditional journalism.
And the NYT is not immune. While it's doing better than its peers (many of whom have gone out of business), it's not doing well: it's experienced approximately zero market growth since its peak in 2002 over twenty years ago, when shares traded for about $48. Today, they trade for $52. And working at the only institution in your field that hasn't experienced total collapse, but has achieved no growth in 20+ years, is obviously going to color your views on the sector that did that to your field.
1: https://www.statista.com/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-rev...
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.
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."
It is more than a little ironic that the NY Times complains about a "lack of diversity" in silicon valley, when practically the entire NY Times senior staff are generationally rich white people who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
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. Half the staff is Jewish. Yet they are complaining about diversity in Silicon valley.
As a person of asian origin, there is probably no way I can get a non-crappy role at the NY Times, yet silicon valley offers enough of a meritocracy that I can get a job there without having a rich uncle.
Remember, when the establishment complains about diversity, they are actually complaining about themselves losing control to the general population. That is why colored people in executive roles in SV is so scary to newspapers.
"Half the staff is Jewish" made me laugh though, perhaps closer to true than false. It's funny how people call The New Yorker the pinnacle of privilege as a writer-type, and their staff writer team is more diverse than just about any other East Coast bigwig outlet.
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.
almost all modern places that unionize have a liberal/left-leaning customer base the company is afraid of losing
You are reading this on another news outlet!
Last year, NYT tech workers also had a strike over return -to-office, as covered by Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-times-tech-workers...
But that doesn't mean they like paying their tech workers any more than any other management. It's just about money. Big tech is a threat to management's profits, just like workers demanding better salaries is a threat to management's profits.
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.
> * 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?
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.
I'd be curious to see an analysis of downvoted comments in political threads and what their general ideological bent was.
if above demographics aren't getting CS majors (or whatever other educational equivalent), there isn't much prospective employers can do about it
- 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.
Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.
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.
The wage gap, at firms without a history of discrimination, is almost entirely determined by women having their first child and the support structures around it (subsidized childcare, paternity leave, flexible hours).[1][2] This suggests the assertiveness is probably not the issue.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaconn/2023/11/08/nobel-winne... [2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
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.
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've worked pretty hard to teach my daughter than it doesn't hurt to ask for more than offered, or even to price yourself out of a job if there are multiple opportunities on the table. Women tend to naturally optimize for stability over maximum income and other factors and to accept a given deal vs negotiate. Much like men are far more likely to move to another location for career advancement and higher pay. There are natural tendencies that training can overcome which is likely better than trying to price control.
Then it’s impossible to determine if its sexism
> Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from underrepresented groups.
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/07/01/racial-ge...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/women-of-color-and-...
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.
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 not the "interviewing" itself but it's the recruiting stage. If you're looking at fresh graduates you're already significantly skewing things. It's hard to blame companies for this, but a few of the bootcamps are cranking out nontraditional candidates and many companies still overlook them in hiring.
Remember that story from the other day about founding Valve and Gabe recruiting game modders to his team? Two of them were pizza delivery guys and thought they were being called on a prank.
To be honest though, I think we're all lying to ourselves. The job isn't about ability to code. We're not looking for people with those skills. Most companies hiring are looking for stable clock-punchers who will do things that make their manager look good.
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.
> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary
It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.
If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.
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.
Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.
"Equal pay for equal work" is a much more compelling goal in my view than "equal pay for unequal work".
Not to mention it's incentivize companies to cut the roles with artificially inflated wages. Imagine a government mandated that some component or material cost 15% more than market rate. You'd refactor your design with that new cost in mind, and reduce usage of that component. Similar deal with labor.
Congratulations, you've taken a swing at this troll's strawman.
Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/eq...
This is not the equilibrium we are aiming for as a society, and the matter is not settled here.
The point of these measurements is not to demand that women are paid more for less work. The point is for us to keep asking “why”, and not just stop after the first one.
“Why are women earning less at the New York Times?”. Maybe the company is just top-heavy with men in leadership roles. This has been floated in this thread as a common cause.
