New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-new-york-times...
Key parts:
> The Tech Guild won its unionization vote in March of 2022, but has yet to agree upon a final contract with management. In September of this year, the Guild voted to authorize a strike with an overwhelming 95 percent (or over 500 members) in favor. The vote marked two and a half years of bargaining with no result. As Harnett puts it, “At some point, you need a deadline.”
> The first key demand is a protection that Times editorial staff already have: just-cause job protections, which would ensure that members cannot be fired without good reason and due process. The editorial staff won this protection in their 2023 News Guild contract, and just weeks ago, 750 Times journalists penned a letter to management urging them to reach a contract with the Tech Guild before Election day.
> The second demand stems from a pay study the union released in June of this year, which found numerous pay discrepancies for women and people of color. According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers. The study also found that women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, earn 12 percent less on average than men, while Black and Hispanic or Latina women earn 33 percent less than white men.
> The third demand in dispute is a frequent source of anxiety for Hoehne in particular: return to office. Currently, many in the Tech Guild work remotely full-time.... Hoehne has been living and working remotely three hours away from the Times office, in upstate New York, since the pandemic began. “I would lose my job. I can’t sell my house. My kid is in daycare. I can’t. All we’re asking is for them to put in writing that we won’t do that to you.”
> But both Hoehne and Harnett don’t think management’s reluctance to settle these demands stems from the particulars of any of the demands themselves; none of them would spark radical changes. The negotiation process has lagged for years, which Times editorial staff experienced en route to their contract as well. Rather, Hoehne said, staring down the barrel of the Election Day strike, management’s immovability feels like it’s more about preventing the union from stabilizing at all.
> “They could easily end all of this with a single phone call or e-mail,” Harnett said. “But they’re making the decision not to. Maybe they don’t believe that we are resolved [to strike]. I don’t know how else to convince them.”
>>women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, earn 12 percent less on average than men
claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
its like the famous "gender pay gap" claimed by all the people who majored in Gender Studies instead of Statistics. Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/there-really-is-no-gender-wag...)
That is, there is almost no evidence that men and women working in the same position with the same background, education and qualifications are paid differently. Whether it’s the Target Corporation, Facebook, the University of Virginia, the United Way, the White House or McDonald’s, there is almost no evidence that any of those organizations have two pay scales: one for men (at a higher wage) and one for women (at a lower wage). Of course, that would be illegal, and if that practice existed, organizations would be exposed to legal action and “half the legal profession would be taking such cases on contingency fees”
You get that "all the black people are in lower roles or somehow all deemed less productive" is worse, right?
We have a free labour market, if it was true that NYT underpaid Black workers for the same productivity, they could easily jump ship to other company and make more $$.
What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????
You've attempted to explain away pay gaps by saying it's because of lower roles and/or lower productivity, but that's just the same problem with an extra step. Why are they in lower roles? Why are they assessed as less productive? Are they inherently dumb/lazy/bad, or are we just back to "the pay gap exists because of biases" again?
> What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????
Black NYT employees are likely very well aware that the biases they encounter are not unique to the NYT.
I think it’s a totally different problem. The problem no longer is about how group X is compensated for doing job Y, but why group X is doing job Y in the first place.
Anyone who has applied for a job knows that switching companies isn’t free, as it would be in a “free market”. There’s any number of outside factors that could prevent it. And switching too often is also viewed negatively, which is not true of e.g. shares of Amazon.
Do we? Your spelling suggests you're not from the US, so I wonder how familiar you are with market conditions. Gotta say your arguments here and above come off as a little shallow.
Do you have a reason to believe the labor market is not free? Like do tech workers in NYT experience slavery/involuntary labor or industry gatekeeping of some sort?
And it’s almost tautological: people who are good at playing organizational games succeed in the organization. Actually measuring engineering productivity isn’t solved at all.
You don't want to be stuck under a bad boss, do you? or do you want to take a gamble that each manager will be perfect (manager can change without your control as well due to restructuring)?
if Corporation treats employees as a perfectly replaceable unit of a Human Resource, then I will treat them as a fungible unit of a Job Description
Take one factor, women earn less because of mid-career halts due to having children, like the father didn't also have a child. Women bear the brunt because we're expected to be the primary caregivers, and this hurts men too due to the "father babysitting his kids" problem of considering the father's involvement as secondary.
You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.
More broadly, once we start dividing "People" up into groups like "Black" "White" "Man" "Woman"; isn't a bit silly to think the groups won't expect and want and do different things? Like even if we assign people literally at random (and 'Race' isn't much different than this); wouldn't differences emerge?
If we defined the "groups" in a less historically informed way, we'd still have differences.
I think it's very easy to overstate how much those things are genuine differences in preference/ability. Allowing no-fault divorce dropped female suicide rates by 20%; were they happy in those marriages, or enduring them? Would they choose differently if offered the same opportunity?
Yes it should — if they’re making choices at a different rate.
That is, if men who take similar time off experience similar hardship and it simply happens to be that women prefer to stay home with the kids more often, there is literally no problem.
We don’t need to “fix” biology to fit our ideology: that’s backwards.
And I don't think it's crazy for individuals who dedicate more of their life to work to make more money those who don't.
my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap, and on balance it all comes down to individual choices, division of labor at household level.
Using motherhood as a wedge issue between genders is an artificial issue that ignores incomes and choices at the household level.
Time to turn off the “Leave it to Beaver” reruns, I think.
I don't think there is any real agency there. That said I also don't think parenthood is the root of the issue.
Of course, I've been in a bad marriage myself, so I understand how someone can make a really poor decision about their marriage partner (esp. when young!), but it seems to me that a lot of people are in lousy marriages, and are only still in them because it's easier to put up with a crappy partner, especially when you have kids, than to divorce and try to deal with the huge challenges that life as a divorced parent presents. I suspect many, many people (primarily women) are just waiting until the kids are out of the house until they finally end their marriages.
All in all, this makes me wonder how viable traditional marriage as an institution really is any more.
Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.
This is not a gender issue, this is the issue of American elites refusing to provide incentives to working American families.
Remember, most of the American societal "struggles" across artificial wedge lines (straight vs gay, male vs female, democrat vs republican, pro-choice vs pro-life, coastal vs rural, etc etc) => are artificially created by the mainstream media and Uniparty in the DC to leech taxes from working families and selectively prop up one side of the struggle, so that another side is outraged and fought the other.
There is only one struggle in America: rich rentiers on Investment income/Trust funds vs Working class on W2 income.
everything else is distraction
> Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.
I'd be surprised if any federal elected official was on record with a position as ghoulish as this. I think the diversity of opinion on "what do we do about childbearing" is broader than "American lawmakers... would rather women have an abortion". At least the right is pushing a lot of incentives to make women staying home to raise children economically feasible again, and the left is really trying to figure out the care economy. There's a lot of hot button cultural stuff entwined with all of this, but also a rich policy discussion happening underneath.
Probably not, the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts at the NYTimes, so they have some experience with sociology data.
> Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
As explained in the article, the data analysts union mad this claim, it's even explicitly linked!
> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc
No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
Anyway, here's a big stats heavy quote about how there is solid evidence for a pay gap, from the stats nerds at the census bureau (I link only the executive summary https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/An%20Evaluat..., link to the full thing can be found in the summary)
"""In both decomposition models, the portion of the gender wage gap that could not be explained by differences in men’s and women’s work histories, work hours, industry and occupation distribution, and job characteristics was between 68 and 70 percent, yielding an unexplained wage gap of 14 to 15 percent. That is, of an estimated wage gap of 21 percent, statistical models explain between 6 and 7 percentage points of the gap, leaving 14 to 15 percentage points unexplained, similar to other major studies on this topic.
Differences in the sorting of men and women between occupations do not fully explain the gender wage gap; men and women are paid differently within occupations as well. The size of the gender wage gap varies significantly by occupation even as men earn more than women in nearly all occupations. While wages are at parity in some occupations, gaps are as large as 45 percent in others. Across the 316 occupations in this study, occupations in finance and sales had the largest gender wage gaps""
Weird that jobs with performance bonuses are the largest gap — but that perhaps suggests that the cause isnt sexism in the workplace, but yet more confounders they didn’t account for.
https://www.newsweek.com/male-and-female-coworkers-switched-...
You can’t point to gender and say that’s the clear and overwhelming bias.
because it DOES NOT control for hours worked nor experience, and lumps up narrow specialties with wide specialties together in a single "finance".
There is a huge difference in finance as a "bank teller" and finance as a "investment banker at Wall St".
This is a problem of large scale population level wage research, it misses very important confounding variables and lumps up everything they failed to explain as some magical gender pay gap.
This is the epitome of how low replicability social sciences research is done: download dataset from JSTOR, load it in Stata/Matlab, run some regressions and call it a day.
Examples of jobs in that category given in full report reads: "securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents (0.55), financial managers (0.66), and personal financial advisors (0.68)."
I can also tell you didn't bother to peruse the linked summary, because it also talks about experience though they call it work history.
I think it can be true that we should make those jobs safer and that it makes sense to pay dangerous jobs more.
I really am curious what the people that disagree with me think. Do you think that danger shouldn’t be compensated?
Jobs compensate employees according to how much they can get away with exploiting their employees.
If dangerous jobs are paid more, what does that have to do with the gender pay gap?
And, let's face it, two of the most dangerous jobs around at the moment are teaching and nursing, both of which are predominately done by women.
Not even in the top 10. 2024 numbers:
Logging – 100.7 per 100,000 workers
Roofing – 57.5
Fishing and hunting – 50.9
Construction trade helpers – 38.5
Air transportation – 35.9
Delivery trucking and commercial trucking – 30.4
Refuse and recycling – 22.6
Iron and steel – 21.3
Mining – 20.1
Agricultural workers – 20.0
It's a very physical job with a lot of powerful machines.
Men do far more dangerous jobs than women
Ultimately, it turns out, men have a combination of typically choosing higher-paid careers and also being more demanding in terms of compensation. At the end of the day I can't hold a gun to women's heads and make them become engineers. If they want to be teachers, then so be it.
But wait! That doesn't mean that there isn't discrimination at play. Because typically jobs that are predominantly women are lower paid. It's complex, because:
1. Typically, there ARE some value/toughness differences in the job. Being a nurse is "easier" than being a doctor. But how much? Are we certain we're dividing the pay equitably?
2. While men have these higher paying jobs more, men aren't more educated. At least, not anymore. What could be the factors leading women to receive education in fields that are less economically viable?
Also, while there is a pay gap, this isn't the only gender gap. Clearly, job distribution across gender is very complicated. For example, men make up 97% of workplace deaths. Why do men choose these jobs more? Is it biological, social, economic, or all three?
What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?
So that men work more in dangerous jobs wasn't a problem, instead that was a proper, "of course men should die more" sort of thing because it motivated the pay gap.
So the argument becomes that men should die so the pay gap is sustained, which doesn't seem like a great thing to declare triumphantly?
You seem to believe a union in a negotiation would care about carefully drawing conclusions from data analysis.
The goal is to construct a political wedge which makes their employer look bad for not giving into their demands. The only mindset about data is “how can we use this to argue for what we want”.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-nobel-laureate-explai...
Their methodology and third party checks are explained here:
https://www.nyguild.org/2022-nyt-performance-evaluations-rep...
Edit: removed dumb take
In person, I’ve seen many women colleagues do things at odds with the competition
For example, being worried about how to move up in their organization without coming across as “too bitchy”, as if it was a unique phenomenon to their gender
When the competition is:
- losing opportunities for being too cocky, and they keep trying until they find a different organization “looking for someone to make the hard decisions”
- emphasis on a different organization. the competition is coming in at a higher level by bluffing and trying, not focusing on going up the corporate ladder, or worried about being married to a company
its a widely replicated experience that changing jobs will get you 30% pay bump and the same level of responsibilities, while trying to move up gets you a ton more responsibility and single digit percent compensation increases
if many women are adverse to doing that, it would be a significant factor in some industries
act like the competition. you aren’t going to get the satisfaction of an argument about the validity of everyone’s lived experiences.
figure it tf out and don’t worry about how it’s articulated in internet comments. otherwise, you’re probably not pulling your weight on the wage gap for your gender, yikes, because other people are.
I can only speak anecdotally with my many years in the "liberal arts", but feel pretty confident you would be laughed out of the classroom for bringing such a thing up, whatever side of it you are on. Its just more of a thing people like us argue about on message boards, not really something academics would care about beyond a fraught data point! For I hope obvious reasons.
And no I cant speak for the annoying guy you met one time who was a gender studies major. I'm sure they were very annoying though.
Colleges aggressively enroll low-SAT high schoolers in these low rigor fields, because they want their federal student loan money at overinflated tuition. Colleges have only incentive to overproduce students and hand out diplomas like candy in exchange for student loan money.
The problem with over-enrollment of low-SAT students in low rigor fields is Replication crisis[1]. A lot of "research papers" are being produced every year due to sheer over-production of graduate students in these fields, and with pressure to "publish-or-perish" a lot of research ends up bogus, fake, non-replicated or p-hacked.
This NYT claim caught my attention because they used words "average wage per gender/race" - which is telling sign they used simple Excel's AVERAGE() to get their "insights".
In a more rigorous field like econometrics/statistics, you would be laughed at if you make such claim because average numbers hide a lot of nuance, required to understand the field. If one were to control for certain confounding variables, one would get a much better understanding of a "wage gap" or "racial gap" issue and understand each individual components of the gap, rather than blaming everything on strawman "institutional racism" or "institutional misogyny" or whatever
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisisI can’t speak for these numbers, but when we do them we account for these things. Obviously pay isn’t going to be fair, but it should be less unfair than it is at many places.
Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less. That doesn’t mean every white man is paid much better, because not all men ask either. In general, however, you can generalise across experience, productivity, seniority and so on and say that some groups are paid less. There are a lot of factors which play into this beyond people not asking. Our metrics also show that employees who ask less frequently or are in general less assertive are also much less likely to leave their jobs. As such it becomes less of a risk to not give them raises. Risk of employees leaving is a factor you consider when balancing your budget, and I’m sure you can imagine other things which may play into this, some of which, shouldn’t.
Yes, and that’s because as study after study has shown they’re less likely to successfully get more and not have it held against them.
> New research by Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Kray shows the belief that women don’t ask for higher pay is not only outdated, but it may be hurting pay equity efforts. Contrary to popular belief, professional women now report negotiating their salaries more often than men, but they get turned down more often, Kray found.
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/new-research-sha...
I personally hope it changes.
I’m not sure you’re arguing against who you think you’re arguing against. I’m not defending it, I’m simply sharing how it is at our place. There are a lot of issues, if you took a wild guess at the demography of our manager staff I'm fairly certain you would get it right.
The author of this particular article you linked to (which itself doesn't really link out to much, other than an interview given by Sheryl Sandberg and references to her commentary from The Guardian, so where is the data coming from exactly?) is also a concurrent fellow at The Federalist Society[0] which has a notoriously right wing bent to its interpretation of law and policy research, which does bring up some questions of bias here, given this and the fact there isn't anything in the linked article that really supports their position, rather its a snippet of interpretation for a Sheryl Sandberg interview and a book titled Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It by Warren Farrell. To which, he uses both snippets outside of their broader context, which both argue that pay remediation is a core component to having gender equality in the workplace, but isn't the only thing
I'm coming up empty here, as to what supports this assertion as any semblance of reality?
Prove me wrong with facts and studies, I’m all ears. I would life to be wrong about this
So firstly, you don’t know what the NYT tech guild analysis looked like, so why assume they didn’t control for other factors? It is plausible they could have, given their access to competent statisticians, but we don’t know either way. It seems like you may just want this story to fit your pre-existing narrative.
Secondly, there are so many high-quality studies out there better than an a blog post about a Forbes article about an interview from a conservative think tank that show the very real existence of a gender pay gap that _is not accounted for_ by fewer hours worked, experience, or job type (yes these do contribute but are far from the entire picture). Here’s a couple (read their citations for more):
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/equalpay/WB_issueb... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21913/w219...
Lastly, _even if_ womens’ “lifestyle choices” were to explain entirely the pay gap (which they don’t, see above), think about what kind of career choices you’d make if you had to constantly debate about your right to equal pay with your supposed peers.
So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post:
> Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation.
What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?
If we, as a society, want to encourage more kids, we should to allocate those funds as a society, much like roads or anything else (we do, tax benefits, ..., maybe we should do more). If we want to offer welfare for people regardless of their life constraints, that's again a societal decision (and one I'm mostly in favor of).
Pushing that to each individual employer sets up a cat and mouse game where the shadiest organizations barely not getting audited are able to leverage that inequality (supposing we did fix the wage gap at an employer level without addressing underlying factors) to achieve higher profits and outperform the competition.
And that's one of the _better_ outcomes. Switching gears only slightly, suppose (using round numbers for simplicity) the average cost to the employer of maternity leave is 6 months salary and you have a 10% chance of incurring that cost. An organization like the NYT can absolutely self-insure, but at the level of only a few employees you cannot.
Something kind of like the unemployment insurance situation works much better in those kinds of scenarios. The government acts as an insurer to provide the service we as a society have decided is worthwhile, and each employer only has to send in a check for their average liability instead of dealing with a different mountain of paperwork and existential risks.
Another one is free of cost universal pre-K. A lot of women can't go to work because there is nobody at home to take care of their children. But really the easiest lowest hanging fruit is universal WIC. Make it available to everyone so it is easier for us to tell people to get it.
https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/applicant-participant/eligibili...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motherhood_penalty
progenity penalty is a societal issue, not issue between worker-corp. It is individual choice of a household to pro-create, and each mother's gender penalty is offset by father's gender penalty.
one may argue that America should provide more incentives to working families, but I see it as a society level issue, not the issue between a particular worker union and NYT.
I would love American society to unite once and for all, and ignore all artificial wedge lines created by MSM and uniparty (state, party, rural/urban, region, identity, ideology) and demand better laws that provide longer PFL and affordable childcare.
Doesn't sound like a penalty to me? also it assumes parents stay together if one offsets the other
"Women earn less due to sexist discrimination" and "women earn less due to bearing the brunt of raising children" are two distinct claims. The first one is contentious and widely disputed (disproved?).
I think this is false?
The gap certainly becomes smaller when you control for those factors, but it does not disappear.
But don't take my word for it; search for "unadjusted gap" (or "uncontrolled") vs "adjusted gap" (or "controlled") to see various reports. Your quoted source does not cite much data that I can see.
My understanding is that the adjusted pay gap is approx. 99¢ vs. $1 for men; one source, with data and a description of their methodology: https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-ga...
(and of course, aside from this, the question of why women would tend to have less experience and lower titles than men, is a valid topic on its own, and adjusting for it doesn't make it unimportant)
isn't it on the border of measurement error ? Would it be fair to say, after controlling for some variables the gender gap narrows down to 1% (which is a fairly small number if you ask me).
Like $1000 per year on a median salary in the US
At least going by that payscale.com link, I don't think so. That is compiled from 600K+ responses, so they have enough data to measure small differences with some confidence, I think. I didn't sign up to download the full dataset though, so I'm mostly going by their claims.
Quoting from the article:
Although $0.99 may seem very close to $1, the red line in the chart
below has never crossed the dotted $1 line in blue representing men’s
pay. Even when women are doing the same jobs, the gender pay gap is
not zero.
