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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

#841

Post by JamesBarney »

shadowgovt wrote: post #707
pc86 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "just asking for due process." Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing. Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen. This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try t…

> If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement It appears we have stopped teaching Mythical Man Month in university.

An inexperienced good employee will slow you down far less than an experienced bad one.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#842

Post by anonu »

7thpower wrote: post #10
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #2

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/business/media/new-york-t... https://archive.ph/f9gP0

You are doing god’s work. Also, fyi for others. Many public libraries have NYT daily access codes you can use for free. It’s a bit of a pain to have to renew each day you want to read NYT but is still great to have. Having a gift link is even more convenient.

The irony of your comment is that tech workers want pay increases (amongst other things) and here we're talking about avoiding paying for their product.

NYT is a great publication and I'm happy to pay less than a $1 a day for tons of great content.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#843

Post by JamesBarney »

Timon3 wrote: post #460
kjksf wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might by what YOU want or what you hallucinate the demand is but most reasonable interpretation of what we know is that they in fact want to prevent being fired for low performance. if you can be fired "only for misconduct" and low performance doesn't count as misconduct means that you cannot be fired for low performance. Granted, the actual demand might be more nuanced but going only by what was reported, they…

No, what's reported is that the tech workers are asking for a "just cause" provision. This is a well-established legal concept that explicitly includes what GP posted. The reporting you're reading that fails to mention this happens to be from the New York Times. Can you guess why they don't mention this?

In theory that's how it works. In practice the amount of documentation is onerous enough most managers just decide it's not worth the effort.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#844

Post by tibbon »

legitster wrote: post #323

> 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

> there's not a clear button the Times can push on behalf of the union to end the strike immediately. The Times would either have to sign a blank check to the union now

But that's the thing, NYT Leadership can choose to offer agreeable terms and end this now. They simply elect not to. Management often likes to drag out negotiations and then play the victim.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#846

Post by akdor1154 »

axus wrote: post #462
bko wrote: 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…

It's like the unpopular, friendless kids in high school, you just know. And there's nothing they can do to change it.

And then they go on to be a (difficult to work with) 10× developer?

Instinctive social judgement definitely exists. Is it a good metric to find good employees? Dunno, maybe?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#847

Post by tibbon »

artursapek wrote: post #737

Wow, the company that makes it impossible to cancel their subscription without an hour long phone call also stiffs their workers of cost-of-living wage increases? I'm shocked

Might be making that hour-long call soon if NYT Management doesn't make some changes to support their union...

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#848

Post by beepbooptheory »

slt2021 wrote: post #735
crazygringo wrote: post #371

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…

If you have the time, could you explain what you think "gender studies" entails? Not to step on your broader point at all, but I think you might need to pick a better strawman here.

I can only speak anecdotally with my many years in the "liberal arts", but feel pretty confident you would be laughed out of the classroom for bringing such a thing up, whatever side of it you are on. Its just more of a thing people like us argue about on message boards, not really something academics would care about beyond a fraught data point! For I hope obvious reasons.

And no I cant speak for the annoying guy you met one time who was a gender studies major. I'm sure they were very annoying though.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#849

Post by slt2021 »

Spivak wrote: post #781
ceejayoz wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity? You get that "all the black people are in lower roles or somehow all deemed less productive" is worse, right?

Jesus christ thank you, folks on the internet are so quick to dismiss pay gaps just because we know what causes them as if that magically makes it not a problem. Take one factor, women earn less because of mid-career halts due to having children, like the father didn't also have a child . Women bear the brunt because we're expected to be the primary caregivers, and this hurts men too due to the "father babysitting hi…

this is not an issue between union and corporation, but more like societal issue. Other countries provide prolonged maternity leave (Sweden has 16 months leave) and free/cheap childcare.

Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.

This is not a gender issue, this is the issue of American elites refusing to provide incentives to working American families.

Remember, most of the American societal "struggles" across artificial wedge lines (straight vs gay, male vs female, democrat vs republican, pro-choice vs pro-life, coastal vs rural, etc etc) => are artificially created by the mainstream media and Uniparty in the DC to leech taxes from working families and selectively prop up one side of the struggle, so that another side is outraged and fought the other.

There is only one struggle in America: rich rentiers on Investment income/Trust funds vs Working class on W2 income.

everything else is distraction

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#850

Post by anigbrowl »

slt2021 wrote: post #771
ceejayoz wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity? You get that "all the black people are in lower roles or somehow all deemed less productive" is worse, right?

Deemed “as less productive” by whom? We have a free labour market, if it was true that NYT underpaid Black workers for the same productivity, they could easily jump ship to other company and make more $$. What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????

We have a free labour market

Do we? Your spelling suggests you're not from the US, so I wonder how familiar you are with market conditions. Gotta say your arguments here and above come off as a little shallow.

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