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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

It is not clear to me whether going on a strike is a good idea for the New York Times tech workers:

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.

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> 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.

If they alternative is quiting, than they don't have very much to lose by going on strike.

That's only true if you are guaranteed to find another job that pays at least as much as that one you are striking against before running out of savings money, otherwise it's always best to look for career movements while still employed.

You are still employed while 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.

If I were looking for jobs, I wouldn't want it on my resumé that I came from a company whose workers just voted to strike - even if I wasn't a member of the union. I would not want it to be assumed that I might be a troublemaker in a not great job market.

Presumably, the tech workers at NYT have a better idea of if striking is a good idea, as they’re employed there and have better visibility into motives and margins

Maybe they want to stay in news media. When I worked at The Atlantic, a lot of my coworkers were highly motivated by the subject matter of their work and perceived quality of their newsroom.

Then, like gaming or Hollywood, their salaries will be lower.

Maybe the New York Times will end up both with a unionized tech workforce, and a lower-paid one. Personally, I would never want to join a union or work as management at a company with a union, but I am still kind of curious to see what the result of a tech workforce unionizing would be.

Lower salaries and treating everyone like a cog.

You think joining a union makes you a cog?

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.

If you do not like working for a business, remember you have an option to start a business

And if you don't like treating employees with a modicum of respect, then you deserve a union to put you in your place. Good luck with the business when people refuse to be taken advantage of.

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.

Tech salaries have ALREADY fallen and tech workers have already been largely treated as cogs. Yes it could get even worse but I get why they’re taking their chances

It would codify this even further. Salaries have fallen but under a union any raises will be slow and require strikes and other job action and not be based on individual performance but on time served. Once time served is in play it doesn't make sense to switch jobs because you start the bottom.

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.

And they’re protected by a union

This doesn't seem like a purely economical strike. It's not a coincidence that the most unionized tech workforce in the country is the New York Times, an organization that is fundamentally pro-union in its politics. When the organization as a whole is consistently delivering a pro-union message, doesn't it just make sense that the employees would tend to be ideologically pro-union?

> the New York Times, an organization that is fundamentally pro-union in its politics

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.

Labor organizations often use a deliberately over-the-top definition of "pro-labor", where you ought to support most labor actions without interrogation or criticism out of solidarity. Is the NYT there? No, of course not, that's not really a practical position for a news organization to take.

Does the NYT newsroom generally report from a perspective that unions are good and we ought to have more of them? I don't see how you could argue otherwise.

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

> the management better starts to analyze how you can reduce the number of, in this case, tech workers because with thin margins

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.

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