If we can say that for the same level, gender pay gap does not exist, but there is discrepancy in promoting women to senior/executive levels: and there could be many legitimate reasons.
and the issue of gender gap becomes an issue of promoting women to senior levels from the inside, or more diverse hiring for senior job roles from outside.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re smart enough to not just straight up compare the average of all men vs the average of all women.
Further, given that the AEI has a very strong incentive to lie a pay gap away, I'd at least suggest consulting additional resources.
With the right, a lot of it is based on religion or irreducible moral sentiment, and you just accept that some people on the right believe crazy things and can’t be swayed. On balance their beliefs are more harmful (though not by as much as in the past), but they don’t bother me in the same way because they’re admittedly irrational. Many on the left start with a set of beliefs similarly rooted in feeling and then rationalize the hell out of them, and will (often literally) scream at you if you dare to point out that their evidence is ex post facto and just poor besides.
Glassdoor has a great report showing that salaries for the same company and same job title are about 7% lower for women. An academic paper on MBA grads showed that hiring salaries for women were lower. So there is evidence for it.
For the MBA grads, the paper show that with training on negotiation, women got salaries similar to men. So, there are policies that help.
Other tech workers should take note. RTO is negotiable, like everything else. If companies can enforce RTO with zero cost, they just might do it.
Point 1: Only getting fired for a good reason? Who decides what a good reason is? The boss right? So what are we even doing here, what's the hidden implication? They want a foot in the door to be able to argue that X wasn't really a good reason and they'll strike over it. If I were a company owner/boss I would want to be able to fire people who are terrible to be around, argumentative for no good reason. Is that a good reason? They would think no because it's a personal fit issue. And yet it's totally legitimate, people don't get hired all the time over "fit" but then you can't fire over "fit". Everytime I have to deal with such colleagues I always think "man if I were a boss, I'd just fire such people, it's so obviously poison for the work environment". Arguing effectively is important but because it's so important it's a great duty to not use it as a tool for personal benefits.
Point 2: Pay discrepancies for "women or people of color" could easily have real world reasons, maybe they really are just worse at their job, less engaged, less ambitious, whatever it is that causes less pay. It's not impossible for this to be the case, no matter how uncomfortable that may be for everyone. Yes really. Yes really really. It can absolutely be true. You might even have a situation where every worker from Russia is just worse at their job. Or the majority of workers that are e.g hindu are just worse for whatever reason that a company can't fathom. It may even be the case that everyone who is white is worse for whatever reason, maybe they are too comfortable, who knows, none of this is impossible and none of this is the job of the company to figure out. I need to have the legal power to pay worse people less money or we are in a situation where you just levied a massive hidden tax on my company. You want me to subsidize worse performers in some strange hope that this is going to help the country as a whole to be nicer. Well having a nicer country would be fantastic, I just want you to be clear that you are issuing massive, gigantic new taxes with these so called anti-racist, anti-sexist rules and it's not just a tax on the company, it also hurts the psychology of all the better workers, so you are hurting society in general. Who is going to count the cost at the end? Why work harder after all if you can just have a certain genetic profile or protected political class and then you'll get free money. What such people who push for this are always implying is that the company is hurting itself in sexist, racist confusion, the implication is that these people are underpaid for the value they provide and the company is too incompetent to see it. The union or government in their infinite wisdom is going to force the company's racists/sexists/homophobes to finally pay according to the real value of these workers and the only metric that they will use to determine the real value is genetics and political class. Absurd isn't even a strong enough word to describe it. Even in the theoretical best case scenario for such a rule where you truly have identical value from two different people, why reward the person that doesn't want to negotiate for more pay? What we should actually do is maybe look at workers' family situation and give people who can't negotiate effectively due to raising kids that they get a government tax bonus. But wait, that is already the case! People who have kids can already get a tax bonus.
Point 3: Yes it would be nice if we could all work how we want but how is that a legitimate negotiable thing for the union to involve itself in? If the company thinks that home office doesn't work for them then who is the union to say otherwise?!
The entire mindset here is so utterly divorced from reality, it's like a luxury daycare where the kids complain that some other kid got a slightly better piece of the pie.
There are these things that exist called courts and independent arbitrators...
> Pay discrepancies for "women or people of color" could easily have real world reasons, maybe they really are just worse at their job, less engaged, less ambitious, whatever it is that causes less pay.
> ...
> I need to have the legal power to pay worse people less money or we are in a situation where you just levied a massive hidden tax on my company.
Ok, then. We have these things called protected categories. If your contention is one of those categories actually consists of "worse people" that you need to be able to "pay less money," then you need to prove that each of those individuals is in fact "worse." A giant wall-o-text consisting of a bunch of coulds, maybes, and I-want-to-be-able-to-do-this's ain't gonna cut it.
> Yes it would be nice if we could all work how we want but how is that a legitimate negotiable thing for the union to involve itself in?
The short answer: yes. The long answer is: yes, and why is that news to you?
> The entire mindset here is so utterly divorced from reality...
Honestly, I could say the same about your comment.
Having certain protections against discrimination is a good thing but they should be very carefully applied. We can already see that the New York Times Tech Guild does not seem to want careful application of these rules if their website doesn't even mention any evaluation of worker productivity or value, all their study apparently did was to look at pay difference without looking at work difference. A perfect example of a total failure to care about the correct things, a total failure to care about what the company needs to achieve (=actual value) and just looking at pay with no connection to possible reasons I enumerated. https://www.nyguild.org/post/pay-inequity-at-the-new-york-ti...
I can imagine an orange when we're talking apples, sure.
> We can already see that the New York Times Tech Guild does not seem to want careful application of these rules if their website doesn't even mention any evaluation of worker productivity or value, all their study apparently did was to look at pay difference without looking at work difference.
Come on, it's an adversarial negotiation. You seem to really want to argue the side of the employer, and for some strange reason seem also want everyone to argue that side as well.
Point 2: No matter how it shakes out, if you structure your company in a way that white men or asian men are incentivized to do more or women and blacks are incentivized to do less, then your company has a racist incentive structure and it should be rebuilt. They aren't flying in 15-year-old Hadje from Chad, the people they hire are all similarly qualified so there shouldn't be such a large gap, as we know cause if we restrict it to just white men then there isn't this large pay gap. Besides, it's a complete myth that people are "payed what they are worth" if that were the case a 100xer would make 100x more than a 1xer after firing 99 people and keeping the 100xer. In reality they might double or tripple their pay and the rest just becomes (record) profits for the company and 99 people are out of work.
Point 3: Does the company have any evidence that it doesn't work or should we just take their word? Doesn't work in what sense? That profits for the company aren't maximized? If that's the only metric then why should the employees be payed at all? Just have them as slaves and use the government to beat or kill them if they disagree.
This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out. It would be one thing if they were disagreeing about a number, but it sounds like the terms keep changing and nobody agrees on the nature of the work itself. It's not even clear that there's a preliminary contract ready for the NYTimes to sign.
Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull. But if this is just attention seeking without a serious contract, it seems egregiously risky on behalf of the union members too: there's not a clear button the Times can push on behalf of the union to end the strike immediately. The Times would either have to sign a blank check to the union now, or the union would have to agree to an IOU in exchange for a bunch of temporary concessions.
They had a contract, waiting for the time when the work they do is absolutely critical is antisocial behavior. Society is built on people honoring their commitments.
What a terrible analogy promoting a ridiculous narrative.
A better analogy is if it's the mayors house on fire, it was predetermined when exactly the mayors house would catch fire, the mayor had been warned well in advance of his house catching fire that the firefighters would like to negotiate their contract, and had in fact been involved in negotiations for years already. Not quite the same zing to it though...
Ultimately, labor unions exist to extract additional compensation from employers. Imo in cases where the employer can afford it and the employees in question are being unfairly treated, I think it's reasonable for them to quit or strike in good faith, but I don't think many of those things are true here.
Newspapers are barely surviving these days. These people took jobs at the nytimes knowing they wouldn't make big tech salaries, and most companies have ended WFH policies. If they can force the NYTimes to give them concessions by holding them hostage during one of the most contentious moments in US history, I won't admire them one bit.
Lastly, thanks for drawing that better comparison. It still wouldn't be right for the firefighters to let someone's house burn down in that case.
2: In an election where trust and reliability of independent media are really being called into question, something like this could have outsized negative impact. There's potentially a lot of damage to innocent third parties, including smaller syndication partners.
2: i suspect that it is not the NYT readers who are fretting about media credibility. By definition, they already believe in the system.
SWE impact is measured in quarters or years, especially at a big company that doesn't have public deadlines for project delivery.
Every job Ive ever been in, scaling was automatically managed. Engineers focused on fixing bugs and shipping features, not scaling up instances
You might need to take some lessons in negotiating.
Also, it takes two to tango. For any of the negative outcomes you mention, NYT management is equally to blame. Why is it the union’s responsibility to acquiesce to whatever terms to maintain trust and reliability?
That’s leverage. Striking during a time when the business doesn’t care is a dumb move.
The NYT kind of brings this kind of heat on itself because it has shifted from being just the paper of record over to an institution to the current definition of progressivism. You can only really do this union kinda stuff against self-important institutions. Which developer is ever going to attempt this on Accenture? They are straight up and honest about their business, which is they are trying to rake profits from connecting developers with companies - whatever it takes, whoever, from wherever, at whatever price is profitable.
The Times adorned itself as something more than a business, a special kind of business, a business that fights for something. So there you go, live up to it I guess.
Here is some of the content that the NYTimes focuses on:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/opinion/starbucks-union-s...
It's a fairly pro-business paper, certainly not very critical of Israel, and you appear to have completely missed all of its somewhat trans-skeptical reporting and opinion. (The latter pervasive enough to rankle many of its own employees about the tone and tenor of NYT coverage of trans issues.)
Does NYT not have a reputation or am I truly out of touch here? I went through some of their podcasts recently and it's all quite one-sided, for example.
(NPR was even more disappointing because they positioned themselves as centrist; APM’s Marketplace was closer centrist that than NPR).
Yes, you are absolutely out of touch. drawkward gave you three incredibly specific examples but you just kept on sticking with your hunch.
A paper that is the "epitome of progressivism" probably isn't going to have multiple conservative opinion columnists heavily featured and isn't going to have recurring problems with fawning interviews of white supremacists over barbecue.
I suppose if you're any further than center-right, a paper that is narrowly center-left is going to appear to be the "epitome of progressivism", but many years of critique would probably suggest otherwise. politely, i don't think this would be something you'd get tripped up on if you'd paid attention for a few years longer than a singular skim of the podcasts recently.
Sorry, are we both talking about the New York Times in 2024 here? Not a day goes by that there isn’t an article crying about Palestinians and bashing Israel - there’s one right now, just scroll down to the section just above sports.
Calling it the preeminent progressive institution in America media today is axiomatic.
Any objective observer would call Israel's behavior abhorrent wrt Gaza. In fact, it seems like the majority of the planet is doing that, if the UN is representative.
...among certain not-unbiased segments of the population.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schw...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-at...
This comment will be deleted by moderators, though, just like every other comment which points this out. Yet no moderator has ever mentioned why they are doing that. It's factual and relevant to the discussion.
I don't consider myself a progressive for just this reason. I would be considered a TERF by the trans community, not because I think trans people don't exist or arent worth of love, employment, and respect, but rather because there are some hot issues (bathroom access, sports access, how to handle children permanently transitioning, replacing cisgendered terminology in medical textbooks) that I believe merit more study or nuanced approaches.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the question of who has the right to define what labels, and I think most progressives would not call you a progressive if you don't 100% accept trans rights. Of course, this demands lockstep ideological behavior, which is rarely a good thing for long. Could you be progressive on some issues and not others? Certainly! But which mix defines you as "progressive" or not is not up to me.
I had to look that up. I'm I out of touch with the times by not knowing such acronyms? I am standing here at the station minding my business and Overton Express is passing by at 60 mph. "TERF" seem to describe most progressives. But I think I lag the avant guard conscious by 10 years of something.
But anyhow, I would say NYT is very much not left nor progressive. Maybe on some tangential culture issues. It is a centre corporate newspaper.
So progressive!
+/- your buy-in on that image. Pete's Pizza Parlor also adorns itself - as being on a mission to serve up piping hot pizza pies.
This sounds like how American conservatives describe it rather than how most readers or actual progressives would - the latter having significant misgivings about how it covered Iraq, Occupy Wall Street, the 2016 election coverage of things like the email hacks and FBI investigations relative to their actual substance, the tone of their coverage and editorials about transgender issues, etc.
The best way I’ve found to describe the NYT is as representing the east coast establishment. The issues which earned them attacks as liberal were things like favorably covering gay rights, which affects those elites (even rich sons of influential families can be born gay so everyone knows someone who benefits from that), but they tend to be more conservative on things like workers rights or tax issues which don’t affect or may even threaten their affluent readers. Climate change affects everyone but their opinion pieces are going to be things like “buy an induction stove” or “vacation in Nepal before the snow melts and buy some carbon offsets” rather than “stop flying and eat less beef” because their target reader wants to do the former and not the latter.
I'll vote tomorrow. That's what I can do. All the rest of it is out of my hands and I'm not going to spend any of my time or mental energy engaging in the manufactured drama sure to come.
Like my barber said at my last haircut: the only sure thing about this election is that an idiot will be our next president.
It boggles my mind at how proud people are to refuse to draw a distinction between two completely different candidates. One has demonstrated competence and public service, while the other has demonstrated incompetence and chronic self-dealing.
Refusing to draw a distinction is moral cowardice.
I see we share the same strategy. My new policy is that I shut the news off once the polls open on election day and don't turn it back on until the following morning. Over the course of my life, I'll accrue enough saved hours to have achieved something minor, yet meaningful.
It's smart. The one week where americans manage pull their head out of their ass is a good time to move.
EDIT: spelling
I spent 3 years working for a professional union negotiator. I don't know everything, but I feel like I have a bit more insight into how the sausage gets made.
This is such a weird request for technology workers. You want to work with low-performing coworkers?
Both parties have freedom in this arrangement, but we can find examples of both employees and employers with weak negotiating positions. I don't think that invalidates the benefits of freedoms of association.
To your point about business being bound by constraints, they absolutely are bound by the niche they operate in. As markets change, world events unfold, competitors appear, decisions are made, companies can struggle and fail, yet are typically unable to pivot.
Consider a company that makes ICE cars that can't follow the market into making EVs. Or a company that has never had competition might be in the stranglehold of "this is the way we've always done it" when a fierce competitor emerges, and won't adapt.
True, most employees typically don't have equity (so they don't share in all the upside), but they also aren't married to the company when it looks like a supertanker headed for an inevitable collision with a bridge (getting wiped out on the downside).
Yes.
About half the people on this thread seem to be misreading that sentence.
It's very clear that "just cause" includes cases of low performance. So no, it's not about making it impossible to fire these people.
Making it hard to fire low performers results in low performing teams, and there are no reliable solutions to this.
It seems if the problem you allege were true at scale, the entire labor force is sitting around doing nothing.
Are you really claiming that the only reason all (tech) employees do their job is just to avoid firing? How do you operate in a zero-trust life?
An interview is at least 4 people, each grilling you for an hour, asking hard questions.
Their hiring bar is high and they optimize for avoiding bad hires (which of course is pissing off the commenters who want to be hired and therefore would prefer lower hiring standard).
In Europe they make it harder to fire people and guess what happened?
First, companies have probatory period (2-6 months, depending on the country) where you're hired but can be fired at will. This is to minimize chances of being stuck with a poor performer.
Second, EU economy is about the size of US and China but software industry (and the tax / employment riches associated with it) is largely in US Chine. Might be a coincidence but I think there's causality between over-regulation and stagnation of the economy.
What good is a growing economy when your country's people are living shorter, unhappier lives?
Look at the countries that are generally regarded as happiest: are their economies the biggest?
Assuming when you say "biggest" you mean per capita... yes. Obviously it's not the only factor, but generally I think it's generally accepted that people in rich countries are better off than people in poor countries.
With the endless seas of SWE layoffs, we'll see if that behavior continues.
It's also not a solved problem in countries where at-will employment is not the norm.
The total freedom of the company to terminate anyone any time for any reason or no reason is extreme, and now we are pivoting to the other extreme. Funny how that happens.
My understanding from the comments was that this prevents people who don't do their job from being fired, as long as they don't set fire to the servers or something. If I misunderstood, then the union is being nicer than they have to.
A court never reinstates anyone to their job, the company just needs to pay damages to the former employee.
That is your problem right there. You cannot trust comments to give you an accurate idea of what actually happened. The linked source is marginally better (but keep in mind that it is close to one side of the story, even though it is more independent than some people here seem to believe).
I don't think it's great that our society tries to treat work like it's family, and jobs like they're some guaranteed long-term relationship. It sets people up with the wrong expectations.
Your company will lay you off or fire you once they run out of money to pay you or reason to keep you on board. That's how it works. Just as you will quit your job and take a new one if you interview and get a better offer elsewhere.
These are business contracts.
It's business's responsibility to not depend on a single employee. The employee might have been hit by a bus.
Plenty of people are aware of this, and they navigate this successfully by saving part of their income, by maintaining an employable skillset, and by living within their means, while working a job.
When you suggest to people that it's their company's responsibility to take care of them, to guarantee their job into their future, or to look out for their personal financial livelihood, that IS NOT REALITY. That's not how it works. You're telling people that their own responsibilities are someone else's, when that's not in fact true. When people mistakenly believe this drivel, they're far more likely to take bad risks and make huge financial mistakes.
Employees, on the other hand, put all their eggs into one basket at a time. Many (most?) employers specifically forbid moonlighting and working multiple full-time jobs at once, so employees are forced to depend on a single job at a time. The risk of having a bad employer is shouldered 100% by the employee.
It's this power dynamic that justifies different standards for employers and employees.
Business is not all huge companies with infinite redundancy. There are 30M small businesses in America that employ 60M people. For the vast majority of businesses and teams, losing an employee hurts, and employees have lots of leverage. These business owners have to do the work to ensure redundancy, to plan their budgets and products and systems to ensure they can weather inevitable employee turnover. Plenty of businesses fail to do this and have to close their doors. It happens with regularity.
On the flip side, unemployment is the US is super low. It's true that workers can only hold one job at a time, but they are not "trapped" at a job. In fact, they have more mobility than ever, which also gives them leverage to negotiate for higher salaries or to hop jobs. Not to mention more gig jobs, remote jobs, and contract jobs than ever, even for highly paid positions. Sure, losing a job hurts. But the employees who plan for this possibility, who maintain skills, maintain savings, and live within their means, can find new jobs, just as businesses who plan well can weather employee turnover.
It goes both ways.
So if you're in a position where your employer has some huge power dynamic hold on you, is that some universal truth for all employees resulting from the nature of the employer-employee dynamic? I don't think so. I think that's the result of poor personal decisions, or bad luck at best.
All that said, I'm 100% on board with legal protections that set a high standard for employers. We have plenty of those already. And I'm 100% on board with government stepping in to help take care of people who fall through the cracks. For example, I love that COBRA allowed me to stay on my previous employer-provided group healthcare plan for 18 months(!) after my last job ended.
What I'm against is any cultural or legal change that begins to suggest that its employers' responsibility to keep their people employed. It's not. Financially, the system can't work that way. Employers are not our parents or our nannies or our caretakers, and we should not try to make them into that.
Your claim of: > Yes, and it's an employee's responsibility to not depend on a single job, and to be prepared for the possibility that it might go away. That's the mindset we should be teaching people, because it's REALITY.
is capitalist mindset that thinks there's never a chance of change. Kinda pathetic for a MIT grad, tbh.
