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 in March of 2022, but has yet to agree upon a final contract with management. In September of this year, the Guild voted to authorize a strike with an overwhelming 95 percent (or over 500 members) in favor. The vote marked two and a half years of bargaining with no result. As Harnett puts it, “At some point, you need a deadline.”
> The first key demand is a protection that Times editorial staff already have: just-cause job protections, which would ensure that members cannot be fired without good reason and due process. The editorial staff won this protection in their 2023 News Guild contract, and just weeks ago, 750 Times journalists penned a letter to management urging them to reach a contract with the Tech Guild before Election day.
> The second demand stems from a pay study the union released in June of this year, which found numerous pay discrepancies for women and people of color. According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers. The study also found that women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, earn 12 percent less on average than men, while Black and Hispanic or Latina women earn 33 percent less than white men.
> The third demand in dispute is a frequent source of anxiety for Hoehne in particular: return to office. Currently, many in the Tech Guild work remotely full-time.... Hoehne has been living and working remotely three hours away from the Times office, in upstate New York, since the pandemic began. “I would lose my job. I can’t sell my house. My kid is in daycare. I can’t. All we’re asking is for them to put in writing that we won’t do that to you.”
> But both Hoehne and Harnett don’t think management’s reluctance to settle these demands stems from the particulars of any of the demands themselves; none of them would spark radical changes. The negotiation process has lagged for years, which Times editorial staff experienced en route to their contract as well. Rather, Hoehne said, staring down the barrel of the Election Day strike, management’s immovability feels like it’s more about preventing the union from stabilizing at all.
> “They could easily end all of this with a single phone call or e-mail,” Harnett said. “But they’re making the decision not to. Maybe they don’t believe that we are resolved [to strike]. I don’t know how else to convince them.”
>>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" claimed by all the people who majored in Gender Studies instead of Statistics. Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/there-really-is-no-gender-wag...)
That is, there is almost no evidence that men and women working in the same position with the same background, education and qualifications are paid differently. Whether it’s the Target Corporation, Facebook, the University of Virginia, the United Way, the White House or McDonald’s, there is almost no evidence that any of those organizations have two pay scales: one for men (at a higher wage) and one for women (at a lower wage). Of course, that would be illegal, and if that practice existed, organizations would be exposed to legal action and “half the legal profession would be taking such cases on contingency fees”
I am all for fairness in pay and equality, but lets not insult the intelligence of your readers by making some absurd claims without doing proper econometric study and controlling for confound variables
> 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""
>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.
I think it can be true that we should make those jobs safer and that it makes sense to pay dangerous jobs more.
I really am curious what the people that disagree with me think. Do you think that danger shouldn’t be compensated?
Of course someone did. The clear and obvious interpretation is saying that “making the jobs safer” is an alternative to “a group does more dangerous jobs and dangerous jobs should be paid more”
I had a friend who worked on the ramp at SFO. Saw him real shook up after work, said he saw a coworker drive one of their carts under a plane while looking elsewhere- and got his head cut off.
It's a very physical job with a lot of powerful machines.
The fallacy (...ish) in these conversations is that men and women always work the same types of jobs. Which you pretty much just admit isn't really the case, which your "teaching and nursing" comment.
Ultimately, it turns out, men have a combination of typically choosing higher-paid careers and also being more demanding in terms of compensation. At the end of the day I can't hold a gun to women's heads and make them become engineers. If they want to be teachers, then so be it.
But wait! That doesn't mean that there isn't discrimination at play. Because typically jobs that are predominantly women are lower paid. It's complex, because:
1. Typically, there ARE some value/toughness differences in the job. Being a nurse is "easier" than being a doctor. But how much? Are we certain we're dividing the pay equitably?
2. While men have these higher paying jobs more, men aren't more educated. At least, not anymore. What could be the factors leading women to receive education in fields that are less economically viable?
Also, while there is a pay gap, this isn't the only gender gap. Clearly, job distribution across gender is very complicated. For example, men make up 97% of workplace deaths. Why do men choose these jobs more? Is it biological, social, economic, or all three?
> 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?
That the full argument amounted had this weird structure where women should be excluded from some jobs without complaint because of the danger, but simultaneously there was no interest in making the jobs safer!
So that men work more in dangerous jobs wasn't a problem, instead that was a proper, "of course men should die more" sort of thing because it motivated the pay gap.
So the argument becomes that men should die so the pay gap is sustained, which doesn't seem like a great thing to declare triumphantly?
Weird that jobs with performance bonuses are the largest gap — but that perhaps suggests that the cause isnt sexism in the workplace, but yet more confounders they didn’t account for.
Who gets handed the best leads to the biggest fish? The people perceived as the best deal closers. Perceived. This is where you can hide the most sexism, along with other confounders, yes.
sales is literally you-eat-what-you-kill. you get paid % commission on sales regardless of your gender.
There are so many sales people nobody would actually bother creating a separate pay grade for women and separate for men (and it would be highly unethical and illegal ofc)
I think the orthodox Left response to this would be that the unseen hand of the patriarchy and general internalised gender roles cause women to hustle less/advocate for recognition of their performance less than men, or for men to overlook their contributions.
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 up everything they failed to explain as some magical gender pay gap.
This is the epitome of how low replicability social sciences research is done: download dataset from JSTOR, load it in Stata/Matlab, run some regressions and call it a day.
I agree about the diversity of finance as a sector. I know many people that work ”in finance” and that varies from glorified interior decorating for corporate real estate to running macros on spreadsheets to check loans to defining investment portfolios
It is a quote from a summary, they don't write out the full list of jobs that fall under the heading to keep it short.