“Why are there more men in leadership roles?”. A few commenters have shared anecdotes of having far more men in their recruiting process. More men applying would help explain more experienced men higher up in the company.
“Why are there more men than women applying?”. We’re getting closer to root causes now. In software engineering, for example, there are just more men in the workforce.
“Why are there more men in the workforce?”. It gets more difficult, but also more important, to investigate the answer at these lower levels. Girls Who Code and similar initiatives are tackling this behemoth cultural problem. It will take years to see the effect of their work, but their success breeds hope that someday, the gap in this New York Times statistic will close a little.
At any of these levels, a company can step in and try and correct the natural bias in their hiring or development pipeline. That is, of course, the most sensitive topic for a lot of us here. Such initiatives should have buy-in from the workforce, and there’s an implication here that the (unionized) workers of NYT do support some kind of intervention.
Their choice, and above all the very measurement of a wage gap, doesn’t need to be threatening to anybody here. It will forever be important to track this number even if we “feel” like the explanations are simple. It doesn’t represent some kind of action the company should be forced to take. It measures where we are on every level of asking “why?”.
There is no need for a society that forces, top down, every possible occupation to be perfectly split 50/50 by sex. Just let individuals make their own decisions.
In this case, why do we "need" more women coding? Maybe they are doing other work that is just as important and fulfilling and useful to society?
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)
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 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.
"Corporate greed" is a fun slogan, but means nothing in reality. In the few areas where the government is exploiting its own natural resources (instead of outsiders), the working and living conditions are not inherently better. If it worked that way, all of the middle east and large areas of Africa wouldn't be so destitute.
Control of the resources or territory wasn’t magically delivered to the people with equity. The colonial infrastructure of control was turned over to local friendly interests and their successors. (Through revolutions, coups, etc)
Handwavy, vague "post-colonial" whatever isn't a reason, it's an excuse.
Plus, if there’s a popular revolt, they are usually motivated by religious, ethnic or ideological factors. Status quo is the interest of the big powers. That tends to bring direct or advisory intervention by western military forces.
I’d suggest spending a few minutes googling, you’ll learn alot.
These are as a category unstable political situations and it is vanishingly few who manage to develop their way out of it. More common is descent into further chaos, with major powers standing by to ensure that it does not disrupt resource extraction.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/starvatio...
Drug addicts and alcoholics often are malnourished - not because food is withheld from them, but because they are more interested in drugs and alcohol than food. The same goes for seriously ill people.
Edit: The parent appears to have committed the cardinal sin of believing CNN, which made this claim here[0], but cited a CDC report[1] does not support the assertion. I went looking for the underlying NCHS data, but couldn't find it.
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/health/nutritional-deficiency... [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr031.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/...
I've never heard of a private company that inept and corrupt.
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?
https://www.gao.gov/blog/more-fraud-has-been-found-federal-c...
Googling for "corruption us government" provides endless examples. I remember reading about the disappearance of vast sums of government money sent to help the Middle East and Afghanistan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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".
- 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.
They are literally striking because the company is refusing to negotiate with them.
How is this a refusal to negotiate?
What does the other side offer? If you want something from the other side, you better have something to offer which the other side wants:
"Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
"Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
"Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
"Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
"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.
In the former case, you can't get blood from a stone. However in the latter, strikes can still be effective.
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!)
For two, if you have so settled your view that you won't take any criticism or advice, why bother engaging in discussion? You are actively harmful to the public discourse, at this point. No?
I'm sympathetic in thinking someone is stalling in bad faith. But bad faith denouncing of their seriousness is not good, either. :(
Any sources for this? Asking out of curiosity—not disagreement.
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.
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.
There’s so much of reporting and selection bias though.
Everybody has their perspective.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...
I'm in EU but in the eastern part of it.
So same people affected both times?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they alternative is quiting, than they don't have very much to lose by going on strike.
You don't make money, but the union can always cave, and then you are right back at your old job.
Its not like quitting your job, where if it doesn't work out you are screwed.