Personal attacks are shite, especially when they dig into someone's background for extra 'bite'.
P.s. what rock have you been living under where you have a preconception that all MIT graduates are ethical white knights that share all of your own opinions?
It's one of the most varietal student bodies at a school that forks people majorly into military programs and research labs.. to expect harmonious homogeny regarding ethical opinions from the graduates is ridiculous.
Because that is bad for the individual worker. We live in a society, and society should look out for humans before corporations.
What are the results of worker protections mentioned above ? Literally no jobs with protections. See for yourself. LATAM has an average of ~65% informal employment. Take Argentina for example. Close to 50% of the labor market are under-the-table "jobs" for this reason.[3]. Even more developed countries suffer the consequences , such as UK having 24% informal sector [4]
All those governments intended to look out for humans before corporations. It didn't work out that way. The road to poverty is paved with good intentions.
US dynamism actually creates more jobs as more are willing to try new things and experiment.
Yes, you can protect workers, very very well. But only if you are OK with a tiny amount of protected workers, and let everyone else toil in the informal sector where zero protections exist
[1] https://goglobal.com/blog/from-legal-protocols-to-cultural-n...
[2] https://www.acc.com/sites/default/files/resources/vl/public/...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1037216/informal-employm...
It is IMO ridiculous that in a lot of EU countries, chronic low performance is not just cause for firing.
It makes economical sense to reduce the friction of allocating workers where they'll be most productive. It just shouldn't destroy those workers' financial security.
I'm not surprised, on a startup-angled site, that there'd be dissatisfaction with not being able to hire and fire at will. COVID had employees re-assess what was important for them. Tangentially, now we're seeing that shorter working weeks results in higher employee productivity and satisfaction.[1]
Having job security, when you've taken on long-term commitments like a mortgage and raising kids, is considered important in many parts of the world. The EU isn't SV; for employees that's probably a good thing.
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/surprising-benefits-...
Its not just startups. The chickens always come home to roost.
Lets go into COVID since it is a wonderful example. Employers in Ecuador dealt with minimum wage protections well outpacing productivity growth precovid, doubling the cost of protections relative to Colombia and 75 percent higher than in Peru [1] . Then COVID hit. The central government had no choice but to temporarily rescind the rules of strict protections under "force majeure". This eliminated all severance payments to employees under 'force majeure'. [2]
What happened?
A bunch of low performers who had built a decade or more in 1 job, got unexpectedly laid off, despite working in perfectly operating businesses with no risk of bankruptcy (AG, export adjacent etc) Then, with zero marketable skills from a decade of non-work, these workers are chronically unemployable now. [3]
PS - Regarding the UK number cited, which some people felt very strongly about.. I made a mistake and quoted the wrong year. I can't edit my comment any longer [4]
[1] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/downloadpdf/journals/002/2021/2... see page 11, section 1.
[2] https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2020-09-21/ecu...
[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/downloadpdf/journals/002/2021/2... , see page 13, section 6 ("the recovery has been very partially among the less educated (persons with basic education or less) ....'they exited' the labor force in larger numbers from the crisis onset")
[4] The number is available in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_share_of_...
Not necessarily. Sure it is better if every other factor is held equal, but it's not: everyone benefits from living in a more highly economically developed society where industry is more successful. So you have to weigh pro-worker concerns against these other benefits.
If your argument were valid then its logical conclusion would be that all profit from the business has to distributed to the employees (as in most traditional strains of far-left thought). In practice systems like that have major flaws.
Coddling workers by expecting corporations to basically act as their family, their parents, their financial planners, their healthcare providers, etc., is terrible.
We should not be telling people to expect any particular corporation to provide them a livelihood indefinitely, when it's a simple fact that corporations cannot do that. They can afford to pay you when it's profitable for them to do so, and that's it. That's the deal. Period.
I'm all for taking care of people. That's what our government should do itself. We should not be placing that role on corporations. And we should not be telling people to expect that their jobs will last forever and they can't be fired. We should instead tell people to maintain their skillsets, maintain their savings, and live within their means, so they can weather inevitable job changes. That's what caring for people actually looks like.
I would agree with this but if that's the case why employees are not given the same perks as companies from a tax point of view? My personal preference is to treat every human as a business. The alternative would be to eliminate all taxes except sales tax with some cutoff for low income persons.
If you're a worker, why shouldn't you be able to band together with your fellow workers to not allow this?
- Landlords should not be able to collude to keep rent prices high. They should be forced to compete against each other, either by offering lower rent or better premises and services to tenants. The result is that over time, society gets better and better places to live, that are nicer, updated, and safer, at cheaper prices.
- Healthcare providers shouldn't be allowed to collude to set uniform prices for services. They should have to compete on price, quality of care, or access to treatments, ensuring patients can choose better or more affordable options. The result is that more and more people can afford healthcare services, which themselves become increasingly effective over time.
- Internet service providers shouldn't be able to divide territories or coordinate to prevent competition in specific regions. They should have to compete, driving down prices or increasing service quality for consumers.
- Software companies shouldn't agree to not hire each other's employees to keep wages low. This prevents employees from negotiating higher salaries and better benefits, hurting workforce dynamism and innovation.
Etc.
Capitalism is simply a collection of laws and regulations that blocks all means of profit other than simply offering a better deal or better services. The goal is for those to be the only real ways to profit. The side effect of workers and companies all competing to do this in order to profit is that society benefits by having a ton of innovation to make better and better things, at cheaper and cheaper prices. Which is the central reason why, today, the average person can have a cell phone, a TV, the internet, amazing healthcare treatments, and an almost infinite array of options for clothing, food, entertainment, etc.
Allowing people to profit in ways that disrupt competition gunks up the entire functioning of the market. Maybe you get some short-term benefit, but ultimately you end up with a system that doesn't create nearly as much wealth and prosperity. Because why go through the trouble to create great things for your customers (as a company), your employers (as an employee), or your employees (as an employer) if you can instead benefit by simply banding together with others and colluding, or monopolizing some essential resource, or fixing prices, etc.
Eventually you learn that one of your middle managers managed to fire someone for some reason that is illegal, or is related to some kind of crime, and guess what? It seeps upward, and your company is in the wrong.
A process doesn't just protect the employee, it protects you from the iffy middle management that, without exception, gets in. And the more freedom you give them, the worse the behavior.
I told him that the first step would be for tech workers to stop thinking that their greatest competition is other tech workers.
(Flip the question: "If your coworkers are low-performing but the union prevents the company from firing them, why don't you just go form your own company with your three closest buddies and compete? That's the dream, right?")
So instead the choices tend to drift to "fire them on the manager's whim" or "practically impossible to get rid of short of murder"
That sounds like just your experience
https://www.apqc.org/blog/better-measurement-knowledge-worke...
The crux of growth in knowledge workers is that our current norms of measurement and productivity were developed in a manufacturing or manual task-oriented mindset. According to Peter Drucker, productivity for knowledge workers needs a different set of considerations
https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-...
While in manual work the targets and outputs are usually clear, knowledge work and its results are less tangible, and therefore harder to define, measure and evaluate
https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/114586/palvalin...
Drucker (1999) has even stated that knowledge worker productivity is the biggest challenge for modern work life. Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success... The need for general performance measurement is great as the theme is still quite new and there are very few previous studies measuring the effectiveness of NewWoW practices. There is also a need for practical tools for analysing and managing the performance of knowledge work from the NewWoW perspective. Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information
Great, which means we have a way to measure individual performance with respect to what matters (organizational success). So what's the problem?
> Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information
Unless you question the validity of the research? But if that's the case, why did you mention it as being significant in the first place?
Can you expand on that?
Clearly if it was possible to measure effectiveness unambiguously this wouldn't be a debate.
But I think this is a bit of hyperbole - some kind of ongoing, documented low performance seems obviously better than just letting managers fire on a whim.
Unfortunately I think those types of layoffs are separate from "firing" and probably not covered by these terms.
Look at the news organizations laying off reporters in large numbers. The news organizations' product suffers considerably.
The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off. I don’t mean anything about your company, which could be great or terrible, I have no idea. But I would expect the best performers to get new positions quickly through their networks and connections. You would not see these people replying to random offers, but it does not mean that they were not high-performers who were laid off.
I suspect this to be very likely the case but I don't think it changes anything here. If we laid off people that were high performers and they got taken up in the job market quickly that means things are still healthy and we are still giving jobs to people that deserve jobs. A net neutral effect on the system as a whole.
The stragglers that can't find new jobs because they were laid off for low performance AND also are low performing interviewers are not useful to the system. Now they just kind of eat up some interviewing productivity but thats probably a net-positive for the entire job market as a whole.
As I was soldering boards together, I said "gnome". The clerk laughed, and said "no, seriously". I said "seriously, gnome". We argued a bit, and he capitulated, saying I was going to be sorry. The Aph guy behind me heard the debate, and asked for "wizard" as his job title. And so forth for all the employees. I think the owner of Aph asked for "grand wizard" or something like that.
Wandering around the convention floor, people would read our badges and laugh. It was all great fun.
After that, such job titles appeared on business cards, convention badges, etc.
I flatter myself in suspecting that it was I who started it!
I was once interviewed for a job by the CEO. He asked me where I saw myself in 5 years. I said "CEO".
I got a "no hire".
Previously, you were probably a dork in high school and mostly self taught for the love of technology. You might have gone through a prestigious academic CS program and cultivated a sense of superiority over the humanities and biz school kids. Outsourcing / off shoring was a thing but you had the innate protection of skin color and acculturation.
Today it's just another thing some people study because that's where the jobs are.
I've worked with people that were passionate about the art their entire life , and I've worked with on-job trained people in equivalent positions -- the difference in code quality/structure/logic is pretty telling between the two camps.
It certainly makes one think that either the skill set is 'special', or that we're really in the experimental trial phase of learning how to teach it to those otherwise uninterested.
Bold assertions requires evidence.
I mean sure we are not "wizards" , but I highly doubt "large swaths of population " can qualify to work in tech as you claim.
Tech remains be a highly desirable position specifically because it's difficult for an average person to fully grasp it. CS has one of the highest drop rates compared to other fields because people fundamentally have a hard time comprehending systems.
I never understand why our profession actively tries to undermine its own status compared to other fields. You never hear Lawyers going around telling people their profession is pointless and any average Joe can master it by taking a 6 week boot camp course.. or that they are "overpaid" for sending a single letter via email.
My pet theory is that the underlying nerd culture enables this due to our insecurities.
I bet this is also why we are not taken very seriously and lack accountability.
It's just asking for due process.
Do you have any examples of systems that worked well?
You're asking them to solve a problem people have been working on for decades without success. How can they measure productivity of tech workers?
This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out
Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.
And utterly zero awareness of what they themselves were doing wrong.
Attempting to explain it to them was a complete failure.
Instinctive social judgement definitely exists. Is it a good metric to find good employees? Dunno, maybe?
Nobody has ever come up with a good set of objective metrics to judge software engineer performance. So the best we have is still the subjective opinions of your managers and peers.
Imagine I sent a manuscript to a publishing house and they rejected it for being bad. I wouldn't expect they got to that conclusion by comparing it to a set of metrics, I would assume they have people in authority whose judgement is the decider on whether something is "good" or "bad".
Human endeavors sometimes fail to live up to expectations.
For workers who work with their heads, "metrics" is a fantasy. How do you measure a better writer?
How do you measure a better writer? It depends on what the purpose of the writing is. If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold. If it is an online publication you can conduct surveys to determine the impact of a particular writer on subscription or view rates. If it is a techincal writer doing product documentation you can measure based upon meeting schedule, number of defects and by conducting customer surveys.
> If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold.
This is a fairly lousy metric. It depends enormously on the marketing campaign and the ability of salesmen to sell it.
For example, I read an article about the author of the "Slow Horses" book. It languished for years selling at a rate that was indistinguishable from zero. Then some journalist read it, wrote a glowing review of it, and it took off. Now it's a best seller, with sequels, and a miniseries.
Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line, it isn't a question of skill or ability. It is a failure of the company to properly motivate, challenge, and reward them for their work.
It’s HN. We’ve all been maliciously compliant. I can close tickets without solving any problems or be on call in the most useless ways imaginable just fine.
Either the company should be able to evaluate an employee's performance and therefore can show proof of poor performance or it can't properly evaluate an employee's performance and therefore shouldn't be firing people based off an admittedly inaccurate measure of performance.
You probably couldn't explain how you walk, or how you cook an egg, or how you speak English, at the level of detail that would be required for something like this. Yet you do know how to do all those things.
Just because you can't write down detailed objective instructions for how to do something does not at all mean you have no idea how to do it.
Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?
What's being asked for is accountability for decisions that can literally result in someone ending up homeless—and that are hugely subject to bias, both conscious and unconscious, in a country that is currently riven by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Maybe we're balancing the wrong side of the equation? Expanding teach-to-the-test across the economy strikes me as the wrong move.
This is a bit fallacious and a false analogy. Due process under law exists because it's definable. We have standards for evidence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, etc.
The challenges in cleanly defining what it means to be a "good employee" don't somehow mean other aspects of society that can be defined shouldn't be.
I think almost everyone has worked with someone who they know shouldn't be there, but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance". And yet they are clearly a huge anchor for the team, and everyone knows the team would be better off without them.
I wish we could perfectly evaluate what it means to be a good employee, and we could show the exact measurements used to do so. But this simply is not realistic, never has been, nor will it likely ever be. The spectrum of possible behaviors and the intricate interplay unique to various teams makes such a task impossible. I'm not saying an effort shouldn't be made, but that these decisions are often highly subjective, without much hope of arriving at something more objective.
I've worked at places that had stringent requirements for firing people. The net result was that good people all leave voluntarily instead of being stuck with the problem individuals, ultimately resulting in teams full of mediocre-to-awful teammates.
Managers can both know how to evaluate quality and fit while not having any hope of perfectly defining and documenting those evaluations. I'd rather work in an environment that has at-will employment with all of the downsides that come with that than a place that can't fire employees without spending a year creating a mountain of paperwork that ultimately doesn't get anyone much closer to the objectivity people are striving to achieve.
Remember that homework assignment or group project where you spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on not doing the work as intended in some silly way? This is the adult version of that.
The same with students who'd go to great lengths to cheat, rather than spend a few minutes learning the material.
I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss.
One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.
https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
https://routine.co/blog/what-is-the-prices-law-and-why-is-it...
All the actual work on Earth is performed by sqrt( 3,630,000,000 )[1] or:
~60,000 workers
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN
"Based on choosing the current estimates of Labor force, total"
...which is probably why you only see this stuff regurgitated in blog posts and right-wing Malcolm gladwell (Jordan Peterson is quoted as the source in one of your cited blog posts).
Either way, I'd be highly, highly suspect of parroting Price's "law" as a fact.
(I get stuff like Conway's law or Moore or Murphy are all also cited as laws, and I don't like that terminology either. "Conjecture" would fit so much better, save for Murphy's)
Even if the law were true regarding authorship, and applied to software, that still wouldn't show that the "valuable contributions" are only made by virtue of a small set of excellent contributors -- see "Matthew effect"
Have you only ever worked with reasonable management? The problem with quick to hire quick to fire is that eventually you might be quick to fire. I suspect you have a much higher level of security than most people to have quality of coworkers as a top priority!
Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.
It's also bad for the high performers, as working in the same team is bad: Having 3 great performers in a team means at least one, if not two are going to get a middling review. Everyone's behavior gets warped in ways that don't align well with what would be good for the company
And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.
Of course not. They fire people with different taste in music, or who don't listen enthusiastically to their complaints about other people, or who refuse them sexual favours, or...
if you can be fired "only for misconduct" and low performance doesn't count as misconduct means that you cannot be fired for low performance.
Granted, the actual demand might be more nuanced but going only by what was reported, they don't want to be fired for low performance.
Nobody has ever invented a working system for objectively rating software engineers. I really doubt NYT will be the ones to do so!
Disclaimer: this is only my opinion on where to work. I'm fully aware there are many other good reasons why management needs to document low performance.
Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.
It's incredibly hard to quantify "low-performing" for white-collar workers, because any measure is either easily gamed, actually creates roadblocks and bad incentives, or both.
Now companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire.
This is another one of those obvious "unintended" consequences. The harder it is to fire someone, the correspondingly harder it will be to get hired. Companies will be unwilling to "take a chance" on someone.
For comparison most French companies I've seen can hire an engineer within 3 interviews. I entered a company in the past in a single interview.
In comparison talking with an US company's HR, the plan was 4 rounds with a coding test, for an average of about a month to go through the whole process and there's still a probation period.
The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.
Mild issue with this. Mostly, cause it's a one size fits all. There's a certain kind of productivity worker that actually responds relatively well to that type of metric. That vagueness results in stagnation and analysis paralysis.
Those workers tend to actually respond better to what the game community almost considers the grind mindset. Give us a well defined hallway, with well defined tasks, and then we'll walk down the well defined hallway. It may not be "super creative" productivity, yet it's a "form" or "type" of productivity.
Part of the issue also, is a lot of the time, people seem to always want to be the Einstein of the company, and nobody really wants to deal with the day-to-day shit. It's simply not status enough, or management visible enough, or high-level content enough, or similar.
This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.
The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student.
(And yes, in spite of this, there are some gems of teachers.)
having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high.
it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly.
back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people.
when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district.
they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.
I read that teachers are fired at a lesser rate than doctors having their medical license revoked.
This should make it pretty easy to see how union strength affects firing rates (no, I don't happen to have the data on hand). IME schools tend to avoid firing teachers even when they easily could, in favor of pushing them out, because they don't want the bad press from a firing, so my guess is firing rates for teachers are low everywhere.
We might further hope to see whether union strength affects education quality, but there are too many confounders—the states with weak teachers unions tend to be red states and to have weak economies, either or both of which may have stronger effects on educational outcomes than union activity. But, on the specific question of the effect of teachers unions on teacher firing rates, we can maybe get something like a useful experiment out of these state-by-state differences.
I’d guess the rates remain low even with weak unions because schools are piss-pants scared of bad publicity, due to the public’s role in (indirectly) hiring and firing the top of their pyramid, and in allocating funding. But maybe I’m wrong and rates of firing are closer to whatever you consider a desirable rate, in states with weak unions. I did go looking, but couldn’t find datasets tackling that in particular. Frustrating, because with that we could get at least a strong hint of the actual effect of unions on this specific thing.
This is not because "it's hard to fire government workers" as often stated, but simply because government runs on a shoestring budget and cannot hire only good people.
Also because a shocking amount of people working in local government didn't realize Ron Swanson was a fucking satire character.
It appears we have stopped teaching Mythical Man Month in university.
Everyone who has interacted with a large company has met a more highly-paid negative-productivity employee than even the worst government worker.
> Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.
If managers aren't competent or motivated enough to follow a process, I sure as hell don't want those same managers firing people just on their say-so.
> This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers.
No, this is about making it harder for management to fire programmers who do pesky things like informing other employees of their rights, or refusing to work unpaid hours.
The problem with that is it's a subjective decision, not an objective one.
In every workplace I've been in, it was obvious to everyone who the low performers were. But it's nearly impossible to prove it.
Even if they could document it, it would take a year to document it, costing the company another $100,000 just to replace them.
There are also people who are technically performing but in practice but are jerks. And please don't start with "that's what HR is for" because I have never - not once - seen HR solve, or even significantly help, this sort of problem. Plus everybody hates dealing with them.
