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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

#891
post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though only for employers that don't care who they hire in the first place, if you fire someone simply because they might be harder to fire lately you don't really care about who you hired.

I actually came to the opposite conclusion: you really care about who you hired, because you define who they work with. If you hire a low performer or someone that isn't a good culture fit, the productivity of your other team members will suffer.

The claim is you would fire someone purely because they are about to age into a bit more job security.

If you fire some because they are a bad employee in some well defined way, that's a completely different situation.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers generally would prefer to pay people less. If you don't ask for a raise you often don't get one. If you ask for a raise, you generally need to consider quitting if you don't get so kind of raise. Men are generally more aggressive about asking for raises. From a certain perspective when one sees a "pay gap" you could think, "Women need to risk more and fight for higher pay. They are bringing wages down for e…

Some recruitment firms had some reports that corroborated that. HIRED’s annual report showed that too. In person, I’ve seen many women colleagues do things at odds with the competition For example, being worried about how to move up in their organization without coming across as “too bitchy”, as if it was a unique phenomenon to their gender When the competition is: - losing opportunities for being too cocky, and they…

Have you honestly heard any male colleague described as “too bitchy”? How did you listen to your female colleagues’ genuine experience of being unfairly labeled and come away from it thinking it was their fault? And the solution is “don’t be loyal and lie”? Sure you can probably get ahead doing that but yikes maybe it’s the system that’s the problem.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#893

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…

The gender pay gap disappears when you control for hours worked, job seniority, and experience.

So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post:

> Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation.

What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 explicit…

> 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.

What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#895

Have devs at any of the large tech companies ever tried to unionize? If not, why not?

I think Boeing developers might be part of their engineers union. Tech companies tend not to unionize, because most developers don't see net gain to be had from unionizing. Most unions end up serving the interest of the union instead of the company, and enact things like seniority based pay and promotion. There's just too much incentive to cater towards interest of mediocre employees in a union model. Another big fac…

> because most developers don't see net gain to be had from unionizing.

you think visa workers have the balls to unionize?

that's what this is all about, finding people who can't say "no". if this round of visa workers wants to say "no" they'll just turn around and import a few more

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 explicit…

did you actually read the research you cited? because it DOES NOT control for hours worked nor experience, and lumps up narrow specialties with wide specialties together in a single "finance". There is a huge difference in finance as a "bank teller" and finance as a "investment banker at Wall St". This is a problem of large scale population level wage research, it misses very important confounding variables and lumps…

The first sentence in the quote talks about trying to explain wage differences by hours worked?

I can also tell you didn't bother to peruse the linked summary, because it also talks about experience though they call it work history.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

it's not anti union propaganda. The largest union in the United States is the public school teachers union. It has explicitly fought against merit based pay for decades. Other Unions like the electricians unions also sets up seniority base systems. You can proclaim that it's propaganda all you want, but what matters is whether or not it's actually true. I agree that the union has no incentive to look after the benefi…

you see "merit based pay", I see corporations incentivizing shitty boundaries

if you adjust for hours worked, unionized employees will make more

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#898
post #45

Just cause feels like a stretch. Is that common in a lot of employment contracts? Feels like one of those rules that sounds like it could make sense but in reality it does not play out and you get this weird cohort of unproductive employees that you can never get rid of.

Due process for employment is probably more important than fair pay in most union contracts. Your argument is in fact that exact same one that was used to argue against due process in legal proceedings. "In reality it doesn't play out and you get this group of criminals running free on legal technicalities." If you are in a union shop and have a large contingent of unproductive employees, it happens for the same reas…

Incorrectly firing a high performer is nowhere near the harm of incorrectly jailing an innocent man.

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#899

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…

[flagged]

Re: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

#900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems they failed either because: 1. The businesses didn't know how to handle the workers not being in the office. While a problem in the past, this is now a solved problem thanks to COVID forcing them to figure it out. 2. The businesses tried to hire cheap workers. This is still going to fail, just as hiring minimum wage workers in the US for the job would fail. The workers you actually want charge the same no ma…

Cultural problems, communication problems, leadership problems. I’ve been involved in a lot of software offshoring projects. It’s about twice as likely to end in failure compared to onshore software development services. It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.

> It has nothing to do with the price. I’ve worked with great devs who were cheap and terrible devs who were expensive. And it’s hard to tell which is which till the project ships or fails to ship.

Very interesting, thanks!

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