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New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

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Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#431

Post by gamepsys »

squigz wrote: post #292
thegrim33 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well here's a challenge for you, we can easily put your viewpoint to the test: Go on the NYT website right now and find me a single article currently on the front page that's negative about leftist policies or politicians, or a single article that's positive about rightist policies or politicians. I bet you can't find any. Repeat this experiment, any minute, any hour, any day, any year, for the last 10 years, and you…

Let's just assume you're right, and this experiment is true a majority of the time... wouldn't another possible explanation be that that's a perfectly fair representation of things? Both sides aren't always equal. Weighing the coverage of both sides to be equal would be misleading.

If the unbiased view is leftist then an unbiased newspaper would be left leaning.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#432

Post by kingkawn »

loeg wrote: post #427
dwallin wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's notable that you completely skipped over the following point: > Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from underrepresented groups.

The statistic, just like the other ones, doesn't tell you whether these firings were reasonable or not.

[flagged]

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#433

Post by consteval »

ImJamal wrote: post #403
consteval wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't, and I said nothing of the sort. I said the NYT, and other media outlets, are not "far right insane wackos". Some people then run with that and say they're left-wing. That's not the case. NYT is center-right, maybe center, and absolute worst-case slightly center-left. Our perception is warped, because we compare it to the likes of Fox News. Which is so unbelievably far right, that just about anything looks l…

Funny how you are now actually moving the goal posts. Originally it was "they're right-leaning". Now it is "absolute worst-case slightly center-left". You are admitting they may not be right wing and yet you accused me, who was simply asking for clarification, of moving the goal posts. There is no point in continuing a conversation when you are just projecting exactly what you are doing on me.

You managed to ignore the rest of my comment, so appreciate the honesty.

I mean by "worst case" you could form an argument that says something like NYT is slightly center-left. And that's the best you can do.

The propaganda that the media is left-wing or left-wing extremists is just that, propaganda. On a related note, there are exactly 0 communist democrat candidates in the US.

In reality, most of our sources and policies on a federal level are strictly right-wing. This only gets more right-heavy when you consider that the US is the most right-leaning first world country.

What we, commonly, perceive as "right wing" is actually far-right politics. For example Fox News is not right-wing, they're far right. Trump isn't right-wing, he's far right. Biden isn't left-wing, he's center, etc.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#434

Post by lupusreal »

julesqs wrote: post #363
janalsncm wrote: post #258

It should tell you something that 95% of the union voted to strike. I found more information from them here: https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes... I wonder how other news outlets will cover this, if at all. They’re probably afraid others will get the same idea.

the editorial bias from management of NYT has always been skeptical of Google and Facebook and perhaps all of big tech because big tech was a threat to their business. Most newspapers in the US have been hollowed out because of social media and the tech industry, NYT ironically has not because they hired a real in house tech team that has kept their paper relevant. But that doesn't mean they like paying their tech wo…

> Most newspapers in the US have been hollowed out because of social media and the tech industry,

They've been declining ever since radio and TV started doing news broadcasts, early to mid 20th century. Internet tech has played a role too, but the whole newspaper industry should have seen the writing on the wall several generations ago.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#435

Post by lupusreal »

cantSpellSober wrote: post #329
aurareturn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it a little ironic that NY Times, and most east coast media, is very anti big tech and pro union while their own employees are protesting because of low wages? Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?

> Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly? The journalists (and tech workers) don't decide their own salary. You conflated "they" as both management and the people being managed, to make it "ironic."

I wonder if the NYTimes journalists will sympathy strike. (They won't.)

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#436

Post by tacticalturtle »

malfist wrote: post #62
notfried wrote: post #17

[flagged]

This type of comment shows up on every single post about unions or layoffs. The answer is always the same: It might take you and a friend a weekend to build a [insert company] clone, but by the time you need to support the level of customers as [insert company] it'll certainly need a lot more work.

Additionally, we have no idea what kind of internal legacy services need to be maintained inside the organization - I’m guessing the Tech guild doesn’t just cover the externally facing website.

You could probably build something with modern technologies to satisfy internal requirements, but plenty of businesses look at the risk of moving to something new vs something that’s worked for a decade, and justifiably say let’s just pay the maintenance cost.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#437

Post by paperplatter »

maximinus_thrax wrote: post #426
novayumatango wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even if they did, there are trading blackout periods to prevent this (like other companies of similar size)

It seems that subtlety doesn't cut through the 'akshually' layer. The point I was trying to make is that regardless of what the company files publicly, employees will have more relevant information than an external observer such as us. There may be internal memos announcing upcoming changes in working conditions or benefits, chatter about SLT, chatter about acquisitions, layoffs, etc... So, the argument that we can b…

Ok, I still doubt they have a better idea about that. Plenty of outsiders know more about my workplace than I do simply because they bothered researching, and the internal comms are more a distraction than actually juicy.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#438

Post by VancouverMan »

Larrikin wrote: post #308
throwawaylolx wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Which ones?

Just over a decade ago, there was a job ad for a host role with the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that explicitly required applicants to be "Any race except Caucasian".

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/cbc-no-caucasian

While it was portrayed as a "mistake" during the subsequent backtracking, that incident certainly planted a seed of doubt in my mind.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#439

Post by bbatha »

andai wrote: post #424
Workaccount2 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we look at past times these things are brought up; almost certainly not. Often things like part-time vs. full time aren't considered or amount of overtime hours worked (for hourly jobs).

The reasoning I heard is that it's explained by differences in personality across the two populations. One group is, on average, more assertive, and as a result more likely to negotiate higher salary.

Which is reasoning that's difficult to prove. To the contrary women and underprivileged minorities also feel like they can't be assertive without being labeled as shrill.

The wage gap, at firms without a history of discrimination, is almost entirely determined by women having their first child and the support structures around it (subsidized childcare, paternity leave, flexible hours).[1][2] This suggests the assertiveness is probably not the issue.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaconn/2023/11/08/nobel-winne... [2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#440

Post by sensanaty »

ipaddr wrote: post #332
lacker wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the New York Times will end up both with a unionized tech workforce, and a lower-paid one. Personally, I would never want to join a union or work as management at a company with a union, but I am still kind of curious to see what the result of a tech workforce unionizing would be.

Lower salaries and treating everyone like a cog.

You think joining a union makes you a cog?

Have the mass layoffs every single year taught people nothing? Newsflash, every company treats every single one of their employees as another replaceable cog in the machine. Even if you're the supreme grand wizard of space time and SQL at your FAANG job, you are still fully replaceable and will be if the business sees it as profitable to do so.

For now SWEs have it good, but this is quickly changing and techies are letting them do it because many of them have superiority complexes and naively think of themselves as indispensable to the business, as if there isn't an ocean of Eastern Europeans who'd happily take their place in the rat race to the botto.

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