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New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#151

Post by linsomniac »

michaelt wrote: post #128
ceejayoz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That figure is an average of $40,000 more than members of the Times’s journalist union, she said. The journalist union should push for an increase too, then. NYC cost of living is enormous .

I don't know about the NYT, but in my country newspapers are fighting for their lives, financially. Newspapers closing down and others laying off staff is a regular occurance. 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 compa…

Sure, but the workers don't have to take a shave to prop up a failing business model. Sure, they COULD just go somewhere else, but it's reasonable to first negotiate with the employer, because, ideally, the employer doesn't want a whole section of their workforce to just leave.

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.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#152

Post by chaostheory »

stego-tech wrote: post #118
impish9208 wrote: post #80

From the WSJ’s reporting on this: > 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 previousl…

When I see people critique those numbers as being “too high”, or demands for additional compensation “unreasonable”, I can’t help but think those people don’t understand that $100k is very much the new $45k of the 2000s, and has much less purchasing power than the latter did at the time. 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 “comfor…

Remote work made so much sense for all the reasons you’ve listed.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#153

Post by raybb »

xnx wrote: post #113

> more than 600 software developers 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'm almost certain that 600 software developers is wrong and that it's actually 600 people in the whole union (software developers, data analysts, designers, and product managers).

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.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#154

Post by 9dev »

bee_rider wrote: post #137
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #110

This strike seems very poorly messaged. As far as I can tell, the union hasn't given any public explanation of what specific demands management won't meet. The union website doesn't even mention that they're on strike!

> Negotiations between it and the Times hit logjams over things like a “just cause” provision that prevents the company from firing workers unless it’s for something like misconduct, as well as pay increases, pay equity, and return-to-office policies, reports the Times. 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 p…

As a foreigner it’s so alien to me that such a provision isn’t mandated by law anyway, and that there isn’t broad support in the population to restrict employers from firing at will… wild.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#155

Post by bsimpson »

gruez wrote: post #132
cowpig wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's put those numbers in perspective: $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 s…

Most families have more than one earner, though.

It'll be curious to see what the ramifications are of sending a kid to daycare basically straight away, vs rearing him at home until he's ~5.

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.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#156

Post by syndicatedjelly »

bwestergard wrote: post #3

I am also a member of the union at NPR, on the subway headed to the picket line in solidarity right now. Happy to answer any questions. 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,…

What leverage does the Times tech workers have in this negotiation? Why does their job specifically matter, versus someone abroad who can do some web dev and data wrangling for a fraction of the cost and similar quality?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#157

Post by dpkirchner »

gruez wrote: post #146
stego-tech wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I see people critique those numbers as being “too high”, or demands for additional compensation “unreasonable”, I can’t help but think those people don’t understand that $100k is very much the new $45k of the 2000s, and has much less purchasing power than the latter did at the time. 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 “comfor…

>I can’t help but think those people don’t understand that $100k is very much the new $45k of the 2000s, and has much less purchasing power than the latter did at the time. 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. [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Does that account for increased housing prices? It probably doesn't, because housing prices (cash price, per the fed) more than doubled since 2005: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYSTHPI

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#158

Post by michaelt »

ceejayoz wrote: post #130
michaelt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the NYT, but in my country newspapers are fighting for their lives, financially. Newspapers closing down and others laying off staff is a regular occurance. 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 compa…

The NYT has 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 comp…

Profit of $104.7 million a year. 5800 employees [1]. So a profit of $18k per employee.

A $40k wage gap between tech and journalism it'd be nice to close.

That's gonna be one difficult negotiation.

[1] https://www.nytco.com/

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#159

Post by BobaFloutist »

vijucat wrote: post #47
bwestergard wrote: post #3

I am also a member of the union at NPR, on the subway headed to the picket line in solidarity right now. Happy to answer any questions. 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,…

Genuine question: what prevents the NYT from offshoring these jobs if they can be done from home? I feel for you, as a fellow worker, but unless there is something hyper-local about the job such as regulatory requirements or trust issues with IP protection, the jobs will go to the ones who work hard without complaining too much.

I think if they did that and the union made a big enough stink, customers would potentially riot.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#160

Post by IncreasePosts »

cowpig wrote: post #145
greentxt wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I guess we disagree on whether unions should fight for enough wages for their workers to support a family.

Should people with families get paid more in order to support them? Why would a single person need to get paid as much as a person supporting another adult without a job and two children?
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