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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

What are their demands?

And, cynically, is anyone even going to notice that they are striking? Seems unlikely, to be honest.

This press release elaborates on the motivations for the strike: https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes...

I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that people will notice when the New York Times website stops working.

If the Times goes down because the engineers are on strike for a few weeks or months, the engineers were not very good at their jobs.

I honestly wouldn't expect many to notice, all told. If Google can't index them so that headlines can be shown on searches, I'd expect larger losses.

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.

One of their key demands is to continue to allow remote work: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/30/nyt-tech-workers-walk-out

I saw that mentioned. Was hoping someone had a link that was a bit more informative.

Edit: This is also an older link?

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

Thanks for the link. Hate that a lot of their demands seem to be to leverage things they want over positions not covered by their guild.

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’m not sure exactly what you mean, but most non-managerial employees at the Times are now unionized. It is no one’s goal to improve the labor standards of the union members at the expense of non-union employees. It is nearly impossible to obtain contract language covering anything other than workplace and employment conditions for union members, as the company isn’t legally required to negotiate over any other topics, which is why you’re seeing reference to requests “for members”. That said, it is very often the case that wins for unionized employees benefit non-union workers as well, because it’s almost always not worth the administrative overhead for the company to have multiple separate policies for similar jobs.

Many of the concerns listed seem to call out jobs that are not part of this union. Stuff like, "Women and people of color are significantly underrepresented in the most highly compensated reporting and editing roles in the newsroom." I agree that is a concern, I'm not clear that "reporting and editing roles" are part of this union's leverage, though.

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.

Oh, this is because the page linked above is for the “Times Guild”, not the Time Tech Guild. Times Guild is the journalists; the Times Tech Guild is the product engineering folks that just authorized a strike. They are two separate unions within the Times. They support each other but do mot have precisely the same platforms or negotiations with the company.

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...

Ah, that makes things much better for the platform page linked earlier! I see now that there was a selector at the top of the page to move specifically to the Tech guild. And it is spartan, but that feels expected for such a young guild. Huge thanks on pointing out that misread of mine!

No problem, glad I could clarify!

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