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.
Doctors have cartel though, instead of union that protects their jobs by limiting number of residency slots that limits number of new licensed doctors
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
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
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).
I kind of doubt actual tradespeople would be fond of us referring to ourselves as one of them
Trades are skilled labor, professions are knowledge specialists.
Programmers are not "tradespeople." What an insane claim.
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.
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?
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.
They've got 5900 employees and https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t... says a quarterly profit of $104.7 million. $400M / 5900 gives about $68,000 profit per employee.
So, what's reasonable? Would giving everyone a $65k pay raise and zeroing out the profit for the company be correct? Would that put them close to what they'd get if they worked in big tech? ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Apple%2C+Meta%2C+GOO... ). We're dealing with very different numbers there.
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.)
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.
> The Tech Guild, which won its union election by a landslide in March 2022, is negotiating its first contract. Times management has been dragging their feet in bargaining and attacking the Tech Guild every step of the way since workers first announced their intention to be a union in 2021.
> Among the major issues at stake for the Tech Guild is job security, which is under threat from the rise of AI and the company’s discriminatory practices around discipline and termination. Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from underrepresented groups. Union members on visas have had their lives thrown into chaos when the company arbitrarily put their immigration status at risk. Members called out the Times for this practice in a reply-all email action in June.
> These actions by management are among the many reasons why Tech Guild members are fighting for “just cause” protections in their contract, an industry and labor standard which requires management to have a just and fair reason to discipline an employee. Times management is attempting to force tech workers to accept a carveout that undermines that standard of due process in the workplace and puts more of their colleagues in the line of fire.
> Correcting pay inequity is another critical strike issue. In June, the Tech Guild released its pay study which found that:
> Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on average than men
> Black women and Hispanic or Latina women, who make up just over 6 percent of the Tech Guild, make 33% less than white men in the unit
> Black workers, who make up 7 percent of the union, earn 26% less than white workers
> Pay inequity isn’t new at The Times. The Times Guild, which represents nearly 1,500 workers in the newsroom, advertising and other areas of the company, has also taken on pay inequity.
---
As far as I can see it is:
Slow negotiations
Job security: AI, discriminatory discipline and termination.
Pay equity within the tech workers (as part of a larger pay equity issue at The Times).
As described, this doesn't seem unreasonable.
1. The New York Times
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 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.
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!
(My kid brother is a labor person, so really I'm just venting some stuff here to keep it from coming up at Thanksgiving).
... Are we supposed to know what that means?
The way you're using it, it sounds like a pejorative... Which puts something of a spin on your particular pedantry here.
> there really isn't an obligation to support a boycott
I think the Irish - who invented the term - would disagree with you on that point.
Not every boycott is worth supporting, sure. But if a boycott is worth supporting (say, divesting from genocide supporters) then yes there's a bit of an obligation there.
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 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.
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.
There is now far more devs than there is work for them. This is a planned strategy to reduce salaries.
If you're "talented". Make your money and get out asap.
What are you telling them to invest in?
> 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, ..)
How is this relevant to programming?
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.
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?
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.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...
The politics of the median voter in the US is not relevant for this discussion.
> 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.
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.
Allsides media bias rating for NYT is lean left[1], a -2.2 with -6 as the most extreme and 0 as neutral. Rating is left for their opinion section[2], a -4.
1. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times
2. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times-opinion-...
Editorial Review: Sep 2018
The NYT's slant has shifted post 2020.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Hmm. Maybe an anti-anti-union consulting firm is a business opportunity?
The only obvious customer would be a union, and they already provide that service themselves.
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?
0:https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/leaked-message...
1: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-boudin-recall-...
2:https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-battle-ove...
3:https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-...
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...
They broadly support capitalism, broadly support imperial military power, broadly do not support single payer health care, broadly do not support nationalization of industry, oppose criminal justice reform, oppose upzoning, oppose transit, oppose large tax hikes, and are active in the eradication of minorities.