Just let people fire lousy workers man. This isn't that hard. Or, employees should push for employment contracts where the commitment is reciprocal: employers promise to keep them on for a few years and they promise to stay on for a few years.
"I should be able to work anywhere so long as it doesn't affect my performance..."
"Also don't judge me based on performance".
I think people need to be honest that WFH is as an argument is tightly integrated with merit.
Your union might protect you from termination on an assembly line, and at least they can move you around the facility or bring in extra workers. Or for a teacher they bring in more supervision and resources.
In contexts where unions have similar provisions, direct supervision is implied.
As a manager, I'd naturally want to retain the people who made me look good to my manager, regardless of my personal feelings.
Having a personal vendetta against particular employees has never happened in my experience, though it's been alleged a lot.
You're arguing on the side of the rentiers and parasites who do not work, and lecturing about "low performance".
It's the people doing the work's purview to discuss performance, not the parasites.
Anyway, no, that is not what they want.
I worked for a company once that was doing poorly, and management decided to do an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of my coworkers was livid with rage. I asked him why didn't he just quit and get another job? He said he didn't have any savings at all, and bills to pay. He had a mcmansion with expensive new furniture, new cars for himself and his wife, and expensive clothes. He had forged the chain connecting him to his desk - not the company's fault.
For example, my dad survived 32 missions over Germany. His group had 80% casualties. He had resigned himself to inevitable death. When he arrived home, he was amused by the trivial things people were stressed about. After all, they would survive to the next morning.
Thereafter, whenever he felt down, he'd think about what a golden opportunity he had to live, that his buddies did not have.
This morning, it was rainy and gloomy. In the afternoon, the sun came out and lit up the wet trees. It was spectacular. What a fine day to be alive.
I live in the Netherlands where these types of worker protections are enshrined in law, and I don't think I've ever encountered this boogeyman of the super low performing coworker that somehow ruins things for everyone else. News flash, low performance is still a valid reason for dismissal, it just has to actually be backed up by proof rather than being done on a whim because some manager has a vendetta.
Also, I don't give a shit how low performance my colleagues are as long as the useless managerial class exists. The laziest and most worthless people I've ever interacted with were always managers or manager-adjacent, never a regular employee.
I've worked with plenty of low performing ICs (as both peer and manager), and the trends are clear:
* companies that don't do, or don't do sufficient, technical interviewing
* employees with heavy worker protections, like in Germany.
I've also worked with fantastic German colleagues btw. But one reason they tended to get paid so much less is that they came with much, much higher risk, as they were essentially un-fireable. Even with imminently clear under performance you're looking at a year of PIPs, paperwork, and CYA bureaucracy.
Personally, I've found it more fulfilling to work in at-will places, for much higher wages, with more uniformly excellent colleagues. There's a reason so many of the best software engineers in the world make their way to the US.
One thing that I don't see being discussed here: If you add "just cause" to your employment contract, you are pretty much trading away future pay raises for security. That is fine, but it needs to be said out loud.
Lastly: I never heard the term "just cause" before this HN discussion. It sounds like a US-specific term. I learned more about it on Wiki here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law)
A ton of tech workers are, in fact, socialists who think job expectations should be 0.
That sounds like an anti-union stance to me.
There's no better time to strike than when your opponent can't afford to look bad.
I'm extremely anti-union principally because they drive up costs to consumers while yielding a product or service of at best comparable (but usually degraded) quality. Some easy examples are UAW destroying Detroit automakers or the recent dockworkers strike involving uneducated laborers demanding compensation ludicrously in excess of what even most people with master's degrees make, all to drastically under-perform equivalent workers from almost anywhere else in the world. To top it off, those same dockworkers zealously guard access to those highly lucrative jobs with some very questionable tactics.
When you drive by a highway construction project that doesn't progress for years or, worse, a horde of workers, most of whom appear to be doing absolutely nothing, there's a good chance that's union fuckery. When you go to almost any hotel in NYC and are treated with borderline disdain by highly incompetent staff while paying $500+ a night, that's union fuckery. When you wonder why you can't get cheap sufficiently high quality EVs like those from China, that's union fuckery. I could go on.
Unions are not comprised of saints. They're doing the same thing as the companies they despise: getting theirs while fucking over everyone else.
If a strike isnt painful for the employer, what incentive do they have to negotiate?
Siblings are doubting this, but you can think of it like price gouging. It's the right behavior for extracting maximum value, but it burns a lot of trust, and that's important for a long-term business arrangement. It's playing the short game when they should be playing the long game.
> The guild, which was formed in 2022, has yet to secure a contract after more than two years of bargaining.
Yes, heaven forbid the people doing all the work and creating all the wealth actually use their leverage against the heirs collecting NYT dividends.
According to the NY Times article, this was outlined and agreed to by the union on September 10th. So this is the poison pill because the agreement wasn't finished over the last 2 months.
Can we get a definitive list of weeks where workers’ rights are officially less important than $world_event? That way we can schedule our requests appropriately. We don’t want to inconvenience anyone.
There is a long list of organizations and governments that made worker's rights more important than inclusive democratic institutions, and it didn't work out for anyone, especially the workers.
Maybe any of the 207 weeks between presidential elections? Or any of the thousands of weeks when one of the running candidates has threatened the legitimacy of their institution directly?
There is no perfect time to strike, but I think other outlets can cover the typical:
- "huge lines in Pennsylvania!"
- "Polls close in [KEY SWING STATE] in 2 hours!"
- "Wow the whole west coast went blue, who would have thought!"
- "Shocker that one battleground is going into recount which will somehow last 4 weeks."
The point of a protest is to annoy you. Annoy you enough into action.
If I earn 200k a year, and my employer earns 1MM a year from my labor, why should I not protest for better work conditions, or more % of my labor? If my labor is valuable I should be able to capitalize on it as well.
A worker earning 20k who is making the employer 40k a year is earning a higher % of their labor value than someone making 200k earning 1M a year for the employer.
How would you or I know whether NYT earns 1MM a year from a striking worker or 100k?
You're just assuming that the labor's value is above the pay. Have you ever met a strike or labor action that you did not like?
- underpaid
- they fight tooth and nail for lack of accountability
- they get lots of fun benefits for overtime, so they make sure to arrest people so they can get overtime
I can't say one positive thing about the NYPD union, it is the "anti-accountability" union.
I think that protests are a risky move unless the general population is already sympathetic to the protesters' goals.
Those protests are to provoke people into physical violence. They are organized by a personal injury lawyer.
> Annoyance so that bystanders support the protesters' demands or annoyance so that bystanders act against the protesters out of spite?
People say a lot of shit, but actually doing an effort out of spite is work, if they do that, they probably think. This is how all protests work. The 1960s black rights protests would like to have a word with you regarding efficacy. :)
But the comment was clearly using sarcasm as an internet hammer, which is what that guideline is asking people not to do. It's bad for curious conversation, which is what we want here.
NYTimes has dragged out the negotiations for months, refusing to have a contract. It's kinda a make or break time for the union.
When would be better to strike, what time would NYTimes and the audience prefer? It should be during a choke point otherwise management wouldn't listen.
Additionally, this is a high traffic time, but not really a high stakes time I'd argue. They're not going to influence the election by going out day before or day of it, they will just lose viewership to others covering what's happening.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/25/workers-at-new-york-times-wire...
i think the point the parent is making is that a better time to strike would be when they have specific demands that management is able to meet - to get them to the negotiating table, or to get them to sign a contract.
but in the case where management is already at the negotiating table, and there's no contract to be signed, it's not clear what short-term goal a strike is meant to achieve. the only thing it does is cause hurt. Hurting management is going to make their negotiations more difficult. and hurting management in this specific way is not just hurting management, it's also alienating their journalist colleagues who should be their strongest allies in this fight.
It's just wild how management is able to unilaterally decide what is and isn't reasonable, and just label unions as childish.
"We want to help you, but you're hurting us!" is one small step away from "gosh we love the idea of unions but it causes too much friction between workers and management, and trust me, management knows best."
It's been a long time they've been trying to make a deal so it's disingenuous to say they're pulling the card early. Management refused to come to the table until recently.
They been saying that about 2.5 years now. They have clear demands that the management can just accept.
I'd agree with you if the situation suggested management were acting in good faith, but 6+ months to negotiate is them either not taking the union seriously or trying to wear them down and make union leadership look ineffective to members.
I love that the default ideology here is to side with the employer. I'm glad that when I am negotiating my salary with my employer, there are no comments from the Peanuts gallery.
I couldn't disagree more. The point of a strike is to demonstrate the value of your labor by withholding it. Withholding your labor in a slow week would be counterproductive. Strikes (just like any effective form of protest) are supposed to be inconvenient, so in saying what you said, you're really just expressing you don't like strikes. Having this blow up in election week is a risk the Times knowingly took in not meeting their workers' needs sufficiently, and drawing out the negotiations as long as they have. The guild is doing the right thing.
I'm not arguing they need to pick the slowest week, but striking a balance seems pretty reasonable and pretty standard for most other unions.
Teachers and health care workers try to be more careful because a bunch of vulnerable people (children, patients) with little to no say in anything about how their respective institutions run are heavily dependent on them. A single newspaper, even the NYT, isn't comparable.
If they had striked last week or the week before they'd have been accused of election interference. Striking this week hurts the Times because they run the risk of losing traffic from people trying to see results, but it doesn't impact the results at all. It's the best possible time to strike this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
I wonder how people who seem to care so much about politics don't spend any time reading about politics beyond rage bait headlines.
The NYT burning to the ground doesn't seem like a bad outcome if it will force people to use wikipedia which still has hyperlinks.
NYT not publishing sensationalist bullshit? While it's just one outlet out of countless many, the world will be that much more peaceful for but a short while.
It's only via third hand effects that the other party is actually affected, because the parents have to make the admin's life hard.
So teachers consider that their first duty is to the students. Also they are there to help the students to begin with.
Writing such content would be terrible, sounds like a great time to strike.
But it is probably a huge click-driver for NYT.
This actually is probably the best possible moment for a strike, in terms of inconveniencing NYT without harming coverage of important events.
You can't count on public sentiment for anything labor oriented in the US - corporations have owned the narrative for the last 40 years. The reason teachers unions avoid clashing is partially because they care about not effecting the kids as much as possible, and partially because they are already keeling over with states dropping the public school system.
What the public thinks is not particularly relevant, just like it's not relevant to my relationship with my manager.
The only time public sentiment is relevant from a strike is when the public's representatives can order you back to work. That's a risk for a teacher, or a railworker, but not for a newspaper tech.
You get that $70k in the big city school where those dollars do not go very far, while out in the boonies where a shitload of teaching is done, you make far, far, far less.
LCOL = low cost of living for anyone else who may need to look it up.
You would have this problem in any area where there is a lot money sloshing around, e.g. most cities in Switzerland. Unless you have some sort of rent control/social housing, or a lot of surplus market to satisfy a wide variety of demand, those people with money are going to simply outbid you.
They do not get 100 days of PTO. They get an hour per work week of PTO and a mandatory 2 month leave. You can't do anything with that leave because there is no simultaneous need for more workers for those two months in any other industry, so you are basically furloughed.
Keep in mind, the states that aren't killing education generally require serious credentials, like a 4 year degree, to make on average $70k a year.
This also completely ignores the mountains of unpaid work teachers do. Every single hour of homework they have to give out to ensure kids get the practice they need to internalize a lesson is at least an hour of grading work, and that's for the easy stuff like fill in the bubble tests that you can literally automate.
My mother regularly spent until 7pm working her teaching job, because that is what is required to be a good teacher.
So the company would be required to retain and pay deadwood, low productive people, and staff for obsoleted positions? That'll cripple any company over time.
If people demand those working conditions, they should get a government job.
They are so silly, why have the strike when you have the greatest leverage, they should wait with their strike until a more convenient moment when they could be easier ignored.
"NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems."
(https://bsky.app/profile/maggieastor.bsky.social/post/3la4qg...)
Time and space is strategic. If you have a unionized workforce without a contract or productive negotiations in progress ahead of a critical time, you’re rolling the dice.
That's the whole point of strikes. If you do them when they are less painful, there's no point in doing them. And in this case, is not like the public doesn't have dozens of other options to consume during election week.
> there's not a clear button the Times can push on behalf of the union to end the strike immediately. The Times would either have to sign a blank check to the union now
But that's the thing, NYT Leadership can choose to offer agreeable terms and end this now. They simply elect not to. Management often likes to drag out negotiations and then play the victim.
> This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out.
One thing I have observed over the years, no matter what are the core issues, it is "never a good time" to strike as a union. I see this sentiment repeated over and over again (over decades!) by anti-unionists.
> there's not a clear button the Times can push on behalf of the union to end the strike immediately
I’m not disagreeing with you but I’m not sure this form of argument-by-esoteric-fact accomplishes your goals. Maybe I’m just uninformed, but as an uninformed reader, I’m not inclined to believe you. Present it as novel information and not something hilarious obvious, and you would probably have won at least one supporter.
Also, according to Wiki, IG Metall is <<the dominant metalworkers' union in Germany, making it the country's largest union as well as Europe's largest industrial union.>> I did some Google searches to find last few negotiations. It normally takes a couple of months. 2.5 years (NYT) is just... well... insane.
Hard disagree. They're exerting what little leverage they have. Also there's plenty of places to get reliable election coverage besides NYT so who cares?
Also, fyi for others. Many public libraries have NYT daily access codes you can use for free. It’s a bit of a pain to have to renew each day you want to read NYT but is still great to have.
Having a gift link is even more convenient.
NYT is a great publication and I'm happy to pay less than a $1 a day for tons of great content.
We pay for the library, and the library pays for an access license. NYT gets paid.
Gift articles are sent by subscribers … who pay.
> I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere until the workers get a deal.
It would be nice if this could be replaced with a non-NYT link.
The guild said it was asking readers to honor its digital picket line by not playing Times Games products, such as Wordle, and not using the Cooking app.
Times management said in an email to workers on Sunday that it had offered a 2.5 percent annual wage increase, a minimum 5 percent pay increase for promotions and a $1,000 ratification bonus. It also said that the company would maintain its current in-office work requirements of two days a week through June 2025, while allowing employees to work fully remotely for three weeks per year.
What is not clear? The article tells that the issues are contention around return to office policies (as your quote tells, change is planned for July) and wanting a “just cause” provision.
Eg if they said we haven't had a pay rise for ten years, that would provide context.
Nothing in the article gives a justification for a strike. That's not to say the justification doesn't exist but it's not remotely elucidated.
If an agreement can't be made... Oh well.
Is it reasonable to tell your factory worker employees that they have to be at the factory at certain times? Yes, that's reasonable because these workers must be physically there.
Using broad words like "employees" and "employment" simplifies your thinking.
BTW why people create a new accounts just to furiously comment all over pretty basic topics like this? Are you really that ashamed of your own opinions (which are still anonymous) or you feel your employer may trace you back? Or NYT employee?
- the tech is there to offer this kind of work. It's not that NYT is somehow special about this
- it's better for the employees. Would we be in favour of companies asking to work 80h/week as a normal thing? Would we be in favour of companies asking to work 6 days per week? Maybe 100 years ago, but in 2024 the answer is (or should be) no. Why? Because we as employees have gained some rights over the last decades to make things better for ourselves. WFH is one more right in that list and shouldn't be taken as a privilege
I'm amazed by the people who are bashing against WFH. This is not about the free market, this is about moving the human race in the right direction.
Yet, strangely, your list doesn't contain any rights. Employers absolutely can ask you to work 80 hours per week / six days per week if they so choose (with assumptions about you being an average US resident; obviously jurisdictions can vary). You have the right to a higher rate of pay after a certain number of hours (with some exceptions) if you accept, but that's something quite different.
> WFH is one more right in that list
While rights can have exceptions, when those excepted are greater in numbers than than those eligible... Good luck! The right to higher pay if you work on location seems more politically tenable, but isn't that already priced in anyway?
And do you think it is possible that a lot of people just don't agree with you (maybe because you are wrong)?
You think it's reasonable to hire someone remotely, then later forcibly relocate them to another, more expensive city, with no compensation? Because that's what's happened here.
In jurisdictions with stronger labor laws, that is not only not reasonable, but outright illegal (constructive termination).
By the normal definition, it's a reasonable thing for an employer to want, and a reasonable thing for an employee to not want.
But if we're treating "reasonable" and "strikeworthy" as opposites, then sure it can be "unreasonable".
That wouldn't provide any kind of justification either, though. All it might indicate is that they desire more pay, just as we know here that they desire a different policy around remote work and desire a “just cause” provision.
And it seems that is the motivation – simply that they want it. Which is all the justification that is needed. One does not have to work if they don't want to. It is up to the NYT to decide if it wants to compel them to or not.
I love working from home, but its just a non-guaranteed perk that can go away anytime and eventually it will, and companies shouldn't break their backs to accommodate people. There is free job market to match one's expectations, triple especially in places like New York.
I really, really don't get folks who setup their lives in the middle of nowhere to save some bucks and then they complain that world and work doesn't come to their doorstep. You took the risk in maybe unclear situation, you bear the consequences if the risk doesn't pan out your way.
Why isn't the inverse equally true? That workers shouldn't have to break their back to accommodate a change in company policy?
> You took the risk in maybe unclear situation, you bear the consequences if the risk doesn't pan out your way.
Again, I think this is equally true going the other way. Companies allowed their workers to move away from the office, why don't they assume any risk that workers won't want to return?
I get that there needs to be a balance of power, but I don't understand why any request from the company is valid by default and any request by workers is somehow an imposition that the workers need to justify. Why isn't the company asked to justify why workers need to RTO?
Well, we do know the state of New York offered the NYT (among others) tax incentives/subsidies earlier in the year. I can't imagine the state of New York will be happy if the workforce works from New Jersey (or Texas). Calling upon the workers to work in New York gives the state the economic activity it expects in return for the subsidies it offered.
But does that make any difference to the workers? If they want to work remotely, whatever reason the NYT has is not their problem.
Okay, but that's what they are doing. They can't work there anymore under the current situation, so they have accepted that their risk didn't bear fruit and are now no longer working for the NYT. Consequences bore.
They have graciously extended an opportunity to the NYT for it to reconsider the current state before the workers walk away for good. Accepting risk doesn't mean you can't still be cordial. At this point they are still willing to go back if the conditions allow them to. But if the NYT in the end says "no, we don't need you anymore, it is time for us to close up shop", so be it.
"Perk" is another way of saying "working conditions". They are bargaining over salary, benefits, and working conditions. Therefore, it's on the table.
Whether or not the bargaining workers are responsible (or even sympathetic) with their private living arrangements is not part of the negotiations, and so it doesn't materially matter.
The workers are not "owed" WFH, but neither is the paper "owed" RTO. They have to bargain over it. One side, or likely both sides, will have to give somewhere on the basket of issues they are bargaining over. Maybe the paper loses on this, but gets something else they want like lower salary. Or maybe workers are willing to RTO if they get some kind of commute allotment (pay for their gas/metrocard/whatever).
The bargaining is holistic, over the whole contract terms. The process is not simply that they go item by item and try to convince each other to change their minds. The process is that they bargain the entire package until they are both OK with accepting it.
I think this is the key to the question. We should start seeing WFH as a right rather than as a perk. Just like the dozens of other rights we have gained over the years. If it were for the companies, we would still be working 6 days/week, 80h/day with little or no vacation/sick/parental days. I'm sure those rights were considered normal in the past but not anymore.
This isn’t taking away free coffee, this is a significant altering of the employment. It’s no different than moving everyone in a location to a completely different office on a whim.