Examples of jobs in that category given in full report reads: "securities, commodities, and financial services
sales agents (0.55), financial managers (0.66), and personal financial advisors (0.68)."
> the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts
You seem to believe a union in a negotiation would care about carefully drawing conclusions from data analysis.
The goal is to construct a political wedge which makes their employer look bad for not giving into their demands. The only mindset about data is “how can we use this to argue for what we want”.
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 everyone. Let's encourage them to fight for higher pay at the same rate men do." Your mileage may vary.
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 keep trying until they find a different organization “looking for someone to make the hard decisions”
- emphasis on a different organization. the competition is coming in at a higher level by bluffing and trying, not focusing on going up the corporate ladder, or worried about being married to a company
its a widely replicated experience that changing jobs will get you 30% pay bump and the same level of responsibilities, while trying to move up gets you a ton more responsibility and single digit percent compensation increases
if many women are adverse to doing that, it would be a significant factor in some industries
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.
I’ve worked with a bunch of men who were considered ‘assholes’. Mean or difficult women are sometimes called bitches, mean or difficult men are sometimes called assholes. There is no practical difference between the two.
well one is allowed in a corporate setting and the other isn’t. that’s the main practical difference. i have literally sat in meetings where women are complaining about “old white assholes” in the industry (im not white) while my white male colleagues just look around uncomfortably.
amusing, as the competition doesn’t have the privilege of defining whose fault their circumstance is. adapt or exist in mediocre compensation, mediocre abilities to provide security to partners.
act like the competition. you aren’t going to get the satisfaction of an argument about the validity of everyone’s lived experiences.
figure it tf out and don’t worry about how it’s articulated in internet comments. otherwise, you’re probably not pulling your weight on the wage gap for your gender, yikes, because other people are.
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?
> What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?
"Women earn less due to sexist discrimination" and "women earn less due to bearing the brunt of raising children" are two distinct claims. The first one is contentious and widely disputed (disproved?).
If we, as a society, want to encourage more kids, we should to allocate those funds as a society, much like roads or anything else (we do, tax benefits, ..., maybe we should do more). If we want to offer welfare for people regardless of their life constraints, that's again a societal decision (and one I'm mostly in favor of).
Pushing that to each individual employer sets up a cat and mouse game where the shadiest organizations barely not getting audited are able to leverage that inequality (supposing we did fix the wage gap at an employer level without addressing underlying factors) to achieve higher profits and outperform the competition.
And that's one of the _better_ outcomes. Switching gears only slightly, suppose (using round numbers for simplicity) the average cost to the employer of maternity leave is 6 months salary and you have a 10% chance of incurring that cost. An organization like the NYT can absolutely self-insure, but at the level of only a few employees you cannot.
Something kind of like the unemployment insurance situation works much better in those kinds of scenarios. The government acts as an insurer to provide the service we as a society have decided is worthwhile, and each employer only has to send in a check for their average liability instead of dealing with a different mountain of paperwork and existential risks.
We can't even do something simple that I would like to see happen — make WIC universal with no conditions. It already covers about half of all children so it basically only doubles the budget. We can afford it and it saves so much time and energy trying to police the system.
Another one is free of cost universal pre-K. A lot of women can't go to work because there is nobody at home to take care of their children. But really the easiest lowest hanging fruit is universal WIC. Make it available to everyone so it is easier for us to tell people to get it.
progenity penalty is a societal issue, not issue between worker-corp. It is individual choice of a household to pro-create, and each mother's gender penalty is offset by father's gender penalty.
one may argue that America should provide more incentives to working families, but I see it as a society level issue, not the issue between a particular worker union and NYT.
I would love American society to unite once and for all, and ignore all artificial wedge lines created by MSM and uniparty (state, party, rural/urban, region, identity, ideology) and demand better laws that provide longer PFL and affordable childcare.
Curious what you mean by father's gender penalty as the link you provide states "Men's wages are either unaffected or even increase after having a child."
Doesn't sound like a penalty to me? also it assumes parents stay together if one offsets the other
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 ????
You've attempted to explain away pay gaps by saying it's because of lower roles and/or lower productivity, but that's just the same problem with an extra step. Why are they in lower roles? Why are they assessed as less productive? Are they inherently dumb/lazy/bad, or are we just back to "the pay gap exists because of biases" again?
> What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????
Black NYT employees are likely very well aware that the biases they encounter are not unique to the NYT.
>but that's just the same problem with an extra step
I think it’s a totally different problem. The problem no longer is about how group X is compensated for doing job Y, but why group X is doing job Y in the first place.
you can do a little scientific experiment yourself: Change your linkedin location to San Francisco, add the buzz words and $big_tech_company to your profile, make sure you are of under-represented minority in profile, and watch recruiters banging your door and offering to apply and headhunt you for pay raise
See, I look at what you wrote and draw the mirror-image conclusion: "Here is a person who would prefer to shame others for being 'impolite' than let them say out loud what is obvious to literally anyone."
The fact that the situation is as GP described is undeniable. But there can be reasons why things are this way that extend beyond what the racists of yore believed about genetics. Most obviously: Not all subgroups of white people are equally represented in tech either. (When was the last time you were in a team where the majority hailed from Appalachia?)
But actual investigation and remediation can't begin until we can first point at reality and describe it as it currently is.
In practice, we use the term “labor market” because those words tend to go together, but if we take a moment to stop and imagine it was an actual “market” it would be a pretty crappy one. Imagine walking into a grocery store and milk was priced as “between $5 and $15”. You need to haggle on the final number. And that’s if you’re lucky to live in a state where prices have to be posted at all! You also don’t really know what’s in it. There is also considerable investment whether or not you end up liking the price. (Imagine you have to stand in line for an hour before you can even begin haggling.)
