Good for them. More workers need to be understanding just how much they are being exploited by their leadership and demand a more equitable piece of the pie.
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.
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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.
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.