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New York Times tech workers form a union
- busterarm 6y agoIt has been an increasingly unpleasant place to work the last few years. This might be the thing that gets the last few of my friends there to leave.
- dcgudeman 6y agodid you work there?
- busterarm 6y agoNo, but I'm close friends with about a dozen people who did or do. Same comments about management from all of them: directionless, self-defeating.
- ahelwer 6y agoSounds like greater line employee input in the direction of the company would be a good change, then?
- busterarm 6y agothe NYT is already significantly unionized. Unions are already giving their input in directing the company.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoUnions don’t exactly give individual employees more input. By unionizing, the individuals surrender a lot of their individual bargaining power to the union and let the union act according to what it thinks is best for the union, but not necessarily individual employees.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoExactly. Look how well the union protected Don McNeil during his dust up. Even though he was a committed union guy who helped the union negotiate, the union decided to side with management.
- ahelwer 6y agoUnions are democratic organizations. Employees elect the leadership, which can effectively advocate on their behalf for changes to company strategy in addition to general compensation & working conditions issues. So yes, by creating a parallel power structure beholden to workers, not management, unions do give individual employees more input. You are saying that an individual employee voicing their concerns to their manager has more sway than a union bringing that concern up to the executives.
- gher-shyu3i 6y agoJust because they're democratically elected does not mean they will act on the the best for each individual employee.
- ahelwer 6y agoSure. Pretty easy to beat the standard set when there's no union though, which in my experience is "your manager listens to your concerns and explains to you why it isn't a problem". The parallel power structure offers you the possibility of recourse, but not the guarantee. And if you want to put effort into having your concerns heard, you'll be convincing people (your coworkers) whose interest generally align with yours.
- gipp 6y agoI left about 2.5 years ago. I wasn't unhappy with the job, just got a better offer, but this is pretty true. You could count on a "re-org" or new project management strategy being announced every two quarters with no more justification than "the current thing isn't working", and you could count on essentially no follow-through after that announcement.
- francisofascii 6y agoFor tech workers or everyone? Curious why.
- threevox 6y agoWow, how badly do you have to treat programmers to get them to unionize?
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y agoI don’t imagine badly. I’d love to be able to have a Union where I can tell my manager not to put me on on-call rotations with no compensation, but I have no bargaining power as an individual. I’m sure other programmers have a whole slew of things that would be great, too, that can only happen if everyone works together to negotiate for it.
- busterarm 6y agoin collective bargaining you ALSO have no bargaining power as an individual. That means you can't go to your bosses and say "I think I'm worth this much (more) money". You also can't leave your job to get paid that much, because seniority at your new company means you will start at lower pay than you currently have.
- Spooky23 6y agoSure you can. Usually there’s a combo of rank+time. I know, I’ve done it. Collective bargaining is usually around work rules and core issues. No non-VP+ individual has the ability to effectively bargain re health insurance. All companies have pay scales. Even massive unionized bureaucracies like the Federal government have the ability to compensate critical employees or critical skills. (Although your definition of critical may not align with the entity)
- busterarm 6y agoI've been in three different unions before I landed in this career. Salary increases were fixed by time and position. Position was always based on seniority. No exceptions. You could try to transfer locations within the same company to try and get better roles (which is how most people got promotions, aside from waiting for people to die). If you changed companies though you started at the bottom, guaranteed, because if you get moved ahead of people in the new company it creates an utter shitstorm. Management at the new job basically has to hate their employees and themselves to do such a thing.
- mc32 6y agoThis should be a good experiment to see how unions affect technology. Is it neutral, does it enhance it or does it hinder it. And the reporting, it would be nice to see the coverage of this by their own reporters or journalists.
- umvi 6y agoI get the advantage of collective bargaining for workers, but I still can't help but think that unions also add a lot of inertia and generally just have a dampening effect on agility, individual contribution, risk taking, etc. which is opposite of what you want for a software shop. Maybe I'm wrong, and perhaps abusive megacorps really do need unions in place as a check against corporate power (never worked for one). I guess time will tell.