Anyone who has applied for a job knows that switching companies isn’t free, as it would be in a “free market”. There’s any number of outside factors that could prevent it. And switching too often is also viewed negatively, which is not true of e.g. shares of Amazon.
I think this image hits the nail on the head. Only thing missing is that markets will only sell to you if you live within an hours commute so you may need to move having to a different city, leaving friends/family behind to even try if the milk at another market is worth it. And sometimes the milk turns out to be orange juice...
could not disagree more. Switching jobs in tech is literally free pay raise. top tier tech worker can jump jobs every 2 years and get ~30% bump every time. You are actually leaving money on the table if you dont switch jobs (in tech specifically) - because jobs are comparable to each other.
I think it is interesting that people are so quick to understand that measuring productivity is difficult when it comes to software engineering metrics or how promotions can be scuttled by things like internal politics but when it comes to macro scale things suddenly we assume that populations are being accurately evaluated for productivity.
Exactly. A few years ago everyone outside of tech was excited about a study from Google showing that “soft skills” were more important for career advancement for engineers within Google.
And it’s almost tautological: people who are good at playing organizational games succeed in the organization. Actually measuring engineering productivity isn’t solved at all.
to me, this is actually an argument in favor of becoming a spherical object, so that you can easily switch job in case your boss is horrible.
You don't want to be stuck under a bad boss, do you? or do you want to take a gamble that each manager will be perfect (manager can change without your control as well due to restructuring)?
if Corporation treats employees as a perfectly replaceable unit of a Human Resource, then I will treat them as a fungible unit of a Job Description
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.
My argument is we have at-will employment which means you are free to work at any company willing to hire you, and free to leave and join elsewhere if you find a better place. I certainly benefited myself from at-will employment and free labour market.
Do you have a reason to believe the labor market is not free? Like do tech workers in NYT experience slavery/involuntary labor or industry gatekeeping of some sort?
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 his kids" problem of considering the father's involvement as secondary.
You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we
have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.
What if Women, on average, prefer to take more time away from work due to having a child than their male partners? And what if "Black" people are, on average, younger than other groups and so are more likely to be in early-career roles?
More broadly, once we start dividing "People" up into groups like "Black" "White" "Man" "Woman"; isn't a bit silly to think the groups won't expect and want and do different things? Like even if we assign people literally at random (and 'Race' isn't much different than this); wouldn't differences emerge?
Now, imagine you enslave one of those groups for ~400 years, prevent them from voting or getting an equal education for another ~100+. Might differences emerge in how society treats that population?
Yes. Do you agree that my point is also correct? Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas.
If we defined the "groups" in a less historically informed way, we'd still have differences.
> Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas.
I think it's very easy to overstate how much those things are genuine differences in preference/ability. Allowing no-fault divorce dropped female suicide rates by 20%; were they happy in those marriages, or enduring them? Would they choose differently if offered the same opportunity?
Eye color, unlike Race or Gender, is pretty evenly distributed over the obvious confounding variables like "Age" or "Preference of staying home with children". I'd expect it to be +/- 10%, though probably not "equal" enough to keep "disparate impact" folks from calling it out.
Any individual woman has far more control over how she and her husband split childcare responsibilities than her employer who was not involved in who she decided to marry or how they decided to split up childcare and financially providing for the family.
And I don't think it's crazy for individuals who dedicate more of their life to work to make more money those who don't.
Just from my casual observation, it seems like these days, lots of women complain about having to do a lot more household work than their husbands, while also holding a full-time job just like the husbands. But no one ever seems to ask these women: "why did you marry this guy then?"
Of course, I've been in a bad marriage myself, so I understand how someone can make a really poor decision about their marriage partner (esp. when young!), but it seems to me that a lot of people are in lousy marriages, and are only still in them because it's easier to put up with a crappy partner, especially when you have kids, than to divorce and try to deal with the huge challenges that life as a divorced parent presents. I suspect many, many people (primarily women) are just waiting until the kids are out of the house until they finally end their marriages.
All in all, this makes me wonder how viable traditional marriage as an institution really is any more.
This is patently false. The USA does not have any regulations around equal parental leave for example. Very few companies allow employees to split their leave however they want, like some other countries do.
each family makes their own decision how to split responsibilities at home. Its possible that men take care of children, while women work more.
my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap, and on balance it all comes down to individual choices, division of labor at household level.
Using motherhood as a wedge issue between genders is an artificial issue that ignores incomes and choices at the household level.
It seems logical that if either partner has to stop working for childcare, whichever partner earns the most keeps their job, unfortunately that just creates a feedback loop where gender gap means women are more likely to tale on child care, which in turn is used to justify the gender gap.
I don't think there is any real agency there.
That said I also don't think parenthood is the root of the issue.
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.
I broadly agree, but would draw this out a little:
> 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.
I'd be surprised if any federal elected official was on record with a position as ghoulish as this. I think the diversity of opinion on "what do we do about childbearing" is broader than "American lawmakers... would rather women have an abortion". At least the right is pushing a lot of incentives to make women staying home to raise children economically feasible again, and the left is really trying to figure out the care economy. There's a lot of hot button cultural stuff entwined with all of this, but also a rich policy discussion happening underneath.
> You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.
Yes it should — if they’re making choices at a different rate.
That is, if men who take similar time off experience similar hardship and it simply happens to be that women prefer to stay home with the kids more often, there is literally no problem.
