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New York Times tech workers to strike this afternoon
- donohoe 3y agoFor those who can't access the full content: https://archive.ph/l437Q https://archive.ph/l437Q
- bwestergard 3y agoI'm not a New York Times employee, but I do work at another large American media organization as a software developer, and was elected to our bargaining committee to represent software developers. We are part of the same union[1]. I have met many bargaining committee members at the NYT and they are all extremely sharp. The tech guild is well organized and I think the NYT management has much more to lose than the workforce in these negotiations. Per the article, there are two main issues behind this strike: remote work and open bargaining. We have a tentative contract agreement that we're voting on this week; it would guarantee remote work for devs for three years, and put caps on days in office for some workers who have on site job duties. The NYT is trying to avoid bargaining over remote work full stop by making unilateral changes before they bargaining a full contact (their legal obligation). The other issue is open bargaining, which simply means that that union members can observe the bargaining sessions that will produce the agreement they will vote on. Without open bargaining, it's very difficult for members to be involved in improving proposals. Every single one of our bargaining sessions was open, and I can't imagine doing it any other way. The NYT would prefer closed door meetings because it gives them opportunities them to drive a wedge between the workers who do the bargaining and their peers. Unfortunately, many unions have been cowed into accepting this employer demand, such that the NYT can present closed door bargaining as "typical". [1]: http://code-cwa.org http://code-cwa.org
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> NYT would prefer closed door meetings because it gives them opportunities them to drive a wedge between the workers who do the bargaining and their peers To be fair, it also deters posturing and promotes compromise. Open bargaining means not only every employee is involved, but inevitably, the broader public, too.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoOne of the things I've noticed with a number of recent strikes (not all, but a bunch) is how many are not over pay but primarily over working conditions. E.g. there was a big strike by nurses in Austin whose primary concern was woefully short staffing that was leaving nurses burnt out and making it difficult to provide adequate care. It feels to me like the pandemic fundamentally changed many people's mindsets with their relationship to work: while I think some people went off the deep end with the r/antiwork crowd, others just reconsidered the amount of time and effort they wanted to put towards work so it wasn't detrimental to other aspects of their lives. They still wanted to do good work and have pride in their work, it was just no longer their primary focus. So I feel a lot of these union battles are primarily about control. Many employees basically did get a bit "woke" (not in the woke-liberal sense, but in the "my eyes are opened to why am I killing myself at a job" sense), and employers are trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
- Frost1x 3y ago>One of the things I've noticed with a number of recent strikes (not all, but a bunch) is how many are not over pay but primarily over working conditions. E.g. there was a big strike by nurses in Austin whose primary concern was woefully short staffing that was leaving nurses burnt out and making it difficult to provide adequate care. Actualized pay is often more the issue here, however we look at or segment it (working conditions, net pay, etc). It's about the net transaction of your time for labor vs compensation. Magnitude of compensation is important because people need enough money and free time to make it worth working, but there are many ways to squeeze this, just as your example points out. Understaffing, pushing increased productivity requirements, tucking in new responsibilities, reducing benefits in some way, slacking on safety or security, etc. It's difficult to quantify all of this for most people so we often just look at pay. We'll, getting paid more than enough to live comfortably.. sure, but maybe you're working long hours to get that and stressed out of your mind. Maybe you're losing sleep. Maybe you're sacrificing your health to focus on improved business outputs. It's an in/out situation, are you getting enough out for what you put in and that's often the issue. Any business paying market rates will be quick to point at salary and ignore everything else because it's very easy to discuss, compare, and argue about.
- danielvf 3y agoThanks for sharing. It's valuable to hear from so close to the situation. I'm interested in seeing how the open bargaining turns out - my understanding had been that closed bargaining evolved to solve problems with open bargaining, but perhaps the situation has changed now, and unions need to prioritize member engagement more these days than in the past.
- rendall 3y agoSuch good news that unions are getting more legitimacy in the US. Keep it up!
- ck425 3y agoInteresting that remote working is one of the key demands. I wonder if this is what will finally get tech workers to appreciate the value of unions.