Your comment is pretty tone deaf in that it is essentially “I really, really don’t get folks who setup their lives to live in a specific location”. The same thing is happening for people in cities and it has nothing do with middle of nowhere.
> I love working from home, but its just a non-guaranteed perk that can go away anytime and eventually it will,
So is getting paid more than minimum wage and getting extra days off. What a non-argument.
The linked article is the New York Times writing about a strike _against_ the New York Times. Factor this into your assessments.
But factor in how? (rhetorical question) Understanding bias well cannot simply reduce to a high-school debate style of tallying arguments for and against. First, there are more than two sides. Second, reasoning under uncertainty (with probabilities) is essential. Third, the best way for humans to reason requires getting the complexity out of your head. So one way or another, if you want to win [1], you have write down your model (we're not yet doing this here, but at least we're laying out some of the moving parts).
Anyhow, I'm not making a "final" assessment of overall bias; I'm trying to (a) expand discussion of the moving parts and (b) promote a rational and probabilistic approach here.
[1] "Rationality is Systematized Winning" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARtkT3EYox3THYjF/rationalit... but consider the counterpoint at "Rationality !== Winning" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3GSRhtrs2adzpXcbY/rationalit...
Anyone expecting their salaries to get a raise to make up for the 2022 inflation are in for a rude surprise.
Still quite extraordinary, though I'm not sure how long they had already been at their current rates, so maybe less impressive? Not really sure.
Then a promotion raise that constitute only 2 years of yearly base raises seems pretty lacking to me since a promotion generally comes with increased responsibilities and higher standards.
I've worked as a developer for companies outside of big tech who complain all day long about the fact that they can't compete with big tech on compensation while they hemorrhage engineers to big tech. I'm sure NYT does the same. No amount of moaning about this will change the fact that they are directly competing with these companies for talent.
I'm not anti-union at all and see them as necessary in certain types of jobs (I hope the Boeing Machinist's Union guts Boeing), but I have no interest in being a part of a union as a developer because it seems like collective bargaining just ends up locking everyone into the level of salary/career progression of the lowest common denominator.
The NYT's latest offer is shit compared to what the employees are asking.
Perplexity CEO offers to replace striking NYT staff with AI
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/04/perplexity-ceo-offers-to-r...
Additionally NYTimes benefits from huge networks effects – both in that they are a comprehensive source of (reasonably) reliable journalism which attracts lots of readers but also that they know lots of sources. It also helps that it's one of the better newspapers around (probably second to the FT).
Because in the article, there's only a tweet of him saying that Perplexity is "on standby to help", of which "offering to replace striking staff with AI" seems a pretty strong mischaracterization.
Update: The headline (but not the URL) was just changed to "Perplexity CEO offers AI company’s services to replace striking NYT staff" (emphasis mine).
That sounds liking replacing striking staff to me, at least for the duration of the election. What other services of value except LLMs to write articles does Perplexity have to offer to the New York Times?
That's my read too, but they could also e.g. lend them some engineers, have them build an election dashboard for them etc.
The fact that that would still be crossing the picket line, how realistic any of that is, or how genuine the offer, are all great questions/observations, but "replace with AI" seems like a quite dishonest editorialization in any case.
The only way having AI write articles would help is if it freed up working staff to help out with tech stuff-—which they said they won’t do.
> Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch’s post on X saying that “the offer was not to ‘replace’ journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day.” The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It’s not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question. (However, in response to the clarification, we have opted to change the headline to reflect the claim that this offer was not necessarily specific to AI services.)
> Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.”
it's absolutely scab behavior
They're using AI as smokescreen for anti-labor practices, as all AI tech executives are.
Who is claiming that in this thread, the linked Techcrunch article, or the tweet quoted in that article?
And even if the Perplexity CEO in particular, or AI tech executives generally were to make that claim elsewhere: Misquoting somebody to strengthen a point like that immediately and significantly reduces my trust in a source.
Also, I'd say that the fact that Techcrunch just changed the headline speaks for itself.
But this notion is definitely rolling around in the heads of these people, even if they won't say so because it's bad optics. What a CEO/executive says and what they believe and what they do are three very different things. You often cannot trust their weasel words.
But as for "the PerplexityAI CEO didn't say "with AI" in those words!!!"... how else exactly would an AI company help out with striking workers without their product of AI? That is an obvious subtext unsaid.
I'm just pointing out that "offering to help" does equal "offering to help with AI". Sure, it's somewhat heavily implied by context, but journalistic integrity means making it clear what's an implication and what somebody actually said.
TechCrunch even seems to agree: They changed the headline retroactively.
(comment below from author https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42046177)
New York Times Tech Guild Walks Off the Job
https://nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off...
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/4/24287600/new-york-times-t...
I dunno. It is a negotiation between the union and the company. They might not have prepared much marketing material because they aren’t really selling anything to those of us in the general public, right?
But I think appealing to the general public is a tool in the toolset, something they consider, but not an automatic go-to. Ultimately, the NYT tech guild doesn’t actually want the general public to think their boss is a “bad guy,” right? Like, getting the general public to boycott their employer too effectively is a risk to their own paychecks, haha.
It seems like economists do consider this to be one of the big reasons why the U.S. economy has grown so much faster than the EU. Hiring in Europe is much riskier, so companies would rather stay small.
Yes, that means some companies might go under when they could have saved themselves by mass layoffs. I'd be okay with that trade.
Yes, that means growth might slow down to more reasonable levels. I'd be okay with that trade. Europe isn't booming economically like the US, but if you've ever traveled there, their quality of life seems perfectly fine, and costs are much lower.
This would be an extreme understatement.
> but if you've ever traveled there, their quality of life seems perfectly fine
I'm not sure if traveling there is much of an indicator of anything. Doing business there over the course of many years might be a very basic table stakes start to get any idea of what is happening. Even then it will have large blind spots. Most folks traveling to Europe are also traveling to the richest parts of the richest countries and ignoring the rest.
Inertia is a hell of a drug. For how much longer can western Europe stagnate and continue to fall behind the entire world little by little? There are bright spots, but those seem to becoming fewer and further in between. Talk with the younger generations and you may start to get different answers than you expect.
The US system certainly isn't how I'd design things today, but I very much would avoid what the EU is seemingly running headlong into. How much of that has to do with worker protection laws is certainly highly debatable though.
Relevant skill could be proper cause. You can absolutely fire someone for not having the skills you need and hire someone else with the right skillset.
Depending on the laws and the country, it involves consultations, handing out offers for alternative roles in the company, mandatory notice periods and timelines, and severance pay.
Or what many multinationals do, you offer non-legally-redundancy severance deals by paying the employees out.
Severance already happens in many industries in the US, however it’s generally only for those paid very well, which arguably need the legal protections less. So such laws are designed to level the play field and prevent abuse of the system. For instance, if you make an accountant redundant, you can’t go and hire another one for a period of time because that means the role was required the whole time. If you want to remove a specific person from a role, you fire them for cause (say bad culture fit or inadequate work) or offer them a payout to leave.
So these protections are always tradeoffs. You can actually earn more at the smaller companies and those places are typically good to get your foot in the door. The larger companies where these protections apply can afford to follow the process and having the process there gives stability that some people need in a career.
I actually think it comes down to the viewpoints on careers. There's no risk to any particular business since the laws are written to only target business that can reasonably follow the process. There is a different viewpoint on working at bigger stable companies vs smaller companies though. One's seen as a stable career and the others seen as temporary (of course exceptions apply).
FWIW, it looks like 11 US states have “Implied covenant-of-good-faith and fair dealing” which mean “an employee may only get fired for a reasonable, lawful, and sufficient reason.” The list is also interestingly bipartisan, Alabama, Utah, and Massachusetts are on there. And it must not hurt business too much, since Massachusetts has that very high GDPPP stat.
https://clockify.me/learn/business-management/at-will-employ...
There are shades of grey. Large institutions should fall back on other means (reduced hours, pay cuts, comfortable severance, longer heads-up for firing) before resorting to overnight-mass-layoffs.
> why the U.S. economy has grown so much faster than the EU
Again, shades of grey.
The economy is a means to an end. If economic growth leads to worse life-outcomes for the populace, when what's the point of having a 'powerful economy'. Now, govt. policies shouldn't knee cap the economy. But, let's not tunnel vision on it as the sole indicator of development.
In my experience, Europeans with a $80k wage live better lives than American tech workers on $300k. To put in concrete light : most American tech workers get 14 days of vacation a year. All that work and all that money, and you only get to enjoy 2 weeks a year in the world's richest country ? That's pathetic.
As a foreigner, do not forget that USA have several government layers, federal ones and state ones.
I strongly suspect that, as usual in discussions like this, by “foreigner” you specifically mean “European” or “Canadian” or “Australian”.
The US is surely not alone in having a relative lack of legally mandated job security.
Sure places like Saudi have literal slavery, but they don't pretend to value life either.
NYT isn't a highly regulated interstate employer like Boeing or the rail industry or the dockworkers so it's dispute with the union isn't a de-facto matter of national politics like those strikes were so appealing to the public to have a particular opinion on the matter is not of as much use therefore neither side of this dispute has invested heavily in it.
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4747313-remote-work-b...
The research backs up all the good things that have come out of remote working since at least the pandemic started. Everything is great, employees do better work and the employer gets better work done. Which was never in doubt if you look at research and metrics.
The kerfuffle about remote being bad only has the stated negative of something about "culture" according to every company that is forcing people off of remote work.
What they don't tell you is
1: the company wants to shift their tax burden to workers from local governments.
2: It is impacting the Commercial Real-estate that the leadership team and board members are getting paid for, on the back end, for leasing office spaces back to the company.
Further:
3: The company is already or will be soon opening a remote team office in Hydrabad, so they are already going to lose #1 and #2 and still not have a decent culture.
FWIW, layoffs are regulated differently from firings.
That seems... fine? In most transaction neither party needs to give "just cause" to terminate a contract. Imagine having to give documentation to move out of your current apartment, for instance. Getting fired is disruptive to someone's finances that some notice/severance would be justified, but "you have to give just cause" (which in practice, means multiple formal write-ups and several months of PIP, even in places without a union contract) seems excessive.
>> That seems... fine? In most transaction neither party needs to give "just cause" to terminate a contract.
You like having a sword over your neck at all times that an employer can just swing and take away your salary and your health insurance for any reason at all?
>Getting fired is disruptive to someone's finances that some notice/severance would be justified
> but "you have to give just cause" (which in practice, means multiple formal write-ups and several months of PIP, even in places without a union contract) seems excessive.
You still said requiring "just cause" is excessive. So you still want an "at-will" sword over your head.
That sword is still going to be over your head regardless of at will employment. You could be laid off (no cause needed), the company goes bankrupt, or you become disabled. Where do you draw the line? If you don't want to accept "sword over your head" for firings, why would you accept it for layoffs?
Is your manager going to disable your body? How is this even remotely close to a manager being able to fire you for whatever? You're just ignoring the whole "at-will".
I'm not talking about a "sword" of any possible negative thing happening to you. Why not bring up asteroids? Or another plague? Or just suddenly a REAL sword beheads me? THe "sword" is solely the at-will. Learn how metaphors work.
> It's fine to argue "people should be shielded from the risk of losing their income/healthcare", but you can't arbitrarily decide when it's fine to apply that principle.
You keep deleting key parts, like "people should be shielded from the risk of losing their income/healthcare from manager's whims". It's not arbitrary.
And a layoff aren't caused by "manager's whims"?
2. Layoffs are usually a less common occurrence than firing people. While the US sucks at labor laws in general, there's at least the WARN act for mass layoffs
3. Layoffs are when multiple people are let go at the same time, which is a distinct category from firing a single person
4. Hence there are often separate negotiations and separate clauses in the union contracts regarding firing a single person (one category) and laying off multiple people (a separate category)
Why the hell you're arguing (in extremely bad faith) against labor protections is beyond anyone's understanding
>Why the hell you're arguing (in extremely bad faith) against labor protections is beyond anyone's understanding
I'm not sure why you're focusing so hard on the "no severance/compensation" part, when from the start I said that "some notice/severance would be justified". Is it because I said that at-will employment "seems... fine?", and you can't get over that, despite my subsequent statements?
Until we get to the bottom of this, I don't think it's worth it for me to engage with any of your other points.
Your argument sucks at base level.
You lose your income in both cases, and I said I'd support severance/notice period for firings. I don't see how the two are materially different.
Yet you keep insisting that somehow at-will employment with immediate termination is somehow good.
I'm not sure how you got that impression. My original comment:
>Getting fired is disruptive to someone's finances that some notice/severance would be justified,
Edit: removed my reply in favor of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42046204
I would hate it to have an "at-will" contract. Just thinking that my manager or his manager or whoever can just fire me the very same day because of who knows what is just awful.
It is not mandatory to sit on your old job for 3 months.
If someone wants to fire me, I hope they find it easy.
Wut?
How does "you cannot be fired on the spot for no reason" prevent them?
At the very least, getting fired is a sign of no confidence from your boss.
It's not such an issue for me now that I have a fair bit of experience, but if I was fresh out of university it would be harder to convince an employer to take a risk.
Also severance is a thing.
> Also severance is a thing.
Indeed it is. Not in the US though
---
The absolute delusion Americans live in never ceases to amaze me. I'm surprised China came up with 996, not the US, and that the US didn't immediately adopt it with the masses cheering it on.
Not every delusion that Americans have is enlightenment.
I know that an online form makes it easy to just position yourself as correct, but you're arguing against reality.
1. You could make similar arguments about consumers being qualified to determine product quality. Are retailers dumbasses for wasting money accepting returns?
2. When it comes to hiring/firing decisions, perception of competence is as important (if not more so), as actual competence (if you can even define that). No manager is going to be assuaged by "well actually, you're pretty bad at determining competence, so you should be glad that we're requiring you to file a bunch of paperwork before you can fire someone".
>There's no evidence that it makes "finding a job more difficult". There are entire swaths of this earth that have the framework that we're talking about and their job markets are just fine.
New hires rate in Europe (with famously stronger labor protections) is around 10% per year in 2022. US meanwhile is more than 4% per month.
https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/skills-intelligence/r...
The unemployment rate in Europe is 6% vs. 4% in the US. I find that some evidence that it's at least a little more difficult.
In other words, one side will win, or both will compromise. It's just another contract negotiation, like any other between two parties. Unions are allowed to do it with businesses, just like businesses are allowed to do it among themselves. This is literally the ruling ideology of the West and has been for generations, but somehow when a union takes advantage of it, that's radical marxism.
Very rare in the US
They way it usually works is there is a probationary period that you can fire someone under for any reason (usually 90 days), but after that, supposedly you're more protected.
That said, in practice, it doesn't really prevent you from being part of a layoff or anything. You'll just get more notice and complaints.
If you fire some because they are a bad employee in some well defined way, that's a completely different situation.
Your argument is in fact that exact same one that was used to argue against due process in legal proceedings. "In reality it doesn't play out and you get this group of criminals running free on legal technicalities."
If you are in a union shop and have a large contingent of unproductive employees, it happens for the same reason as non-union shops. You have bad management. Just Cause is almost entirely asking management to do a little paperwork and a little planning, things that are supposed to be their job anyway.
Dumb comparison. Losing a job is not the same as losing a legal action. You can’t just go get a different life if you’re convicted of robbery.
> it happens for the same reason as non-union shops. You have bad management.
No, sometimes employees are just bad and work the system to keep the job as long as possible with no intention of improving.
We’ve seen a ton of automation and offshoring for centuries now but employment around the world just keeps improving.
>Dumb comparison. Losing a job is not the same as losing a legal action. You can’t just go get a different life if you’re convicted of robbery.
Because, as you just admitted, you can't just go get a different job if you're unfairly fired.
- in a thriving environment, lots of companies are hiring
- some people quit or get fired, and it takes a couple of months to get a new job. This is no biggie in a country where the median individual has a net worth of 192k. [0] (yet another argument in favour of a thriving business environment).
- so some % of people will always be temporarily unemployed.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/average-americans-net-worth-871....
Loll, youre a pretty funny person. No biggie, ill just sell my house to feed myself.
You conveniently ignore the fact that this is the median family net worth, not individual net worth. Further, this will include retired families, who will have access to social security, medicare, and mature 401k/pension plans. This is not anywherenearthe median net worth of a working individual.
If youre going to quote statistics, please at least do so responsibly.
The point is that the comparison to due process is shockingly stupid. If the government imprisons you, you are done. Your life in civilization is over for the duration of your incarceration and you have no other options.
Anyone who thinks due process against the monopoly of violence is the same as due process for a payment from a company is completely tone deaf and has never dealt with the impact of government imprisonment.
Being unemployed indefinitely is far better than imprisonment.
It's a legal requirement in many parts of the world.
I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere until the workers get a deal.
The Times Workers are holding the line against arbitrary return to office mandates and for Just Cause protections. The vast majority of HN consists of developers, designers, QA, and PMs who stand to gain from a successful movement to win these rights.
If enough people fight for the recognition of their need and desire to work from home, enough to enshrine it in some legal norms or at least in widely accepted and expected practices in the industry, WFH may become a right. This is how 40-hour work weeks became a right, or collective bargaining became a right, etc.
It became a standard in the US, but is not a right. And while the idea of the 40-hour work week did, indeed, come from labour groups, it was the Great Depression needing effort to try and compel businesses to hire more workers, not the fight of workers, that pushed to see it become a standard.
It wasn't a sudden bout of benevolnce from the FDR administration, or from anyone in the management or government.
Was there something to suggest it was? Getting workers back working isn't for the benefit of workers.
Also a reminder that just a few years ago, CEOs thought remote work was good, everyone was productive, and they didn't see how they wanted to force everybody back. No, it's not a privilege, it's just how you get work done.
I think it's fair to point out that progressive worker rights acquisition would initially always be a small case minority context (vs the vast majority that would lack those rights).
In the distant past almost everyone in the world lacked xyz worker rights.
I'd call it a perk or benefit. It's like health insurance or vacation time. You may not have a right to it, but it's upsetting when you lose it.
When an employer takes away something you have a right to, you don't strike, you sue.
I'm not going back to having to bring earmuffs and blast music all day just to have any hope of getting anything done, I'm not starting a commute, and I'm not sacrificing lunches with my kids for some executive's opinion about how I ought to collaborate most effectively.
Meanwhile in the early 20th century:
> They're striking over a weekend? I work five days a week and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right
Like, this is generally how it goes; workers' rights are generally won, not granted by divine authority.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day_movement
In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organised the 1835 Philadelphia general strike, the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.[37] Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.
I believe that the value from WFH varies a lot from person to person.
If you were working from the office before and the company changed to a WFH policy, you might see it as a nice to have. You already made some life choices to accommodate going to the office. Maybe you even go to the office anyway.
But, if you were hired when the company already had WFH, you probably made some life choices based on that (buying a house far away from the city, having kids, not buying a car,...). In that case, mandatory RTO is a complete disaster (especially with the housing crisis) and you pretty much have no option other than resigning.
I assume NYT was doing WFH since ~2020, so a lot of employees probably took decisions based on WFH, therefore the strikes.
Other folks have already pointed out the "rights" unions have fought for that we take for granted today. On top of that, being in a union is about solidarity with your fellow workers. You can support your coworkers' who need or just want to work from home. This should be easy, since it would affect you in approximately zero ways. They'll have your back for fighting for Just Cause protections.