We don’t need to “fix” biology to fit our ideology: that’s backwards.
What annoys me about the left is exactly things like this. Someone points out that an ideologically-motivated claim is baseless, and the talking heads on the left just repeat, over and over, in various ways, that bad-faith actors on the right are disputing the claim, but they’re wrong (and evil). They just do this until people get tired of arguing, and they refuse to give up the claim.
With the right, a lot of it is based on religion or irreducible moral sentiment, and you just accept that some people on the right believe crazy things and can’t be swayed. On balance their beliefs are more harmful (though not by as much as in the past), but they don’t bother me in the same way because they’re admittedly irrational. Many on the left start with a set of beliefs similarly rooted in feeling and then rationalize the hell out of them, and will (often literally) scream at you if you dare to point out that their evidence is ex post facto and just poor besides.
> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables
I think this is false?
The gap certainly becomes smaller when you control for those factors, but it does not disappear.
But don't take my word for it; search for "unadjusted gap" (or "uncontrolled") vs "adjusted gap" (or "controlled") to see various reports. Your quoted source does not cite much data that I can see.
(and of course, aside from this, the question of why women would tend to have less experience and lower titles than men, is a valid topic on its own, and adjusting for it doesn't make it unimportant)
isn't it on the border of measurement error ? Would it be fair to say, after controlling for some variables the gender gap narrows down to 1% (which is a fairly small number if you ask me).
At least going by that payscale.com link, I don't think so. That is compiled from 600K+ responses, so they have enough data to measure small differences with some confidence, I think. I didn't sign up to download the full dataset though, so I'm mostly going by their claims.
Quoting from the article:
Although $0.99 may seem very close to $1, the red line in the chart
below has never crossed the dotted $1 line in blue representing men’s
pay. Even when women are doing the same jobs, the gender pay gap is
not zero.
If it were a "lost in measurement error" thing, I would expect that chart to have a lot more noise in it — some years women would be above men, other years below (that said, I do wish the charts had error bars). Instead, it's showing a small-but-consistent difference repeated across the years.
Claims that there is no gender pay gap based on clearly biased sources irks me.
So firstly, you don’t know what the NYT tech guild analysis looked like, so why assume they didn’t control for other factors? It is plausible they could have, given their access to competent statisticians, but we don’t know either way. It seems like you may just want this story to fit your pre-existing narrative.
Secondly, there are so many high-quality studies out there better than an a blog post about a Forbes article about an interview from a conservative think tank that show the very real existence of a gender pay gap that _is not accounted for_ by fewer hours worked, experience, or job type (yes these do contribute but are far from the entire picture). Here’s a couple (read their citations for more):
Lastly, _even if_ womens’ “lifestyle choices” were to explain entirely the pay gap (which they don’t, see above), think about what kind of career choices you’d make if you had to constantly debate about your right to equal pay with your supposed peers.
It’s not really plausible that the NYT tech guild would have controlled for factors that would make the pay gap appear smaller, because their incentive isn’t to be truth-seeking, but to attain a superior negotiating position.
I am economist and former quant. I wrote a report on the gender pay gap for a candidate for Congress. There is evidence of a gap.
Glassdoor has a great report showing that salaries for the same company and same job title are about 7% lower for women. An academic paper on MBA grads showed that hiring salaries for women were lower. So there is evidence for it.
For the MBA grads, the paper show that with training on negotiation, women got salaries similar to men. So, there are policies that help.
Surely, every other time you've raised this argument, people have pointed out that job seniority is a desirable and highly contested variable? Saying that it makes sense, because fewer women and minorities are promoted, does not actually support your point. Don't control for job title.
I think it helps to isolate the issue and prescribe better targeted intervention measures.
If we can say that for the same level, gender pay gap does not exist, but there is discrepancy in promoting women to senior/executive levels: and there could be many legitimate reasons.
and the issue of gender gap becomes an issue of promoting women to senior levels from the inside, or more diverse hiring for senior job roles from outside.
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.
"Gender studies" is usually used as a dog whistle for low rigor Liberal Arts programs like Psychology (as opposed to high rigor STEM programs like Physics).
Colleges aggressively enroll low-SAT high schoolers in these low rigor fields, because they want their federal student loan money at overinflated tuition. Colleges have only incentive to overproduce students and hand out diplomas like candy in exchange for student loan money.
The problem with over-enrollment of low-SAT students in low rigor fields is Replication crisis[1]. A lot of "research papers" are being produced every year due to sheer over-production of graduate students in these fields, and with pressure to "publish-or-perish" a lot of research ends up bogus, fake, non-replicated or p-hacked.
This NYT claim caught my attention because they used words "average wage per gender/race" - which is telling sign they used simple Excel's AVERAGE() to get their "insights".
In a more rigorous field like econometrics/statistics, you would be laughed at if you make such claim because average numbers hide a lot of nuance, required to understand the field. If one were to control for certain confounding variables, one would get a much better understanding of a "wage gap" or "racial gap" issue and understand each individual components of the gap, rather than blaming everything on strawman "institutional racism" or "institutional misogyny" or whatever
Ah gotcha. Well thanks for responding thoughtfully, reading what I actually said! Good luck with all that, you are fighting a good fight. One day those rigor-less Academia scum are gonna get whats coming to them, I'm sure.
I don’t think it’s really relevant? It would be a very easy promise to make if no such thing were happening in the first place.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re smart enough to not just straight up compare the average of all men vs the average of all women.
Given that I've got a rather nice chunk of cash (buy-a-really-nice-car nice) from a settlement in a pay gap lawsuit, there's at least existence proof that a pay gap exists occasionally to the extent a judge will believe it does. I'd consider looking at the actual data instead of blanket-dismissing via generic questions.