Biden shut down a major labor strike, he expanded drilling for oil, he made it easier for states to medically and socially discriminate against trans people, he's pumped up the police, and he's continuously armed a state accused of genocide. Biden has put forth one of the most restrictive border policies we've ever had, and kept many trump era policies. The democrats also had the opportunity, years ago, to permanently secure abortion access and chose not to. They have by and large expanded the carceral state (and coined the concept of super predators to ensure Black people remained incarcerated.)
Also, and this might be a shock, democrats are anti gun, while many many leftists believe in gun ownership. (Karl Marx, Martin Luther king Jr., Malcom X, etc were all believers in individual ownership of firearms.)
Leftists generally believe in nationalization, limiting corporate and executive power (or eliminating it), social housing, socialized medicine, free food and water, elimination of oil drilling, trains, dense urban areas, mutual aid, "wellbeing for all", free education, free childcare, etc.
I've never once seen a Democrat say that we should abolish private property. If you think democrats are left wing you simply don't understand what left wing means.
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.
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.
Not who you're discussing with, but Hillary did win the popular vote by about 3 million votes.
Besides, there are people who just don't vote if your platform or personality is not engaging. That was a big phenomenon with Clinton and is generally what decided whether or not Democrats win: the higher the turnout, the higher their chances. If a Democrat runs to the right, they lose turnout from leftwing voters who stay home, they don't (just) win votes from the center.
Also, Clinton did win the popular vote, despite all of this.
Compare that to an actual leftist publication like The Nation, where the second most popular article is literally about the enduring legacy of Marx's Capital (lol): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wendy-brown-marx-c...
Or over at Jacobin where this is the top story: https://jacobin.com/2024/09/ruwa-romman-dnc-speech-palestine
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.
Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming Harris has flip-flopped on progressive policies.
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?
Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. “Flip flop” is an insult in politics.
This was on the front page a couple of weeks ago
Obviously not a leftist bias.
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 AnswerThe 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.
Wouldn't they be able to get a much higher comp by interviewing with other local tech firms? If so, why don't they? Seems more effective than waiting and hoping for a small increase through the union.
Tech isn't hyper-individualist. It just leans slightly to the individual, because any half-decent tech worker is worth a lot to an organisation, and they don't need a union rep to negotiate on their (and hundreds of other people's) behalf.
I 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.
Food service and retail workers are not widely unionized. Do they have high salaries?
> the highly paid athletes and actors are not having their wages negotiated by a union rep
So then you understand even with a union, workers can be free to negotiate their own wages. The union doesn't necessarily hold superstars back from earning their true market value.
TLDR: I'm not telling anyone what to do.
Precisely why it's always under attack. Corps with simple technical objectives accrue thousands of developers into an org chart so dense it's a productivity black hole: anything to justify keeping wages down for the actual workers.
Finally, if everyone just leaves their jobs without trying to improve them, won't everyone run out of places to jump to eventually?
Can someone explain it to me?
622 * $124,584 [0] * 1.25 = $96,864,060/year
Their CPM and CPC would need to be seriously fine tuned to sustain this.
$5 per 1,000 visitors (CPM): they would need 19.37 billion ad impressions.
Similar problem when calculating CPC with $0.10 to $2 range.
I cannot see how they are still in business.
[0] https://www.roberthalf.com/us/en/insights/career-development...
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?
> Subscription revenue in the quarter grew 7.3 percent, to $439.3 million, compared with the previous year. Total advertising revenue was up 1.2 percent, at $119.2 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t....
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.
In June it was 10.6%, in March it was 6.9%
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
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.
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.
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?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=google+ma...
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.”
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28GOOGL%2C+NYT%29+reve...
(GOOGL, NYT) revenue per employee
Alphabet Class A Shares | $1.815 million (US dollars)
New York Times Company | $422656.27 (US dollars)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.
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.
And, cynically, is anyone even going to notice that they are striking? Seems unlikely, to be honest.
Edit: This is also an older link?
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.
This press release goes into more detail as to the motivations for the strike: https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes...
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.