If it is arbitrary, why is the NYT seemingly standing firm on the issue? As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
Perhaps you mean they are striking against mandates that are motivated by undisclosed reasons?
You'll have to ask NYT management if you're curious why they're doing something. I can venture a guess though. A lot of companies use RTO mandates as a way to avoid layoffs (and the negative press and severance requirements that come with them). This seems to go hand in hand with the demand for "just cause".
As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
This doesn't follow.
I don't have to ask them anything if they are truly doing it arbitrarily. That's the answer.
But the question is if you are confusing "arbitrary" with "not knowing". Which is I guess I am to take that the answer is yes, that you are confused, since you admit to not knowing – which means you can't know that it is arbitrary.
How did you end up so confused?
> This doesn't follow.
If it is arbitrary, why not institute it today on a whim (strike notwithstanding)? Why wait? This indicates that there is planning involved, which suggests that it isn't arbitrary. It does not prove it without a doubt, but when playing the odds…
You're aware that NYC is an extremely expensive place to live, right?
Not in a position to help you guys in any way, but fight the good fight against the mythology of the grand collaborative campfire that apparently happens in-office.
I find your suggestion that I should consider the trust I've built with their news division destroyed on this day of all days ridiculous and irresponsible, especially given the fact that the timing of the strike was chosen to hurt me extremely badly if I should feel morally obligated to follow your advice
While I wholeheartedly support their legal right to organize, I am not required to celebrate at the cynicism of attempting to undermine faith in democracy to win a better job
You're being melodramatic. There are piles of news sources to choose from, absent NYT. And that assumes it falls over due to the strike, although it seems likely they need workers on hand to do ops.
But with there being such a strong probability that there will be coordinated far-right attempts to undermine faith in our system of elections tomorrow, I do really do think of tomorrow as a kind of holy day for democracy that is not acceptable to use as bargaining chip.
Nothing about an election where only the votes of people in 7 states out of 50 matter can possibly be "holy" for democracy.
I don't need the far-right to undermine faith in our system of elections; I'm not far-right and have never had any faith in it to begin with.
Election day, assuming that is what you are referring to, is the least important day in democracy. It is every day after the person is hired, when you stay on top of them and communicate your expectations to them, when democracy happens.
I’m not gonna support your cynical anti-union, anti-worker policy of blaming everything on the part of the workers while dismissing the management side with a “I don’t doubt it”.
Two can play this game.
Also, there are more than one reputable news source. This protest isn't going to hurt you
Not having this solved well ahead of time speaks poorly of NYT overlords. My trust in NYT has deteriorated quite a bit over the years :(
A few sincere questions:
1. Are there no other news sources that you'd trust to convey the binary of 'who won the election?'
2. Assuming that there aren't, what negative effect would there be to you from not knowing the result of the election for a few days?
I'm sorta hoping that "hurt me extremely badly" is an exaggeration for effect. If not I'd suggest getting some perspective.
Unless you sincerely think there's going to be widespread political violence in your specific area, knowing about what's going on in at this exact moment is honestly as much about entertainment as anything else. And if you need local news, the NYT is typically not the best place.
I'm as guilty of rubbernecking as anyone, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that boycotting my favorite news source for a few days would be extremely damaging to me.
You're talking about Jan 6 like it was just some minor scuffle. And I agree that it did not ultimately amount to more than that, but do not forget that at the time there were two live bombs on the ground, we were in a constitutional crisis, the president seemed to be hoping that if he maintained silence his supporters would carry out a forceful takeover of the government which he assured them would be righteous in his view.
The fact that there was not more escalation had a lot to do with how many people were watching closely, as well as with the actions of a few individuals like Mike Pence and Brad Reffensperger who, at the most important moments, decided that their duty was to all Americans and not just to one man.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the rubberneckers (myself included) who were following it from moment to moment on the other side of the country.
Some small percentage of the watchers are in a place to actually do something about it, and if that's you then fine. Most of us don't need to know on the day of, we've just grown accustomed to knowing, and it's probably honestly a net negative for the world that we do follow things that are outside of our control so closely.
The opinions of the people who are comfortable sitting by while the conspiracy "steals the election" (or more likely, the astrotufed reactions put forward by sockpuppets of the conspirators themselves) don't matter by the time you get to the point of invading the US capitol.
Trump was being cynical, but the insurrectionists themselves were just nuts. They couldn't have cared less what Twitter thought.
... and in no small part due to the actions of police officer Eugene Goodman [1], who diverted away the incoming rioters with about 60 seconds or so to spare - had he not done that, the mob would likely have been able to take hostages.
It was sheer fucking luck and a couple of very VERY brave individuals that kept the death count of Jan 6th in the single digits (at least if one excludes the police officers committing suicide in the months after).
What the shit does it help the Capital police if there is some sort of coup attempt and you watch it on TV? Does that really save America somehow? People are so desperate to be bystanders to things they could have prevented by making better choices months earlier.
(There actually are strikes which are consciously run on this basis, but mostly only in the most safety-critical fields.)
Like, it's not as if the NYTimes was unaware that it'd be a big news week; you should probably be blaming management more than anyone else here.
Watching a car crash, totally outside of your control in real time is not healthy. Skip the will they / won't they and find something healthier to do with the 24 hours or so of uncertainty.
Like just ask chatgpt or your dog to make something up that sounds contemporary and newsy. Same quality level.
These days news publications generally have a pretty weak business model and a lot of competition. Does it still make sense to have a union in this case? Why?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/04/new-york-times-nyt-q3-earnin...
> Total revenue of $640.2 million was in line with estimates of $640.8 million, as digital advertising thrived.
> Adjusted profit was 45 cents per share.
There are 164,540,000 shares outstanding.
That gives a profit of $74,043,000
They have 5900 employees for a profit per employee per quarter of $12,550
While yes, they are profitable this doesn't suggest that there is a lot of room between profit, pay raise per employee and net loss for the company.
Contrary to perhaps popular misconception, if the business is unprofitable, unions aren't going to demand a larger piece of a disappearing pie. If there isn't money to be paid out, there's nothing to fight over. Leading a union or negotiating for a union does not fundamentally turn you into an unreasonable person at the negotiating table.
The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.
For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].
This article[0]from 404 said it well.
>Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.
I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.
0 https://www.404media.co/the-billionaire-is-the-threat-not-th... 1: https://fair.org/home/conspiracies-pushed-by-atlantics-edito... 2: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-198-how-the-atlan... 3: https://fair.org/home/nyts-campus-free-speech-coverage-focus... 4: https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
Really? I don't believe this at all. I have not seen a properly edited published piece online in over a decade, and it continues to get worse. From obvious spelling errors and sentence fragments to full blown loss of coherent thoughts. The obviousness of multiple contributors' work being mashed together with the same information being repeated multiple times within the piece clearly shows that no editor is looking over the work at all. No editor worth their salt would allow that kind of work.
I don’t think this is the outlook of an ally.
I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website and get management to the table.
This is why we all need unions.
Unions cannot cause intentional or malicious destruction of their workplace.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme...
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.
Especially with a huge election tomorrow.
And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
I didn't meant to imply they would or should sabotage anything.
It's possible we'd hire junior engineers locally for the offshore roles if we went fully local, but there's zero chance that we could offshore any of our existing onshore roles. This is for a few reasons:
1. Data law compliance. We can't let people outside the US see PII, which precludes them from participating fully in many support roles, including rotations within engineering.
2. Time zone differences are huge. We have some developers in Eastern Europe who we love, but coordinating their work with the roles that we can't offshore is substantially trickier than local employees. At a certain point it's more rational to pay higher salaries for US-timezone employees.
3. Cultural differences get in the way. It's far easier for a product person or a designer to get an idea across to someone with shared cultural context, so there are fewer back and forth iterations when there are US employees on a project than when there aren't. For the same reason we can't offshore design roles since we're serving a US market, so that doesn't work as a solution.
4. There's substantial difficulty in filtering for quality. We have some offshore contractors who've been with us for years, but we've struggled whenever we tried to add new ones. Hiring is always hard but it's particularly hard when you're either doing it indirectly through a contracting company or doing it yourself across cultural barriers.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, when we're doing offshoring through contracting companies who take a share of the fee, the difference in cost versus a US employee is much less significant. And if we're not using a contracting company then we're on the hook for figuring out the tax situation ourselves and as I mentioned filtering for quality is much harder. So it doesn't save as much money as people would assume to offshore a role.
(1) This generally isn't true for most companies. You must be in healthcare? Otherwise there are a bunch of state-level data protection laws which to my knowledge do not prevent access to PII by persons not within the US.
(2) Partially covered with my first comment about South America. I'll also note that asynchronous work seems to be more productive for a lot of people, and practically everyone in the corporate world complains about too many meetings – so maybe making it harder to constantly have meetings is a feature, not a bug (even if your org isn't great at async).
(3) Shared context might be helpful, but the design part is nonsense. Obviously non-Americans can design for the US market. Suggesting otherwise is just so ludicrous I don't know where to start.
(4) This is just a skill issue. You can definitely filter for quality in off-shore roles just as well as you can for on-shore roles. If you're bad at it, that's on you, not intrinsic to the off-shore labor or their circumstances.
(5) Saving money isn't the only reason to off-shore roles. Believe it or not there are actually more talented people you have access to if you consider all 8 billion of the world's population rather than only looking at 4% of it. Or for example with your first point where off-shoring can actually be a huge boon because diff timezones means all of your employees can work a 9-5 without needing people to work graveyard shifts. Also there are solutions like Deel which are less expensive than your average contracting middleman, but still allow you to hire people globally without needing to deal (pun intended by them I guess) with all the local tax etc issues. So even if money is your only concern, there is plenty of room left in the market for labor arbitrage.
That isn't to say that teams should be monocultural, but expecting to have high performing teams without any thought to culture, time zone, or communication ability is optimistic.
1. The businesses didn't know how to handle the workers not being in the office. While a problem in the past, this is now a solved problem thanks to COVID forcing them to figure it out.
2. The businesses tried to hire cheap workers. This is still going to fail, just as hiring minimum wage workers in the US for the job would fail. The workers you actually want charge the same no matter where their seat happens to be located. But I'm not sure that is applicable here as the parent is not talking about cost-cutting, but filling the roles that are no longer filled due to the strike.
I’ve been involved in a lot of software offshoring projects. It’s about twice as likely to end in failure compared to onshore software development services.
It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.
Very interesting, thanks!
#2 is a possibility. What happens when you do it is that your cheap hires tend to stay for a short time (as they will get better offers later, possibly involving relocation to better countries). You end up with the ones that are cheap for a reason.
Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences, etc.
If all the butts are in the same office, you are no longer offshoring. You've moved the entire business.
I don't think that is what anyone here is talking about, though. I certainly wasn't. Offshoring normally implies remote work.
But that's not the case anymore. The "onshore" workers are (or at least did for several years, giving the needed experience) also working remotely, so there is no longer an office barrier between the "onshore" business and the workers abroad.
Whether or not the workers "offshore" work together in an office or independently at coffee shops really makes no difference and has nothing to do with the conversation. If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true. But we're not going to change the subject just because he is confused.
No, like I spelled out, your response that I replied to misinterpreted the comment that you replied to. What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office, but because other other problems, such as culture. Also, the user that you replied to was the one who made the upper-level comment that you originally responded to, not the other way around.
Yes, that is what they pointed out, but it made no sense. The only way that could have applicability to the conversation is if you moved the entire business into that new "offshore" office, but then you wouldn't be "offshoring" anymore. You will have moved the business instead. Which isn't what anyone is talking about. The original comment is clearly about offshoring, not relocating businesses.
I expect you are right that the other commenter misinterpreted something and replied based on that misinterpretation. But, no need to change the subject because of their confusion. Especially when, as you point out, they established the subject! If it was good enough then, it remains good enough now.
No-one was referring to moving business and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that. Moving a contained software business unit of a US based business to another country is not "moving the business", but is often how offshoring works. This doesn't involve moving the entire business, but just a mostly self-contained portion of it. I don't think surgical_fire misinterpreted anything. The quote above from surgical_fire explains their sentiment. Businesses in the US getting used to their onshore employees being remote doesn't solve any of these offshoring issues.
Exactly. So where do you think the statement in question fits?
> and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that.
Well, you're certainly not going to figure it out if you keep going off on some strange tangent about an entirely separate part of the comment that has nothing to do with the discussion here and which nobody replied to. And, I might add, offered nothing of value as that part said the same thing as the comment posted approximately two hours prior.
But what is your motivation for being in that state? We can see you are purposefully trying to not figure it out. Not only are you not staying on topic, you haven't even asked a single question to try and help your understanding. What is to be gained in acting like an idiot? Just a show put on for the sake of the lolz?
Not workers doing the same jobs though. Look at how manufacturing was offshored over the past several decades -- for many companies, entire job trees within the US were eliminated. HQ is still in the US, but anything remotely having to do with manufacturing isn't. You have to go really high up the chain in those offshored manufacturing jobs before you see anyone actually interacting with an employee in the US.
And how are those not the same jobs...?
Is the end goal to just have management in a nice office and all production including hr, finance and IT overseas??
I mean those are office jobs, so they can WFH, so they can be in India or Philipines!! :)
Wow saving so much money!!!
Does a company work in a country or will they just take and take and take from the country and then not give jobs?
Almost making me nationalist (I am in the EU)
The goal of a company is indeed to make as much money while spending as little as possible. Why hire people when you don’t have to?
For example, multiple fast food companies have driven themselves into the ground by exploiting their franchise owners for fast cash. That's how Quiznos died. You would think murdering a company would actually be bad for C level people, but they just move on to the next company. They never seem to have a problem getting hired despite their past performance.
What prevents the NYT? In part: workers not just lying down and taking it. Just not “complaining” at all, like your implicit feel-for-you advice.
Hell, even in the NY area. Median household in the Bronx is only $37,397, meaning that half of the households are living there for less than that. And that's household income, which is usually about 1.5-2x above individual income. That's a huge margin against what these workers are being paid.
But people don't sell things based on cost. Hell, a lot of people lose money when they sell things. Around 10% of the US population have a negative income in a given year! People instead charge as much as they can (or think they can, at least) get.
And anyone who is worth hiring offshore can get just as much as a local (within some reasonable margin; there can be frictional costs to offshore hiring that won't change the cost to the employer, but will reduce what makes it to the worker). You can sometimes get lucky and hire someone who doesn't understand their worth, both locally and offshore, but you can't count on that (and they aren't apt to stick around for long once they realize their worth). On balance, it costs the same no matter where you go.
Cheaper and submissive labor doesn't result in high-quality products.
Wouldn't you send a stronger message if you picketed at home?
Technically, wouldn't "respecting the picket line" be not doing any "scab" work for the NYTimes? Asking us not to use the NYTimes is more of a boycott and a separate question (and not always something strikers ask for). Is it official policy of the strike that they request people boycott in solidarity as well?
Hence the use of "and". It presents two separate ideas for you to think about:
- Respect the pickup line
- Get your news elsewhere
> The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app. Members of the newsroom union, Times Guild, have pledged not to do struck work, a right that’s protected under their contract.
https://nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off...
NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems.
https://bsky.app/profile/maggieastor.bsky.social/post/3la4qg...
If I pay for a service, I expect it to be available.
It’s not my job to track the status of labor disputes - it’s the job of the NYTimes (the organization) to ensure they deliver that service.
If they can’t, because they are dealing with ongoing labor disputes, then I’ll probably complain and cancel. The threat of those cancellations seems like plenty enough leverage for a striking union.
I don’t understand why I would need to preemptively refrain from a service I’ve already paid for.
Especially as the bloc grows. If the "someone abroad" is also part of the same bloc, management ends up running out of people to turn to. A rising tide floats all boats.
(It's even more extreme in some countries. I've heard tale of situations in Scandinavian nations where a restaurant owner who mistreats their serving staff will find, in addition to the staff leaving and nobody being willing to scab for them, that their deliveries are delayed because nobody will drive ingredients to them and if their sink breaks down no plumber will take the contract to fix it).
Isn't this the default state of affairs for american private enterprise? This is why PIPs are so wildly popular—it's trivial to fabricate performance reasoning regardless of the actual motivations for firing.
Granted, I don't see how you could negotiate your way out of this. We need federal labor protections to make serious movement on this.
Personally, I have considered the arguments and concluded that I am not interested in collective bargaining or joining a union.
Official NewsGuild of New York release:
New York Times Tech Guild Walks Off The Job
https://nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off...
The union filed an unfair labor practice with the NLRB, but that process has dragged for over a year, even after the union successfully won their vote AFTER the purge.
Why don't workers unionize? Because management can fire them right away with repurcussions only after years, if that, and even then, the repurcussions aren't to the CEO who broke the law. Breaking labor laws should put executives in prison, but noooo, instead penalties are paid by the company and the CEO's move to another company to do the same illegal shit.
The government agencies must move faster if they want to protect workers. Delays only help management, who still get salaries throughout and are never actually punished or face any negative consequences.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3mq4y/grindr-unlawfully-pur...
https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/grindr-workers-united-cw...
A friend in another industry had this happen: management forced everyone out of Berlin (or you could take a package). He ended up having to move for five days per week.
Tech companies tend not to unionize, because most developers don't see net gain to be had from unionizing. Most unions end up serving the interest of the union instead of the company, and enact things like seniority based pay and promotion. There's just too much incentive to cater towards interest of mediocre employees in a union model.
Another big factor in software development is that the jobs are comfortable and pay very well. So lots of people would happily apply to the job. IIRC, it's something like a 40:1 ratio of applicants to offers at big tech companies.
you think visa workers have the balls to unionize?
that's what this is all about, finding people who can't say "no". if this round of visa workers wants to say "no" they'll just turn around and import a few more
Most of those organizations (like the UAW) don't focus on technology positions, so software people are left out in a lurch a bit.
NYTimes has savvy, vocal people in it that have someone overcome this.
- https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
You can be in finance, hr, it, dev, engineering etc. Because we all want transparency, good salary, protection, 40h work weeks, overtime etc.
A union is not going to be involved in specifics like if we use Linux or Microsoft, so why does it need to be tech focused?
Look @ link
There is no tradition of unionization in most tech companies, and tech employees are paid very well and have usually had an easy time moving between companies. If you're unhappy with something, you can probably solve that as an individual without needing collective bargaining.
Tech workers at a company that's already unionized would be more likely to unionize in part because their colleagues are unionized, so they look around and say, "Hey, how come I'm not a part of that?" And the unions themselves can evangelize unions and recruit tech workers to unionize, which is good for the union because it gives them more resources and more bargaining partner. It's much harder for a union to come into a non-unionized workplace and start a movement from scratch, especially with a bunch of people who make six figures.
There's also a libertarian streak to Silicon Valley and the tech industry more broadly. This makes startup culture vibrant but at the expense of more individualism and less collectivism.
It's no coincidence that one of the few areas of tech to have seen a meaningful unionization push in recent years is gaming. Workers in gaming are in much more volatile positions, since it's a hit-driven business with long, expensive development cycles. And there's a constant stream of young, idealistic people who have dreamed of working in games their whole life and are willing to take on terrible working conditions and low pay to live that dream, at least for a while. There's also a lot of roles like art, music, and game design that are hard to parlay into other industries, whereas a software engineer or product manager who works can move between industries with relative ease. So there's an incentive for people in those roles to fix the companies and industries where they are instead of just moving on.
For context, the NY Times does not provide amazing compensation or benefits.
In the 90s there was also a minority union of field engineers at NCR Corporation.