Further, given that the AEI has a very strong incentive to lie a pay gap away, I'd at least suggest consulting additional resources.
I don't know that the American Enterprise Institute is the most unbiased source of this information.
The author of this particular article you linked to (which itself doesn't really link out to much, other than an interview given by Sheryl Sandberg and references to her commentary from The Guardian, so where is the data coming from exactly?) is also a concurrent fellow at The Federalist Society[0] which has a notoriously right wing bent to its interpretation of law and policy research, which does bring up some questions of bias here, given this and the fact there isn't anything in the linked article that really supports their position, rather its a snippet of interpretation for a Sheryl Sandberg interview and a book titled Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It by Warren Farrell. To which, he uses both snippets outside of their broader context, which both argue that pay remediation is a core component to having gender equality in the workplace, but isn't the only thing
I'm coming up empty here, as to what supports this assertion as any semblance of reality?
Prove me wrong with facts and studies, I’m all ears. I would life to be wrong about this
> 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
Their methodology and third party checks are explained here:
> 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?
I can’t speak for these numbers, but when we do them we account for these things. Obviously pay isn’t going to be fair, but it should be less unfair than it is at many places.
Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less. That doesn’t mean every white man is paid much better, because not all men ask either. In general, however, you can generalise across experience, productivity, seniority and so on and say that some groups are paid less. There are a lot of factors which play into this beyond people not asking. Our metrics also show that employees who ask less frequently or are in general less assertive are also much less likely to leave their jobs. As such it becomes less of a risk to not give them raises. Risk of employees leaving is a factor you consider when balancing your budget, and I’m sure you can imagine other things which may play into this, some of which, shouldn’t.
> Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less.
Yes, and that’s because as study after study has shown they’re less likely to successfully get more and not have it held against them.
> New research by Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Kray shows the belief that women don’t ask for higher pay is not only outdated, but it may be hurting pay equity efforts. Contrary to popular belief, professional women now report negotiating their salaries more often than men, but they get turned down more often, Kray found.
If you notice I spoke about my place of work. Not on the national or global norm. I’m sure times are changing, but it’s not what our internal metrics currently show at our company.
Do you have internal metrics showing that women who ask are treated the same way? That women are convincingly told that it won’t jeopardize their offers as it likely has at other employees? This stuff is insidious and it doesn’t need to happen every time, everywhere to shape people’s decisions.
We don’t have any sort of metrics which are that personalised.
I’m not sure you’re arguing against who you think you’re arguing against. I’m not defending it, I’m simply sharing how it is at our place. There are a lot of issues, if you took a wild guess at the demography of our manager staff I'm fairly certain you would get it right.
Yeah, supporting anecdote: only thing I got for trying to negociate my salary and benefits last time I tried, was my contract started over a month later so I technically lost that much pay, with zero changes to my contract. It just doesn't feel worth trying. Sure, you can blame me for poor negotiation skills maybe, or for not walking away from this job but contrast that to my partner's salary doubling without having to even ask... So it deeply irritates me when people say women don't get things because they don't ask. It is just a catch 22 situation.
I just don't know, all these points sound so weirdly out of touch with reality, it feels like we live in a world of children and there are no parents anymore.
Point 1: Only getting fired for a good reason? Who decides what a good reason is? The boss right? So what are we even doing here, what's the hidden implication? They want a foot in the door to be able to argue that X wasn't really a good reason and they'll strike over it. If I were a company owner/boss I would want to be able to fire people who are terrible to be around, argumentative for no good reason. Is that a good reason? They would think no because it's a personal fit issue. And yet it's totally legitimate, people don't get hired all the time over "fit" but then you can't fire over "fit". Everytime I have to deal with such colleagues I always think "man if I were a boss, I'd just fire such people, it's so obviously poison for the work environment". Arguing effectively is important but because it's so important it's a great duty to not use it as a tool for personal benefits.
Point 2: Pay discrepancies for "women or people of color" could easily have real world reasons, maybe they really are just worse at their job, less engaged, less ambitious, whatever it is that causes less pay. It's not impossible for this to be the case, no matter how uncomfortable that may be for everyone. Yes really. Yes really really. It can absolutely be true. You might even have a situation where every worker from Russia is just worse at their job. Or the majority of workers that are e.g hindu are just worse for whatever reason that a company can't fathom. It may even be the case that everyone who is white is worse for whatever reason, maybe they are too comfortable, who knows, none of this is impossible and none of this is the job of the company to figure out. I need to have the legal power to pay worse people less money or we are in a situation where you just levied a massive hidden tax on my company. You want me to subsidize worse performers in some strange hope that this is going to help the country as a whole to be nicer. Well having a nicer country would be fantastic, I just want you to be clear that you are issuing massive, gigantic new taxes with these so called anti-racist, anti-sexist rules and it's not just a tax on the company, it also hurts the psychology of all the better workers, so you are hurting society in general. Who is going to count the cost at the end? Why work harder after all if you can just have a certain genetic profile or protected political class and then you'll get free money. What such people who push for this are always implying is that the company is hurting itself in sexist, racist confusion, the implication is that these people are underpaid for the value they provide and the company is too incompetent to see it. The union or government in their infinite wisdom is going to force the company's racists/sexists/homophobes to finally pay according to the real value of these workers and the only metric that they will use to determine the real value is genetics and political class. Absurd isn't even a strong enough word to describe it. Even in the theoretical best case scenario for such a rule where you truly have identical value from two different people, why reward the person that doesn't want to negotiate for more pay? What we should actually do is maybe look at workers' family situation and give people who can't negotiate effectively due to raising kids that they get a government tax bonus. But wait, that is already the case! People who have kids can already get a tax bonus.