- silenced_trope 3y agoI imagine unionizing software engineers at a media company is probably a bit easier since the equity side of NYT is likely not as valuable as tech companies in the Bay Area. For instance there's also this news today out of union-heavy Sweden where a Tesla worker walk-out failed: > Some younger employees also reportedly stated that their salary and career paths are much better at Tesla as compared to other automakers. They also appreciated the fact that they were issued stock options from the company, some of whom have reportedly seen an increase of several hundred percent to date. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38070432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38070432 Of course there's also alternative data points: such as most employees only speaking on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago[flagged]
- burkaman 3y agoI can't read the whole piece, does he get into evidence for his feelings? He seems to be saying in the part I can acccess that the NYT refused to discuss Biden's age and health until July 2022 when something changed ("The New York Times has declared the President’s age acceptable for discussion."). This is obviously not true, and I'm sure Matt Taibbi knows how to use a search engine so I'm wondering if I'm misinterpreting somehow. Some examples: When he took office: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/joe-biden-age-oldest-presidents.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/joe-biden-age... Biden is old, should he run? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/politics/biden-democrats-2024.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/politics/biden-democra..., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/opinion/biden-age-election-2024.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/opinion/biden-age-electio... Biden is still old, he still shouldn't run. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/us/politics/biden-2024-election-democrats.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/us/politics/biden-2024-el... I don't know how many times they're supposed to run the same story, but this seems like an appropriate amount to me.
- InitialLastName 3y agoTaibbi is just doing his normal "assert things that confirm my audience's biases, hope they won't check" process. It's how he thinks journalists work, so why shouldn't he do the same?
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoTaibbi hasn't been a journalist in over a decade. He's positioned himself as a brand but he doesn't have the talent to produce daily content, so instead he runs snark pieces for the alt-right.
- afavour 3y agoIsn't that piece on the very specific topic of how the Times has covered Biden's health? If that's the case can you explain the relevance to the NYT tech workers going on strike as part of their negotiations? I get the position companies like NYT hold in society but in this particular instance their role is that of a tech employer engaged in heavy-handed negotiations with a union forming among their workers. Can't we, for once, talk about that without yet another distraction into this week's political football?
- CSMastermind 3y agoI worked at Dow Jones (owners of The Wall Street Journal) and was forced into the union there. That particular union at the time at that company was nothing but a detriment to me and other software engineers. You paid dues and got nothing but lower wages in return. The union would also protect the jobs of under-performing employees which was just demoralizing. One of the things people would negotiate for was to be made nominally into managers with only 1 direct report so they could get out of the union and individually negotiate their pay packages outside of the union's agreement. Now possibly part of the problem was that it was not a union for all software engineers but a general union for employees of many different jobs. But the experience left me skeptical of unions in this profession. I think something like employees pooling their equity to get representation on the board or something like that might be more effective.
- runako 3y ago> But the experience left me skeptical of unions in this profession. I think something like employees pooling their equity to get representation on the board or something like that might be more effective. This wildly overstates the amount of equity that non-exec employees have at the vast majority of firms. It also ignores that fact that companies are able to issue different classes of stock with differing rights. Further, it overstates the possible influence of a single board member. The Dow Jones board has 14 members; I'm not sure that adding a 15th to represent employees would meaningfully change anything beyond the length of the board meetings.
- philipov 3y agoBloomberg? Is New York Times not reporting on this? :p
- rooters23908 3y agoReuters too https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-times-tech-workers-strike-over-return-to-office-rules-bloomberg-news-2023-10-30/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-times-tech-workers...
- sidcool 3y agoSoftware Engineers Union. Wow, never thought that would happen. Does it mean we are laborers now?
- philipov 3y agoAlways have been.
- greenie_beans 3y agowise up, your labor as a software engineer is being exploited! we are the laborers of the 21st century, building the future. if somebody tells you, "you're among the most privileged class of workers making a lot of money, you don't need a union," then kindly tell them to go fuck themselves. but seriously, we are all part of the working class regardless of income bracket, and that sort of thinking is intended to drive divisions in the working class so we don't have class solidarity. if you are a software engineer working for a salary, then the "value" you produce is captured by the owning class via free market transactions paying for whatever your labor produced, and thus you have an incentive to reclaim your stolen value as a laborer.
- gosub100 3y agoWhat if I don't want "solidarity" with inept coworkers, or fixed wages, or corrupt leaders? I think Amazon drivers and warehouse workers need unionization. They have been actively exploited for many years now and still don't have a voice. We live in paradise compared to them.