Right now there is a union at blizard.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bandcamp-union-mus...
Indeed. When tech workers actually had some bargaining power. The rise of remote work, AI, and the flooding of the industry with bootcamp and CS grads has changed everything. We'll probably look back at the last 20 years as a golden age akin to the postwar manufacturing boom in the US, where a single person could reasonably provide for a family.
NYT will be signing on the dotted line within a week I believe given the risk to their revenue if they don't cover the second Trump-vs-Kamala. The section vs-Woman-Candidate election in a decade is going to get a lot of eyeballs.
Salary is 140-155k USD.
For reference, here's levels.fyi's breakdown of the New York city area: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/new-yor...
Median total comp is 185k.
It seems like their total comp for NYT is slightly above the mark based on reported salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/...
They also have 600 technologists on staff, which is massively higher than comparable news organizations. I think this is the real elephant in the room: They're hiring (and therefore spending) at a rate that already far outstrips comparable news organizations.
Not that NYT hasn't done some interesting innovative technical stuff within their journalism.
A senior role in NYC for 155K (plus bonus, which they do offer) is nothing when you factor in the cost of living.
For example there was a cop in Massachusetts who had "retired" twice and was getting 280k/year due to the way the union rules were set up.
Of course I imagine most engineers enjoy feeling productive, and wasting everyone's time does take a psychological toll.
"Companies are taking more of people time for the same pay, in addition to requiring unpaid commute time".
I usually don't like when I work more for less, do you?
I’m sure you meant to say “waste time in commute and spend 8 hours trying to complete 1 hour of WFH amount of work in open office”.
this is a problem. Hiring and career paths are completely non-existent for tech people. Most will not get a cost of living increase, and the only way to actually increase their pay is to update their resume and spend months trying to find another position. I dont' know if you've noticed, but our job market blows right now.
They may have bought us off for a decade or so, giving us benefits that rivaled unionized positions. But over the last 20 years, that "bargain" has slowly eroded and now the unionized shops are the only ones getting benefits for the employees.
Capitalism being what it is, each company MUST pursue the lowest costs and highest margin. Without collective bargaining, a single worker has no power against the whims and desires of board members, to whom you are just a rounding error.
"If hard work were good for you, the rich would have it all to themselves."
[1]: https://ethanmarcotte.com/books/you-deserve-a-tech-union/
Excellent time for their strike too; they've got a good sense of strategy.
My big question is, how much % of their engineers are participating in this? I can't find a single clear answer. For all we know there are another 400 engineers not part of this activity
As far as I can tell this isn't a Boeing situation where a decision is made and all employees are part of it. the NYT building is still full of workers today
Compare the NYT article to other reporting, and you can see the difference. There's a few things the NYT forgot to mention, like the fact that these negotiations have been drawn out for 2 years now. Or this:
"Throughout the bargaining process, Times management has engaged in numerous labor law violations, including implementing return-to-office mandates without bargaining and attempting to intimidate members through interrogations about their strike intentions. The NewsGuild of NY has filed unfair labor practice charges against The Times on these tactics as well as numerous other violations of labor law."
https://nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off...
The NYT does include a quote blaming everything on the Tech Guild though: “We are disappointed that the Tech Guild leadership is attempting to jeopardize our journalistic mission at this critical time,”
>links to a blog post from the union
- bias cannot be eliminated, merely mitigated;
- the truth is not the average of all opinions;
- some sources are important even if their point of view is subjective.
Unfortunately, the whole internet seems to be engulfed in a nihilistic tribal war where everything is black or white. This kind of argument is a hammer you can use at any point when you don’t like an argument, because there is no objective source. Then, the conversation shifts to a discussion of the various point of views and all contact with reality is lost.
I was broadly agreeing with this in the parent post:
> Do you think bias is a one-dimensional tug of war that cancels each other out when combined?
I am not saying that we should not seek other sources, just that quoting the union on one side of the dispute is not better than a reporter paid by the journal on the other side. Even worse, because a journal has some incentives to keep a reputation for being truthful, while communications from a union are purely partisan. (That’s not some criticism and unions play an important role; journalism is just not it)
The point is, two wrong points of view do not magically average out to something right. Ideally someone reporting with some distance would be better.
Why? The piece is written by "Katie Robertson", which according to her profile is "a reporter covering the media industry for The New York Times". That dosen't sound like new york times company management to me. She (and therefore the article) is at least more distanced away from this story than the union itself.
The idea that a company must only do what brings shareholder money immediately is a meme that is widely propagated by a certain class of people who stand to profit from it, but the law does not impose that behaviour.
Ironically, the NYT's apparent belief in this exact thing is the main reason I'm no longer a subscriber.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/nyt-tech-workers-strike-ahe...
And before you start. The problem affecting article quality in reporting ISN'T a direct conflict of interest, it's bias. A direct conflict of interest just implies bias.
https://nypost.com/2024/09/17/media/ny-times-tech-unions-biz...
The story is written by a reporter, Katie Robertson, who is also part of their own union (Times Guild).
The Times has been pretty good at covering itself imho.
This doesn't remove the conflict of interest because it's not the same union. Those in the other unions may well be more sympathetic to the company than to the strikers, especially given the timing of the strike.
It's likely interfering with their jobs right now in pursuit of a negotiation that they don't stand to gain from.
I really think this is silly. If there is anything specific you don't think the New York Times article is presenting fairly, please share that.
The comment I was replying to suggests the reporter is pro-NYT but you are suggesting that the reporter is pro-Union?
Maybe the reporter did a great job after all :)
It's not obvious to me they have a bias here, but given the clear systemic issues in other reporting it's reasonable to bring a skeptical view to their own reporting.
> The Times has been pretty good and covering itself imho.
This is silly. It's like the people who say that the Bible is true because the Bible says the Bible is true.
Like I said, I don't get your analogy.
this is insane. you can't require your workers to come into an office anymore? that's against the law?
Does anyone have a sense for how this breaks down? I would never have guessed so many full-time employees were necessary to maintain a CMS.
“I run my basement website with in my spare time? Why can’t one of the most popular websites in the world run on gum and a few paper clips”
The answer is almost always: Cloud Costs, Kubernetes and Resume-driven architectures.
Hacker News isn't exactly the kind of website for many millions of Internet users to engage with. Its interface and features work well for the kind of niche it serves, which is much smaller compared to many other websites. HN (at least the user-facing parts) seem to run on mostly the same code for years, where NYT likely needs to build many interactive, one-off features for the flavor of the day topic.
> Twitter (though not doing well as a business) was overloaded with tech employees.
I read this a lot and maybe it has a truth to it, though I remember before the Great Layoff of 2023 there was a time when Twitter was trying (and AFAICT often failing) to grow its business. One example is that they've tried (and failed) short-form videos way before Tiktok started. Today's Twitter seem to be in maintenance mode, and operates with less people.
Maybe it was 'overloaded' in the sense that it was the kind of business that could never grow and shrinking it down to the size where it can be profitable and squeezing it hard was the way to go, that I cannot know.
Traffic is not the primary driver of staffing. For a simple app, it is relatively straightforward to use commodity cloud offerings to scale to large volumes of traffic. Even something as simple as Heroku + a CDN can take a small team a long way.
But the NYT is not a simple app. I'm not even willing to accept that their CMS needs could be handled with an off-the-shelf CMS without modification. Without having worked there, I can see:
- CMSs for text/images, audio, video content - syndication for audio content - custom? subscription system - some kind of interface to the printing system - bespoke game studio - Web dataviz studio
plus all the stuff needed to run a company as big as the NYT, which will include lots of integrations between things like payroll, accounting, 3P ad networks, reporting, HR software, etc.
I haven't even included the people who might make use of the copious data generated by the business.
These things add up fast.
> Twitter (though not doing well as a business)
That's a heck of a caveat! Most businesses aim to do well as businesses, so current Twitter is not a great model.
If anything, the cloud to onprem migration was best and maybe only move from Elon that made sense.
So yes, 10 skilled people could run a site that large (and do). But you can’t run a company to recruit and manage that team over decades. “Well just find 10 smart and motivated people who work well together and can be given autonomy to do the right thing and hope they give us what we want” is not an actionable management plan.
Just open this (gift) article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/09/opinion/immig...
There was clearly a non-trivial amount of frontend development work necessary to build the dynamic visualization in this article. This has nothing to do with CMS's. The work has nothing to do with persisting data anywhere. It has nothing to do with backend anything. It's all frontend work to get a visualization in a browser. Absolutely nothing do with CMS's.
When I was at NYT in 2021 there were like ~300 software developers. Which still seems like a lot but they have legacy COBOL (converted to java) systems to interact with the ancient printing press technologies around the world, a payments team instead of stripe, a lot of folks working on different apps ( cooking, audio, games, etc), data scientists working on the algorithms, an in house CMS with a lot of steps, probably tooling for all their podcast work, software for the customer support agents when people have issues, and the list goes on.
I'm still trying to figure out how to start up Aristo (ex-CIS) correctly. What a messy codebase...
Well they also run Cooking and Games, which has gotten pretty big. I imagine they have some hand in audio too.
They run their own services, such as messaging and ad delivery, too.
IIRC, they basically developed things like D3 and Backbone back in the day (or paid the maintainers)
They have a much higher bar for quality and boutique solutions than almost any organizations.
Legacy companies have armies of consultants building pretty decks with little end-product to show for it. Never questioned. Every industry has a certain amount of slack built in. Large institutions (big Hollywood, govt, defense, medical services) have oodles of bureaucracy. Tech looks like a paradise in comparison. Yes, tech workers should seek to be more efficient. But, when viewed from comparative lens, tech is in the top tier of efficient industries.
Personally, I am not sold on tech unions. But, tech workers have uniquely low leverage within their profession. Tech lacks paid overtime or paid on-calls. Engineers are routinely expected to work evenings for meetings with off-shore teams. There is limited mobility because unlike doctors or lawyers/ engineers/ hard-tech engineers.... SWEs are frequently managed by non-SWEs. The manner in which remote work was revoked is a canary for the lack of lobbying power among tech workers.
Yes, tech workers are paid upper-middle class wages. But, the quality of life afforded by the profession has gone for a plunge since the 2022 layoffs. Companies have revoked all the pros of covid (flexible & remote work replaced with mandatory in office days and 9-5 hours). But, they've kept all the negatives of covid (work never ends, notification on all devices, global teams, smaller offices, fewer in-office perks). It's like companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
To that end, I empathize with any tech coalition that wants to lobby for better 'worker rights'. Union strikes may be a suboptimal way of doing this. But, it's better than nothing.
> Most employees in the tech union receive pay of more than $100,000, and average compensation, including bonus and restricted stock units, is $190,000, according to a Times spokeswoman. That figure is an average of $40,000 more than members of the Times’s journalist union, she said.
> Times leaders have also bristled at the nature of some of the guild’s requests. The union previously sought a requirement that the company use unscented cleaning supplies and offer a pet bereavement policy that included a leave of up to seven days, though it has since backed down from those demands.
The journalist union should push for an increase too, then.
NYC cost of living is enormous.
Print newspapers are essentially dead. Online news? Barely anyone pays for that. Online with ads? Reddit/twitter/facebook/youtube pay zero dollars for the content they put ads on.
If you're in tech and you want to maximise your salary - a company's gotta have money before they can give it to you. And newspapers don't have money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/business/media/new-york-t...
> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, which ran from July through September, rose 16.1 percent to $104.2 million, from $89.8 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 7 percent to $640.2 million, compared with the same period in 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t...
> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, from April through June, rose to $104.7 million from $92.2 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 5.8 percent, to $625.1 million, compared with the same period in 2023.
A $40k wage gap between tech and journalism it'd be nice to close.
That's gonna be one difficult negotiation.
Even quadrupling the $18k per employee, you're still trying to get a $40k raise from an organisation with a profit of $72k per employee. That's going to be tough.
Far tougher than moving to a different job at a company with more money.
Net income seems to be healthy, too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/04/earns-new...
When I was much younger, a few years out of high school, I ended up being the last developer on a sinking ship, and had asked for a pay raise to get me up to where the highest paid of the employees who had left were, IIRC that was around $5/hr, and was denied. I should have used that as an RGE, but instead just hung on until around a year later when a job fell into my lap. But the employer would have been hurting if I left, and was definitely more expensive for them to lose me than it would have to keep me. But in the end, the parent company folded a couple years later because of a very, very bad bet they made.
The unscented cleaning supplies is a weird request, but it does kinda make sense and the cost should be pretty low - don't know why they removed that requirement.
I can often tell if someone was wearing anything but the mere hint of perfume minutes after they've left an area, and anything stronger gives me headaches or worse.
The idea that they “bristled” at a union supporting people like me is total shit
I have a friend who is very sensitive to scents. She may not be able to work in a typical office again because of it. I'm very sensitive to harsh fluorescent lighting and noisy office environments and get migraines. You can push through for a while but eventually you burn out.
We've also realized we're both "mildly" autistic [1] over the last few years, along with quite a few other software engineer friends. The sensory sensitivities fall under that umbrella.
Tech has traditionally been more accepting of neurodiversity than other careers, so it's great to see a tech union raising issue like this that don't cost much but make a big difference for anyone affected.
[1] Book: Unmasking Autism by Devon Price
> The guild said it was asking readers to honor its digital picket line by not playing Times Games products, such as Wordle, and not using the Cooking app.
I’m not familiar with digital picket lines, why not ask that people not read via the site? Tying the picket line to Wordle and the cooking app seems to trivialize the importance of the team – Wordle was an acquisition!
$100k is about $72k after tax[0].
Suppose I want to support a family in NYC. Average cost of living is about $9,000/mo for a family of four[1].
That's $108,000 per year. Or about $36,000 above what I would need to support an average 2-kid family, living paycheck-to-paycheck.
So if I want to be able to support a family, 100k is not even close to enough.
edit: forgot to add the sources
[0] https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=100000&from=yea...
The costs in cities like NY and SF are so high that many kids end up in care as soon as parental leave expires. One of the big recent public policies in NYC is "3K," public schooling for kids starting at 3 years old.
It's practically a college tuition per kid at age 0 though.
Truth be told, for the present cost of living in the Northeast in general, you’re looking at a family income of $300k to be “comfortable”, or a single base income of $200k. That’s if you want to buy a new car (of which the bulk cost more than $50k), a starter home that doesn’t need major repairs ($800k+), and still have some money left over to save for retirement; in cities like NYC and Boston, you’re easily looking at $250k single/$400k couple for a “Middle Class” existence.
The brutal reality is that everyone who has to work to survive is grossly underpaid relative to the current cost of living. To ignore this fact (or worse, try to compartmentalize it or limit its scope to a reduced “other” category) endangers both the economy and the state.
Its pretty easy to go to college on loans and rack up $150k in debt for an average 4-year degree. Its easy to spend $35k-$50k on a new car, even 10 year old cars in good shape are $10k-$15k. Housing costs vary a lot more by area, but I think most would agree its extremely expensive these days.
The idea that a young family could have $5,000/mo just in debt payments between school, vehicles, and housing is insane to me. That doesn't even account for day to day expenses, children, vacations, etc.
It isn't easy for a 4-year degree. To get to that level generally requires law school or medical school debt or an unfunded graduate degree.
For 4-year degrees around 80% of students graduate with less than $30k in debt.
For public schools only 7% of graduates have debt above $50k. For private nonprofit schools 12% have debt above $50k. For private for-profit schools it is 32%.
That does include estimates for housing, food, books, etc so there's wiggle room especially if you have family near by and live at home.
For anyone going to school entirely on loans though, you wouldn't make it a year with only $30k in debt.
To me its less interesting to look at what the average person who is able to afford college today borrows to pay for it. That's a self-selected population and doesn't show what the impact would be on anyone who gets into college but doesn't have family money, scholarships, or grants to help pay for it.
False. $45k in 2005 is only $73k today, when adjusted for inflation[1]. Even if you use the most generous interpretation of "2000s" to mean 2000, that's only $82k.
If you did a 30 second search, you'd see it's factored into the CPI, with "Shelter" (which further breaks down into rent and owners' equivalent rent) making up 36% of the CPI basket.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241009171432/https://www.bls.g...
Unless owners are completely in the loop in terms of the rental market (which they likely are not, they don't rent), they may not come up with good estimates for what an equivalent rent would be.
I’m sure getting it that low means ignoring housing, and making everything in the “basket of goods” worse.
No. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
>and making everything in the “basket of goods” worse.
Given that food, energy, and shelter makes up the bulk of the CPI, I'm not sure how this can be done. The most plausible thing I can think of is "food is less nutritious than before", but I doubt that's an actual factor. "Food is getting less nutritious so I'm forced to shop at whole foods" isn't exactly a popular sentiment.
I wonder if there is a similar measure for time kids spend in school. My kid comes home early every Wednesday, and there’s are ~15 other early dismissal days during the school year too.
I would bet almost everything that relies heavily on labor has been increasing in price faster than official figures for the basket of all goods and services.
Look at the junk in this section for exampe
> Cereals and bakery products
And ofcourse all the items in fruits and vegetables had the highest inflation.
>> Cereals and bakery products
>And ofcourse all the items in fruits and vegetables had the highest inflation.
A simple check shows this is false. The "Cereals and bakery products" category went up by 28.6% since January 2020, compared to 17.9% for "Fruits and Vegetables". You get similar conclusions if you use compare against January 2005.
The first is you're using the Nationwide averages as opposed to the regional numbers for New York where a lot of these increases are much greater than on the nation.
The second thing is the way it includes housing is by using a thing called the owners imputed rent. And what that does is it tries to back out the rental from a housing unit. The problem is in New York City rent has been rising way faster than that.
30 is the cpi's consistently underestimated a number of its own provisions because of the way it does hedonics and substitution. It basically says that while meat might have risen 50% people switch to fish now and it uses in lower value for inflation.
The CPI over the last 30 years have been so massively game it's almost useless anymore
Another commenter has pointed out new york house prices actually rose slower compared to the rest of the country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42043147
>The second thing is the way it includes housing is by using a thing called the owners imputed rent. And what that does is it tries to back out the rental from a housing unit. The problem is in New York City rent has been rising way faster than that.
Most Americans own their home. OER might not be perfect, but pretending that they pay market rent doesn't make much sense either. Even for people who don't own their home, new york has rent control, which provides similar inflation protections compared to owning a home.
>30 is the cpi's consistently underestimated a number of its own provisions because of the way it does hedonics and substitution. It basically says that while meat might have risen 50% people switch to fish now and it uses in lower value for inflation.
The part about hedonic adjustment is misleading. While it's true that such adjustments are used. It's only used for small minority of categories (basically clothes and technology), and doesn't include stuff like food (like in your example).
Meanwhile the part about substitution is straight up false:
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/common-misconceptions-abo...
> In January 1999, the BLS began using a geometric mean formula in the CPI that reflects the fact that consumers shift their purchases toward products that have fallen in relative price. [It continues by saying it allows substitution withing categories and not between categories.]
This is exactly what I was saying. It has become a cost of living index, not a measure of inflation anymore. The hedonic adjustments can be laughably hand-wavy (it is a very difficult problem on how you measure inflation when using CPUs -- the real answer is you shouldn't and CPI's basked is a bad bad way to do it). That FAQ is always pretty funny and defensive (a lot of "give us a break -- it doesn't really affect anything much").
> Even for people who don't own their home, new york has rent control, which provides similar inflation protections compared to owning a home.