Point 3: Yes it would be nice if we could all work how we want but how is that a legitimate negotiable thing for the union to involve itself in? If the company thinks that home office doesn't work for them then who is the union to say otherwise?!
The entire mindset here is so utterly divorced from reality, it's like a luxury daycare where the kids complain that some other kid got a slightly better piece of the pie.
> Only getting fired for a good reason? Who decides what a good reason is?
There are these things that exist called courts and independent arbitrators...
> Pay discrepancies for "women or people of color" could easily have real world reasons, maybe they really are just worse at their job, less engaged, less ambitious, whatever it is that causes less pay.
> ...
> I need to have the legal power to pay worse people less money or we are in a situation where you just levied a massive hidden tax on my company.
Ok, then. We have these things called protected categories. If your contention is one of those categories actually consists of "worse people" that you need to be able to "pay less money," then you need to prove that each of those individuals is in fact "worse." A giant wall-o-text consisting of a bunch of coulds, maybes, and I-want-to-be-able-to-do-this's ain't gonna cut it.
> Yes it would be nice if we could all work how we want but how is that a legitimate negotiable thing for the union to involve itself in?
The short answer: yes. The long answer is: yes, and why is that news to you?
> The entire mindset here is so utterly divorced from reality...
Honestly, I could say the same about your comment.
We can just take this exchange as an example, maybe that helps to clarify my actual position. Imagine if I had to contact an independent committee before I could "fire"(=ignore) your comment with several snide insults. I'd get bogged down, my work day would be slower. Imagine if somebody could drag me to court over every comment decision because hey, maybe I just ignored it for no good reason, or because you are black or white or have a certain religion. You could file an appeal at HN that I have to give you more attention. So in your desired reality we will have to find out during the court proceedings and in the meantime I am forced to pay you 15% more attention *by default* in an irrational attempt of fairness to all the other comments if they received 15% higher attention.
Having certain protections against discrimination is a good thing but they should be very carefully applied. We can already see that the New York Times Tech Guild does not seem to want careful application of these rules if their website doesn't even mention any evaluation of worker productivity or value, all their study apparently did was to look at pay difference without looking at work difference. A perfect example of a total failure to care about the correct things, a total failure to care about what the company needs to achieve (=actual value) and just looking at pay with no connection to possible reasons I enumerated. https://www.nyguild.org/post/pay-inequity-at-the-new-york-ti...
> Imagine if I had to contact an independent committee before I could... ignore your comment...
I can imagine an orange when we're talking apples, sure.
> We can already see that the New York Times Tech Guild does not seem to want careful application of these rules if their website doesn't even mention any evaluation of worker productivity or value, all their study apparently did was to look at pay difference without looking at work difference.
Come on, it's an adversarial negotiation. You seem to really want to argue the side of the employer, and for some strange reason seem also want everyone to argue that side as well.
Point 1: The hidden implication is obviously the continued problem of large firms over-hiring when labor or money is cheap and then performing mass layoffs when it's not. If you are hiring someone or a group with plans of firing them later then the contract wasn't established in good faith. Many of these workers can make more hourly if they are independent, they are paying for stability.
No company should be able to double dip by hiring a large team to build a system and then firing most of them to maintain it on a shoe-string budget, if they want to do that they can pay top dollar to have a 3rd party build it
Point 2: No matter how it shakes out, if you structure your company in a way that white men or asian men are incentivized to do more or women and blacks are incentivized to do less, then your company has a racist incentive structure and it should be rebuilt. They aren't flying in 15-year-old Hadje from Chad, the people they hire are all similarly qualified so there shouldn't be such a large gap, as we know cause if we restrict it to just white men then there isn't this large pay gap. Besides, it's a complete myth that people are "payed what they are worth" if that were the case a 100xer would make 100x more than a 1xer after firing 99 people and keeping the 100xer. In reality they might double or tripple their pay and the rest just becomes (record) profits for the company and 99 people are out of work.
Point 3: Does the company have any evidence that it doesn't work or should we just take their word? Doesn't work in what sense? That profits for the company aren't maximized? If that's the only metric then why should the employees be payed at all? Just have them as slaves and use the government to beat or kill them if they disagree.
I'd also point out the irony that if the NYT had hired staff with balanced and diverse perspectives, it might not have put itself in this ouroboros trap.
Thank you!
I wish I could promote this (and @crazygringo's helpful summary a few min ago) to the top of the thread. The rest of the HN commentary so far would've benefited from it a lot.
> 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 about a number, but it sounds like the terms keep changing and nobody agrees on the nature of the work itself. It's not even clear that there's a preliminary contract ready for the NYTimes to sign.
Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull. But if this is just attention seeking without a serious contract, it seems egregiously risky on behalf of the union members too: 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, or the union would have to agree to an IOU in exchange for a bunch of temporary concessions.
> 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 blow up in election week is a risk the Times knowingly took in not meeting their workers' needs sufficiently, and drawing out the negotiations as long as they have. The guild is doing the right thing.
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'm pretty sure the wider harm of the NYT halting operations for an entire week—which isn't remotely what's happening—would be effectively zero, even during the week of a presidential election. What's the problem?
Teachers and health care workers try to be more careful because a bunch of vulnerable people (children, patients) with little to no say in anything about how their respective institutions run are heavily dependent on them. A single newspaper, even the NYT, isn't comparable.