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y agoI’ve experienced a dapening effect on all those things due to shitty management too, and I can’t vote my manager out!
- mylons 6y agoI work at a startup and have no ability to take risks, or be agile, or any of those neat things you said because of management.
- hawkice 6y agoTo be fair, if you've been in business more than a century (and are facing weird pressures probably best weathered by staying true to your Paper Of Record history), you probably don't want to be agile and risk taking.
- xhkkffbf 6y agoOne friend of mine was extolling unions after we discussed some pattern of microaggressions that ruined his latest job. He also hated HR which did nothing. A union, he claimed, would have saved him. Perhaps, I said, but private sector unions can't handle workplace friction as easily. Often the other side of the complaint is also in the union and the union is just like a shadow HR. It has to choose winners and losers. Of course collective bargaining is another thing. It can be useful, especially when the jobs are pretty standardized.
- paxys 6y agoImplying that more stability, less risk at a tech corp would be a bad thing. If a union mandated that its members must be allowed to fix bugs before being put on a new project everyone I know would join in a heartbeat.
- idownvoted 6y agoFinally. The most trodden down workers of the first world - poor, starving programmers - who for the most part voluntarily passed on high salaries so they could "be a force for the good" and by joining news outlets [1], are stadning up to the powers that be (no one). [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media
- freedomben 6y agoIt's unfortunate that you included the sarcastic second paragraph, because the link you provided is quite good and provides important perspective. While I clicked it primarily because you were sarcastic, I would bet far more people will look past it because of the same reason. I could be wrong tho.
- ciabattabread 6y agoI can't find the column right now, but the columnist I read said that some of the internal tensions of the New York Times newsroom that have spilled out into public (well, "public" as defined by Twitter's reality distortion field) are partly due to having employees -- specifically, the highly-valued and sought after tech employees -- having a greater say in corporate policy that their predecessors, the printing press operators and the delivery men, didn't have.
- gipp 6y agohttps://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-... Maybe what you're thinking of. Most of this started after I left the company, but I saw some of the beginnings of it, and knowing Kathy Zhang (the organizer quoted in the union article), I would be very surprised if she didn't play a major role in a lot of what's described there.
- ciabattabread 6y agoThat's the article, thanks for finding it.
- 86J8oyZv 6y agoI interviewed there a couple years back. They loved me but the culture seemed pretty clearly to be "we are the elite of the elite reporters, and software engineers are brainless minions here at our pleasure." The offer was... commensurate with that way of thinking. Needless to say, I didn't accept.
- busterarm 6y agoA few years before they shut operations here, I'd met a few engineers/journalists at Al Jazeera at a bar. They were gushing about how much the company had embraced tech and how they were having engineers & data scientists work together with journalists on breaking new stories. That included cross-training engineers to do passable journalism. It seemed like they had a dream job and they were really keen on recruiting every decent engineer they could find. Sad to see how that all ended up.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoI work in media, that is how I always saw the New York Times, especially seeing as Mike Bostock came out of that camp. I'm disappointed to hear they weren't much better than most [traditional] media companies when it comes to the digital approach, at least in HR. The NYT is still in a whole other league over most media companies for their digital product and development.
- paxys 6y agoIs that really a surprise though? This is going to be the experience at 100% of companies where tech is an operating expense, not a money maker. Flipping things around, do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website?
- jefftk 6y ago> do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website? Probably not the level of respect and deference they are accustomed to, but potentially higher pay?
- AJRF 6y agoYou reap what you sow
- dominotw 6y agoCan someone tell me how nytimes gets away with no minority opinion piece writers. I went on their homepage and 11 of the 12 opinion articles are written by non minority authors. Can they do same here with unions and somehow get away with being anti union? what is the logic here?