This is one of the huge issues. (1) Not sure if you live near NYC, but ask any new yorker about how much rent control has helped -- the answer is usually pretty low. don't have a heart attack looking at this rental rise in the last 5 years https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys...
However that isn't the important part - rent control shouldn't effect measures of inflation -- this is precisely why CPI is bad. You can't legislate away inflation, you mere push the money around and prices rise asymmetrically but you still have the fundamental issue that CPI no longer even tries to measure -- too many dollas chasing too few goods. So you stop some of using those dollars on housing -- they just bid of something else instead.
CPI is a terrible horrible very bad measure of inflation. Its been that way since the 70s at least when the concept was turned on its head.
You need to understand that when people bitch about the "cost of living", they're not speaking in broad terms. They're speaking in specific terms, inclusive of their insane budgetary choices that they believe are mandatory to be seen as high-status.
Yes, you can live just fine on the median income. But in order to have your ego stroked as the super important high class person that you obviously are, you have to spend some money. Choosing to live in NYC in the first place is certainly part of that, the rest is just gravy.
It reads like you are projecting your own beliefs of what New Yorkers and tech workers are like, and then screaming about that intersection.
I'm curious about what portion of those that are living on $74k or less are doing so solo, and how many are only able to do so by racking up debt / getting support from family / etc.
I live in an area less expensive than NYC and, at least anecdotally in my circles, if you don't have a partner (or other assistance like roommates, parents, or something along those lines) it seems pretty damn rough to get by on ~70k.
1. A Tesla Model 3, on which I spend 1k a month with insurance
2. 1.5k rent for a studio in a good safe location with utilities
3. Rest on groceries, eating out movies etc.
If I decided to get a cheap car, I could easily have 600$ or more to spend on housing etc. So it would be tight but as a single 20s male, I would make it with 50k a year after taxes. Everything else just goes into savings. I think people have lavish tastes, or no control over their spending if they can’t make do with 70k a year after taxes.
I actually can't think of an EU Capital where that's achievable anymore, bar possibly the socialist outlier of Vienna. In Dublin a good studio is at least 2k, and you'll pay 52% tax on earnings over €70k as well...
I don't think the median income is after taxes, is it? That would be more reasonable, for sure. My comment was made in reference to friends who make $70k/yr before taxes.
I live alone in a 2br. I don't have assistance from family or a partner.
Now, I do not live in a luxury building, and I am not building up a nest egg from my salary. And I rent. But when people think about the costs of NYC, a lot of people forget that you don't need a car, car insurance, or gas.
Where you get into trouble is if you're paying a stupid large amount for rent. It is very possible to pay 1-2k / month in rent. Most people who move to the city at that budget live with roommates initially, but most find a really good deal, sometimes rent controlled, organically through networks after a year or two of living here. Deals are hard to find as they should be, but certainly exist, and most longterm locals have a great deal.
What is false?
I didn't make any claims other than saying that in my circles I see some of my friends and colleagues have trouble making it by on $70k. I'm not sure how you would be able to tell me that I'm wrong about that. I'm happy that you are able to make it on $70k, though.
Okay, then let's make this rigorous.
Falsifiable Claim: People live a life of struggle on 70k a year in new york, where struggle is defined by constant worries of physiological needs, safety, and security, as categorized in Manslow's hierarchy of needs. https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Falsified by counterexample.
QED.
For a lot of people, they may mean 'struggle' in the sense of living below where they want to be, which is relative. Maslow's hierarchy is helpful to categorize.
Can we maybe just have a normal conversation without trying to flex our superior debating skills?
I was curious how many people that make the median wage in NYC are living comfortably solo -- that's it!
You're making up claims, disconnected from my comments, and then falsifying them yourself in some sort of weird self-debating comment.
You are robbing from your future to live in the present.
This might be ok for you specifically as you are making a gamble on your ownership of the startup paying off. Perhaps you have a family safety net. Or Perhaps you are ok with taking the risk that you don’t have enough money in your older years.
It’s not really ok for standard employees to live that way. The USA social contract is that each person must self-fund their own retirement. Deferring that savings to “later” has truly staggering costs in compound-interest-years lost.
The majority of standard employees live this way, or with less.
So you can't actually afford to maintain your lifestyle, unless your retirement plan is a revolver.
Just because it's possible, doesn't mean most are willing to take the set of preferences in my head that allows me to be so cheap and rewire their own brains like that.
It's more a focus on how people "feel" about their situation than it is math. It's resonant to me.
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-the-self-fulfill...
As in "people feel as though they want to be paid more"? You may find the idea interesting and resonant, but how does that affect anything? It's still true that they're on more than journalists, regardless of how they feel.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYXRSA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA
The same is also true if you use 2005 or 2009 as your start date. I agree there is variance in theory, but in practice it has been about the same as the national.
If you are a healthy person living frugally then I think the inflation in your personal basket of goods is actually higher than the fed numbers would dictate (esp for rent and housing).
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys...
The entire "Recreation commodities" category (which includes other stuff like "Sporting goods" and "Pets and pet products") is only weighed at 2%, compared to 13% for food and 37% for shelter. Even if it's down 50% the impact on the overall CPI is negligible.
>assume you only buy new cars (only up ~25% since 2000, but used cars are now almost as expensive as new whereas they used to be available for half the price or less),
???
There's clearly a "Used cars and trucks" category.
>and underweight housing (basically doubled since 2000, worse if you need to move to a HCOL major urban center for employment).
The index is called "Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers", not "Consumer Price Index for Young Urban Professionals". Not everyone is a recent graduate who recently moved into a high COL city and paying for a market rate apartment. For every person fitting that criteria, there's probably also a retiree who owns their house and/or lives in a rent controlled apartment.
The discussion here is about the cost of living difference for tech workers who I assume are clustered around NYC.
$45K in NYC in 2005 is not equivalent to $73K today for most such people. It is likely closer to $100K today, as the above poster said.
But they're not.
[0]: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-mont...
[1]: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan...
Those are literally part of the CPI.
>interest rates
The "C" in "CPI" stands for consumer. Unless you're taking out loans to buy your groceries, interest rates shouldn't be a factor on your expenditures.
The Soviet Union "officially" had the highest production of food per capita in the world, yet they had to import food. Because you cannot eat government statistics.
The problem with your retort is it ignores the very context I outlined above. The present rate of inflation appears more manageable, but because most of it is driven by absurd inflation in shelter and transport costs (homes and cars), those two areas are starkly higher than inflation overall - as much as 50% or more, in some metros.
So while your napkin math makes for a good soundbite, the reality is that it just hides the complex truth of inflation. So yes, while $45k might be inflation-equivalent to $73k today, that purchasing power is significantly different. $43k in the 2000s could buy you a starter home in most states, albeit not in most metros; nowadays, $73k can’t even cover basic necessities in many states and all metros, not without significant sacrifices.
So my point still stands.
This is a global problem, and it requires solutions at all levels. Remote work is amazing, and I 100% support it (and exist on hybrid despite being in a major metro), but we need more on a local, state, and federal level as well. Heck, it’s so bad that we can’t even blame a singular or group of enployers anymore: the system is broken, and desperately needs updating so it can work again.
It really isn't.
Yeah but if they're remote they can live in cheaper parts of the country so the 100K+ range of inner expensive cities is less justified and they're competing on a country wide market.
Minimum wage is $15,000/yr.
With an MS in the life sciences I can make $16/ at the big local public university doing research.
Anyone making over $100k is doing fine and has no sympathy from me.
I did strenuous manual labor for next to nothing once upon a time. After about 8 years of that, on top of regular 60 hour work weeks, I spent almost every waking moment of 4-5 years to learn and better myself with about every sacrifice you could imagine short of divorce. I'm now making significantly more and working much less with an extremely happy family.
I'm not some trust fund kid. I have a high school education. My father worked 3-5 jobs to provide for my family growing up. So if you haven't picked it up, I know what the other side looks like.
I work in tech now, I wouldn't even reply to a recruiter presenting a 190k job offer if it meant living in New York. I can get more working remote. It's not because I'm spoiled, it's not because I make bad financial decisions, it's because I know my value and won't compromise and I sure won't reduce my family's quality of life because some multi million dollar company wants to short change me.
I get paid fairly for my experience and what I bring to the table, I make sure of that. If my employer isn't matching what I know I can get on the market, I will first negotiate (which is right where the NYT Tech workers are at), then leave for greener pastures if that falls through. I can do that because I worked hard to bring more value to myself in an in demand field.
I'm sorry if you're making a lower salary, but that doesn't mean everyone should just take what they're given. That's how people are exploited.
These arguments aren't just wrong. They are backwards and self limiting.
What I read from parent is that lifestyle inflation must be high in some of these demographics when the rhetoric used is about survival, despite evidence of many more people 'surviving' on far less income.
What I read from you is that you fiercely maintain negotiating power because you can and feel it's only right given your high value. Why WOULD anyone leave money on the table, after all?
Both can be true.
Yes, the notion you need 300k to be comfortable anywhere is absurd, but just because someone makes more doesn't mean their desire to achieve a better quality of life is any less valid than anyone else. Do people with higher salaries need more? No. But why assume that just because an individual or group of people want a better quality of life they're "privileged?"
FTR, 100k as a average base salary is pretty low for tech in NYC. When the other 90k is bonus and RSUs that probably vest over 4 years, the stock has fluctuated 50%, and this being the journalism space, I wouldn't expect to see the full value. They have every right to try to negotiate better quality of life improvements out of NYT, especially for something as low impact on revenue as pet bereavement, as ridiculous as that is. I feel a lot of these comments don't understand tech compensation, where sometimes companies can't meet market value in cash so resort to all kinds of quirky benefits to attract/retain skilled workers. That is exactly where I see such a crazy request coming from when a company pushes back against giving more than a 2% annual raise.
If you think it's reasonable to pay exorbitant rent, food, gas, utilities, simply because you live in some concrete jungle then you are blind. It doesn't justify you actually deserving to make that much other than someone choosing to pay you that much.
If you have to work to live, then we’re on the same side, and we all deserve more money to help us offset this cost of living crisis.
However, journalism in general is a struggling business, which will probably push wages down on average across the profession.
Double however, the NYT has been doing really well at adapting to the modern media landscape and currently has record subscribers and profits [0], so I can see why the union thought it would be a good time to play hardball.
Triple however, I'd quibble a bit with your numbers, even if I think the overall point is well taken. It might be hard to live on the UES on 100K. It's not so hard to live by the Cortelyou stop in Brooklyn or in Sunset Park, both lovely areas.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t...
Which reminds me of another thing. A good friend of mine is currently getting their MBA from a fairly well regarded school. One thing they recently learned about is structuring compensation. The general adage is that whatever you pay an employee must be in reflection of the multiple you get back from that employee. For example a ratio of 5:1 would be for every 1 dollar you pay you get 5 back.
When you start thinking about it like that, you realize just how underpaid people are. So many companies - in fact the vast majority - it’s much higher, in tech for example it’s usually around 10:1 and often as high as 25:1 or more.
This makes it much more straightforward in understanding things and the power imbalance when thinking about it like this
> A good friend of mine is currently getting their MBA from a fairly well regarded school...
Let that good friend of yours get actual job in some non-superlative companies like Wall street banks or FAANG. They will learn how their fantastical ratios of 5:1, 10:1, or 25:1 work in real life.
> ... you realize just how underpaid people are...
If that were true those 100s of thousands companies be making enormous unheard of profits. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
This means nothing. Its a red herring. The fact is executives are paid outsized to the rest of a company typically, certainly when you look at companies of size like Google, Microsoft or even Intel or Nvidia (and so it goes down the chain really), and I really question the value of most executives, as they tend not to like being scrutinized by outside parties, especially within their own organizations, but the reverse is untrue. They really seem to hate accountability but sure love getting the board to rubber stamp golden parachutes and big bonuses for themselves
If a corporation can find 350 million dollars to pay out in executive bonuses salaries etc. I'm certain than is an allocation problem not a money problem.
>If that were true those 100s of thousands companies be making enormous unheard of profits. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
>Let that good friend of yours get actual job in some non-superlative companies like Wall street banks or FAANG. They will learn how their fantastical ratios of 5:1, 10:1, or 25:1 work in real life.
They have one, I'm declining to use identifying information. The largest bonuses and salaries funnel upward, its no secret, with huge executive (and to be clear, I'm bundling VPs and SVPs in this) getting hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in bonuses that those below them see a fraction of.
Like profits being at record highs last year?[0] and thats just 5 seconds of running a search.
Not mention we are talking ratios here. So just because some SMBs aren’t taking in millions doesn’t mean the ratio is any less true
[0]: https://thehill.com/business/4561631-corporate-hit-record-hi....
Labor compensation is determined primarily by substitutability. A $200K engineer creating "$1M worth of value" is not automatically deserving of a higher wage unless there is no one else willing to do that engineer's job for $200K.
I’m not saying don’t people pay well but the executives - non executive power balance is huge and I don’t see how a person can deny this.
Materially executives are also rarely helped accountable for their terrible decisions or layoffs would actually be laid at their feet.
Labor market imbalances of power are well documented and easily discoverable. It’s really plain at this point that material productivity gains have almost entirely been funneled to the top, with workers benefitting very little. Wages have not kept pace with productivity gains since the 1970s, even if you include the recent blip of wage increases they aren’t meaningful in the grand scheme of things.
I don’t know why we just accept these as truths or whatever cause they don’t have to be
I'm not a fan of the status quo. Things should change.
You’re right that personal standards, subjective as they are, can make an argument highly misleading. However, you’d be careful not to make the mistaken assumption that your personal standards are the norm, either.
I’m seeing a lot of “you’re wrong, no sympathy for anyone over $100k” responses to my argument here, all of them making the same assumptions: that anyone making that much dosh must obviously be whinging about paying more for their Maserati or unable to afford rent on that high-rise condo anymore. Everyone is extrapolating some false narrative despite overwhelming evidence that even the most highly-paid among us are getting squeezed out of the housing market or struggling to make ends meet, and that’s exactly what the powers that be (people who don’t have to work to live, because they have all the money) want us to devolve into.
At the end of the day, there’s exactly two groups: those who must work to survive, and those who don’t need to due to immense wealth. Statistically speaking, you’re never going to be the latter, so you should be just as concerned about “highly paid” workers struggling to make ends meet as you are “low-skilled” workers, because we’re all workers.
Turns out I was wrong, and my failure to adapt my standards has likely cost me an opportunity to own a home sans a significant pay rise.
Once I accepted that new data, however, I was able to see the immense gap between reality and expectation, as well as understand that it’s not necessarily my fault for missing that opportunity. I went with the widely-propagated programming for new homeowners at the time, and missed the pitfalls despite my ample additional research. Housing is complicated, and it’s the biggest hindrance to a more stable, equitable, and productive society in my personal opinion.
- Minimum is 1.0 Living Wage ™ (after taxes, rent, insurance, utilities, savings... you get to eat 3 meals and 2 snacks per person per home).
Having the mental stress of trying to determine when would be the right moment to approach the moody boss to make a case for your livelihood shouldn't be a thing.
I'd like the freedom of not having to pay the time tax of determining if I'll make rent or not...
> grossly underpaid relative to the current cost of living
This is just very, very out of touch. The vast majority of the world lives just fine on far, far less than what the median worker at NYT currently makes.
Again, it doesn't exist because it makes no sense.
For some, esp. those who choose to be childless, a relationship like that is probably the closest we'll come.
I was happy the startup I worked at during that time allowed me to take a week off as sick pay... sent flowers with a handwritten note from our HR leader the following morning, but I opted to come back after a couple days as I needed to take my mind off things.
I take it you've never lost a child? Because I've lost both and sad as it was, losing a dog doesn't even come close. Losing the dog was sad, but I got over it and eventually adopted another pup. Losing the child was so unimaginably awful that I struggle to find the words...
Police knocking on my door at 2am to tell me. Calling my wife at 2:30am to tell her (she was away on business). Waiting for her to find a flight home. The funeral. Dealing with the estate. Waking up every few weeks feeling like it was all a nightmare, only to realize it was not.
It's fucking awful.
When the union was formed in 2021, tech workers were insanely in demand and carried basically all the chips. But now that that has cooled significantly, and many tech workers are having trouble finding work, the union is in a precarious position of being founded on ideals of 2021, but having to negotiate with the reality of 2024.
Tech generates more money than the Times. It makes sense that the employees should be paid to reflect that.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with high paid workers striking for even higher pay. It’s not like the suits don’t hoard bonuses for themselves.
It's the journalists that create the content for the tech end. Without them, there would be no Times tech employees.
The problem remains that with the advertisers, there cannot be journalism.
Little distinguishes much of american mass-media 'journalism' from a ChatGPT precis of a Press Release or Reuters/AP wire. What does is generally in the form of an Op-Ed, and is generally at the behest or bias of a billionaire or their lobbying proxy.
In 2024 this has gotten to the point where America's Largest Newspaper chain will not endorse a presidential candidate out of fear. That's 200+ separate publications.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/29/media/usa-today-gannett-n...
Both the advertisers and the journalists rely on the Tech Employees as their core dependency for distribution and scaling factor, and are weighted in compensation accordingly. Much as it ever was - the people selling adspace and doing the logistics of distribution always made more than the people writing copy or typesetting.
The Reuters/AP wire is journalism.
> Some background: The Tech Guild represents hundreds of software engineers, product designers, data analysts and others who make and run our website, apps, games and publishing systems. It’s a sister to my union, the NYT Guild, which reps the newsroom (and advertising, security & more!).
> The NYT Guild contract contains a no-strike clause. That means we in the newsroom are legally forbidden to go on strike with Tech. So we will be supporting them in other ways, some of which you can also do.
Have you looked at what the owners of the New York Times make and compared that to the average “newspaper owner” in the US?
Wirecutter (also a Times property) went on strike during Black Friday.
Unions can be pretty savage.
Like the one in Chicago that was striking at a hotel, but couldn't get any traction, so for weeks took to blaring bullhorns and sirens outside a children's hospital at 2am to put pressure on the city to put pressure on the hotel.
In the end, the hotel closed and the people who tortured the sick children ended up losing their jobs.
I'm not entirely convinced these two situations are even remotely alike. But yeah, by savage I didn't mean unjustified or evil or anything negative.
“ Tommy used to work on the docks, union's been on strike He's down on his luck, it's tough, so tough” - living on a prayer by bon jovi
If Linux kernel can be developed remotely spanning over several architectures and huge number of mission critical subsystems, surely your systems having blog posts, comments and such can work as well and if not, you have failed to articulate exactly what needs to be done and by when and under what constraints.
Didn't you think about them?
These formerly poor countries become middle class and then manufacturing has to shift to one of remaining poor countries.
It’s challenging to say the least. Even when working between first-world countries speaking English, there’s a host of serious problems. Cultural differences; different expectations; time zone differences.
I'm fully aware of how jaring it is for the median HN reader to hear this, but maintenance of a news website isn't the kind of skilled labour that commands a 250k a year paycheck anymore.
It’s not rocket engineering but it’s not nothing.
With 100k annual budget you can hire a contractor with good English who will be working in your timezone.
Regarding cultural difference - does everyone in your office has the same culture? No indian-born developers? No asian-born?
"Management says that the Guild has bogged down negotiations with what the paper sees as outlandish, even illegal, proposals. As Semafor previously reported, the Guild proposed a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news."
"The union, which covers the newsroom's software engineers, product managers, designers and other tech workers, has also put forward language about journalistic integrity and issues around bylines, catch-and-kill, and letters to the editor - which management rejected out-of-hand."