Exactly, if anything this strike is timed to do the least damage to the general public relative to the amount of impact it has on the business. The election has already been decided, we're just waiting to tally the votes. Most people have already decided if they're going to vote and if so who for.
If they had striked last week or the week before they'd have been accused of election interference. Striking this week hurts the Times because they run the risk of losing traffic from people trying to see results, but it doesn't impact the results at all. It's the best possible time to strike this year.
Hard disagree. The most important part of the election, from a news perspective, will be during/after the count, especially if it looks like Harris will win, or it's exceedingly close. Maybe this wouldn't be the case pre-Trump, when elections were decided relatively quickly, and you could assume a peaceful transfer of power.
Because most people who “care” about politics like this are radicalized due to their bubble. Add in a fair mix of a lack of civics classes and inexperience with politics and you get very loud people with no idea what’s going on.
Who is harmed and how? Students only have one school and limited options for the SATs. The results draw the most attention, but there are countless reputable sources people can turn to, and little lost by learning the results a bit later.
I would argue it's a great benefit rather than a problem, too.
NYT not publishing sensationalist bullshit? While it's just one outlet out of countless many, the world will be that much more peaceful for but a short while.
I didn't think my original comment needed it, but yes, I actually agree the NYT not publishing might be a net improvement in the world, not just not-harmful.
When teachers or doctors or nurses strike regular people, the general public, suffer. In the case of the NYT tech staff nobody suffers except the NYT leadership. Oh no you can't read NYT during election week. Whatever, read something else.
The megacorps' refusal to negotiate or compromise is what caused the problem. They are the villains, not the working people being understaffed, underpaid, and hated on by selfish third parties who don't understand solidarity.
I agree. I’m just pointing out the reason why those other professions need to carefully time their strikes to avoid adversely affecting innocent third parties. In the case of the NYT the only people affected are the leadership so they can time their strike for maximum impact without regard for impact on third parties.
The teachers are a little different though. When they go on strike, the most directly affected people are the students, who they aren't negotiating with. Second hand effects are on the parents, who again they aren't negotiating with.
It's only via third hand effects that the other party is actually affected, because the parents have to make the admin's life hard.
So teachers consider that their first duty is to the students. Also they are there to help the students to begin with.
> Sure, but you are also appealing for public sentiment.
You can't count on public sentiment for anything labor oriented in the US - corporations have owned the narrative for the last 40 years. The reason teachers unions avoid clashing is partially because they care about not effecting the kids as much as possible, and partially because they are already keeling over with states dropping the public school system.
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.
Sure but the NY times is just one of many news websites and even if it went down, people aren't gonna miss it in the same way as teachers going on strike
The public aren't the party you're negotiating with. You're negotiating with management.
What the public thinks is not particularly relevant, just like it's not relevant to my relationship with my manager.
The only time public sentiment is relevant from a strike is when the public's representatives can order you back to work. That's a risk for a teacher, or a railworker, but not for a newspaper tech.
When public sector workers like teachers go on strike, the other side of the negotiating table is ultimately elected by the public that’s being inconvenienced. That’s a completely different strategic playing field than a private sector strike.
Teachers are also paid crap because they continue to work for starvation wages. They should strike more because they will not receive more compensation with gentle pleas that are convenient.
I just checked and in my school district the lowest paid (full time) teacher made ~$100k in 2022 (the highest paid made $180k). I would hardly call that "starvation wages".
That is so outside the norm. Average in the US is about $71k and varies WILDLY from state to state, school to school, district to district, and importantly, that variation is one of the huge problems in the first place.
You get that $70k in the big city school where those dollars do not go very far, while out in the boonies where a shitload of teaching is done, you make far, far, far less.
Is 70k considered a starvation wage nowadays? I think I need to look up the definition because this seems far above minimum wage. Most people I know make under 40k per year and they aren't starving...
The problem is housing and costs that are rising as if everyone is making $300k in many places. It doesn’t keep up with costs at all. But if you live in an LCOL, it could be very respectable.
oh I see, thanks for clarifying. Comparable to e.g. downtown baristas who can't afford rent in the city they work in. Still mind boggling that even 70k is insufficient to afford housing.
LCOL = low cost of living for anyone else who may need to look it up.
$70k isn't a lot of money when everyone else is making $200k.
You would have this problem in any area where there is a lot money sloshing around, e.g. most cities in Switzerland. Unless you have some sort of rent control/social housing, or a lot of surplus market to satisfy a wide variety of demand, those people with money are going to simply outbid you.
Teachers make a fair salary. It’s a degreed position with ~100 days PTO annually, so when you account for that the benefits actually outweigh most degreed positions. One could argue the ceiling is closer, particularly for primary education, but that’s a problem of govt funding more than anything.
>It’s a degreed position with ~100 days PTO annually
They do not get 100 days of PTO. They get an hour per work week of PTO and a mandatory 2 month leave. You can't do anything with that leave because there is no simultaneous need for more workers for those two months in any other industry, so you are basically furloughed.
Keep in mind, the states that aren't killing education generally require serious credentials, like a 4 year degree, to make on average $70k a year.
This also completely ignores the mountains of unpaid work teachers do. Every single hour of homework they have to give out to ensure kids get the practice they need to internalize a lesson is at least an hour of grading work, and that's for the easy stuff like fill in the bubble tests that you can literally automate.
My mother regularly spent until 7pm working her teaching job, because that is what is required to be a good teacher.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull
NYTimes has dragged out the negotiations for months, refusing to have a contract. It's kinda a make or break time for the union.
When would be better to strike, what time would NYTimes and the audience prefer? It should be during a choke point otherwise management wouldn't listen.