- greenie_beans 3y agothe solidarity i'm describing would help you see how you have the same interests as an amazon driver or warehouse worker, except you get paid a lot more with better working conditions. your dissatisfaction with coworkers and leadership sound like interpersonal problems that will happen in any organization regardless of power structures.
- 3y ago
- nixpulvis 3y agoThe biggest factor making me want remote work is to avoid being actively monitored by surveillance cameras all the time. Otherwise, I miss being around my coworkers.
- yieldcrv 3y agoNeed to make it so they don’t monitor computer activity too
- nixpulvis 3y agoOh yea. They try to take away root, put crazy network monitors in place and push all my development into the cloud. Funny how much some shitty employers like to get in the way of developers getting things done. Though to be fair, a lot of you guys can’t be trusted, and data breaches are a major liability, soooo… here we are.
- 93po 3y agoI never do anything not work on my work laptop and I'm not sure why anyone would.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoWhen the rubber hits the road, it swings from the left to the right.
- taude 3y agoDoes a three year contract for remote work, give NYTimes mgmt time to get more jobs outsourced over seas? this is what I've seen at my last two companies of employment. Remote work is a gateway to off-shore for a lot of companies, it appears.
- paxys 3y agoCompanies have been trying to off-shore work since the 90s, or possibly even earlier. I used to constantly hear "don't study software engineering, all the jobs are going to India" 25+ years ago. Some companies did succeed in doing it, but most ended up paying 80% of the costs for 10% of the quality, and abandoned the experiment. Remote work changes nothing in that regard.
- dilyevsky 3y agoThat assumes you wont get similar drop off in “quality” with union-forced remote-only arrangement
- Apocryphon 3y agoWas there a drop off in quality with quarantine-forced remote-only arrangement? The markets said "No."
- dilyevsky 3y agoLol now try that without simultaneous infusion of trillions of capital and see what the markets say. In fact I think they already said it...
- Apocryphon 3y agoSounds like quality is never truly being measured, either way!
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- VFIT7CTO77TOC 3y ago[flagged]
- slamonjam 3y agoOh dear, I hope this won't affect Wordle.
- paxys 3y agoAlternatively I hope this does affect Wordle, so it gets visibility and management/ownership can treat it with the urgency it deserves.
- golergka 3y agoVery happy to see this! I work for american companies from outside of US, and as more and more american companies go full remote, they become more open to work with people like me. However, I'm not sure it's a good thing for tech workers who are already located in US as they look their competitive advantage on the labour market.
- bjornlouser 3y agoWhy strike when you can sabotage? Can't they accept crypto anonymously and use those funds to publicize their demands while crippling the company from within? EDIT: the sabotage may already be happening... the NYT iPad seems extremely slow and buggy.
- ugh123 3y agoThe use of "remote work" as a chip on the bargaining table is risky. Employers will ship jobs overseas faster than any point in the last 20 years if employees demand that as part of a deal. Unions have no place in technology companies. It will drive down wages and performance and ship jobs out of the U.S.
- henry2023 3y ago"It will drive down wages" All evidence suggests that unionized workers earn more than non-unionized workers. Unions are not perfect but they bring more of the value being created by employees to the employees. An unionized US tech worker working from Bolivia will still make more than a non unionized US tech worker working in SF.
- ugh123 3y agoIn what industry? That may hold for labor trades like plumbing, electrician, etc. but that data doesn't hold for teacher's unions in cities with a proportional number of private schools vs public unionized schools.
- henry2023 3y agoIn all industries on average. Soon we'll have more data on the tech sector as more people unionize. As of right now, we can only expect the surplus to be the average surplus across industries. Also, our work is much closer to the electrician than to the teacher. But it doesn't feel right to take this into account.
- Jensson 3y ago> An unionized US tech worker working from Bolivia will still make more than a non unionized US tech worker working in SF. This got to be sarcasm, right? Or you made a mistake? Your post doesn't really make sense.
- henry2023 3y ago
- storf45 3y agoAre the engineers having the product managers be the main negotiators with management? Would be interested in what the union mix of representation is and who does what.
- strangesmells02 3y agoI tried to get a job working for the New York times tech department they treated me like absolute ass. Glad they're getting ripped off.
- gaws 3y ago> I tried to get a job working for the New York times tech department they treated me like absolute ass. Can you elaborate?