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New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

washingtonpost.com

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much! That is a vastly more informative article. It seems like it's not so much the NYT is opposed to the contract's specifics -- they're opposed to having a contract at all because the union is new. The NYT has been stringing the union along without ever actually signing anything, so now the union has to strike to get the NYT to take them seriously. Key parts: > The Tech Guild won its unionization vote…

>>According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers >>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" c…

> claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender?

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""

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull 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 blo…

Sure, but you are also appealing for public sentiment. So there's a reason why teacher's unions carefully time their strikes so they don't clash with important events like SAT season. 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.

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Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3/4 are directors and managers 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 bene…

I'm pro union. I'm just saying I've worked with a lot of people with Director in their title that I know don't do any actual work other than balance a budget or shuffle shit around in spreadsheets once every couple months. I've been at my new job almost a year now, and I can't believe what people are getting away with. Obviously not everywhere is like this, but it's not my first job where the rest of the company is c…

I see - I absolutely agree with your assessment that the Directors may not be contributing any actual value at this point. I would love to see more servant leadership, and perhaps have management be an elected position instead of one that seems to be reserved for a certain Class of person.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#794

> The two sides negotiated until late Sunday. The sticking points in recent days were over whether they could get a “just cause” provision in their contract, which means workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason; pay increases and pay equity; and return-to-office policies. This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out. It would be one thing if they were disagreeing abou…

> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull

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.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#795
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much everyone agreed. If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. So creating a documentation trail is difficult, especially if its based on people saying they don't think he does good wor…

> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true 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!

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Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What news organizations truly compare to the NYT tech game though? As far as I can tell, they are at the top.

Comparing to other "news organizations" might not make sense if we're including Wirecutter and the games division (e.g. Wordle) on the NYT side. They should be compared to other types of media orgs. Not that NYT hasn't done some interesting innovative technical stuff within their journalism.

Wordle was famously made and run by one person. How many are needed to keep it running now?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#797
post #719

Related :/ Perplexity CEO offers to replace striking NYT staff with AI https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/04/perplexity-ceo-offers-to-r...

Did he actually say that? 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).

Crossing the picket line like this is craven and opportunistic.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you are also appealing for public sentiment. So there's a reason why teacher's unions carefully time their strikes so they don't clash with important events like SAT season. 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.

I don't think there will be any impactful election news for at least 48 hours, probably more. People will be nervously grasping for assurances that they can't realistically have and the outlets will be cranking out content to fill that void without actually saying anything. It's pretty much just dark entertainment at this point. Writing such content would be terrible, sounds like a great time to strike.

There’s not much actual value to society to having stuff like the election needle running, it is just a moment-to-moment description of the processes of counting votes, which have already been cast, so we can “enjoy” the stress of Election Day.

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.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#799
post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. 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 sounds liking replacing striking staff to me 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.

I don't think it's necessarily either-or. If he had the time to personally write the tweet, I think he would be willing to lend some engineers to help get them set up with their services.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way do you think the current tech industry has turned into a shit show?

There's a lot of companies now that expect you to leave the house and go work around other people. Like, what the hell?

> go work around other people

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”.

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