Additionally, this is a high traffic time, but not really a high stakes time I'd argue. They're not going to influence the election by going out day before or day of it, they will just lose viewership to others covering what's happening.
i think the point the parent is making is that a better time to strike would be when they have specific demands that management is able to meet - to get them to the negotiating table, or to get them to sign a contract.
but in the case where management is already at the negotiating table, and there's no contract to be signed, it's not clear what short-term goal a strike is meant to achieve. the only thing it does is cause hurt. Hurting management is going to make their negotiations more difficult. and hurting management in this specific way is not just hurting management, it's also alienating their journalist colleagues who should be their strongest allies in this fight.
> when they have specific demands that management is able to meet
It's just wild how management is able to unilaterally decide what is and isn't reasonable, and just label unions as childish.
"We want to help you, but you're hurting us!" is one small step away from "gosh we love the idea of unions but it causes too much friction between workers and management, and trust me, management knows best."
I don't think parent is defending the management here; rather pointing out that it's a strategic error to play your strongest negotiating card before you are ready to make the deal. True, the New York Times will miss out on the election coverage bonanza this time, but unless the union can say "sign here to make this problem go away" they are just hurting the management for nothing. I've only heard of the story today, but it doesn't sound like the union even has a written offer ready.
Pretty sure they're ready to make the deal if they get just-cause, work from home, and salary.
It's been a long time they've been trying to make a deal so it's disingenuous to say they're pulling the card early. Management refused to come to the table until recently.
NY Times management has been accused of some extremely shady stuff. For example, their chief union negotiator is also responsible for disciplining wayward staff members. Union members who strongly advocate get more infractions and punishments than those who are passive.
Management are already hurt by the formation of the union, and not agreeing to a contract is their way of attempting to hurt the union back.
I'd agree with you if the situation suggested management were acting in good faith, but 6+ months to negotiate is them either not taking the union seriously or trying to wear them down and make union leadership look ineffective to members.
Negotiations have been going on for 2 years, and the strike was approved in September. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment, attention-seeking thing and was totally preventable by NYT.
No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing, document when those workers don't meet the standards of performance, and reference those documents when they fire someone.
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 work or people don't want to work with him.
This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out
I worked in fast food and this resonates extremely with me. There were only 4-5 people in a kitchen during the busy rush, and there was a list everyone knew of people they didn't want to get stuck in a shift with. If someone sucks to work with, it really sucks, and because everyone is pitching in and working together, there is no indication that the person was bad at their job. If you were fired, it was usually because your fellow workers said you were bad.
I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss.
One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.
"law" is an incredible term used for "an observation a physicist made about the author citations of academic papers at one point in time", especially when you try to extend that to software development, and realize that there's other competing theories with supposedly better fits. I have not independently re-run the analysis myself, but lotka's law claims to be better an in general these are all special cases of zipf's laws, which is admittedly where I personally first heard this concept.
...which is probably why you only see this stuff regurgitated in blog posts and right-wing Malcolm gladwell (Jordan Peterson is quoted as the source in one of your cited blog posts).
Either way, I'd be highly, highly suspect of parroting Price's "law" as a fact.
(I get stuff like Conway's law or Moore or Murphy are all also cited as laws, and I don't like that terminology either. "Conjecture" would fit so much better, save for Murphy's)
Even if the law were true regarding authorship, and applied to software, that still wouldn't show that the "valuable contributions" are only made by virtue of a small set of excellent contributors -- see "Matthew effect"
> 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!
Heck, there's companies where standard practice is "fire the lowest x% of workers on a regular basis". Doesn't even matter if they're doing a good job or not; just that someone else is doing a _better_ job.
Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.
And don't forget that the percentages are not global, but in small buckets. This makes the worst performers extremely valuable, because not only you have someone to get rid of, but if they are bad enough, the rest of the team knows who will be laid off, so they can be far less tense.
It's also bad for the high performers, as working in the same team is bad: Having 3 great performers in a team means at least one, if not two are going to get a middling review. Everyone's behavior gets warped in ways that don't align well with what would be good for the company
And the problem with slow to hire, slow to fire is one day you might be incredibly slow to hire.
And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.
The looser overall firing rules are, the harder it is for the union to protect members from e.g. firing for insisting on adherence to safety/security/contractual/employment policies/laws. Threat-of-firing-backed pressure on all those fronts is incredibly common outside companies with strong unions.
If they are meeting the metrics set to judge their performance how are they bad employees? If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.
> If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.
Nobody has ever come up with a good set of objective metrics to judge software engineer performance. So the best we have is still the subjective opinions of your managers and peers.
Like in the cases of US courts defining obscenity or fair use, there isn't necessarily a set of metrics which can be used to perfectly taxonomize something.
Imagine I sent a manuscript to a publishing house and they rejected it for being bad. I wouldn't expect they got to that conclusion by comparing it to a set of metrics, I would assume they have people in authority whose judgement is the decider on whether something is "good" or "bad".
The original comment was regarding employees currently being judged via metrics bringing up whether certain jobs can or cannot be judged using metrics is pointless.
Your analogy only works when applied to the hiring stage, as that is when the publishing house decides to work with you. If the publisher accepted your manuscript, assigned you an editor, gave you a target publish date, and gave you advance and then suddenly booted you and said “your work isn’t good” you’d have some questions, and rightly so.
This sort of thing happens all the time? Many manuscripts and screenplays are stillborn. Movies make it halfway through production before the plug is pulled. Software projects fail left and right, with millions of dollars spent (sometimes billions!)
Human endeavors sometimes fail to live up to expectations.
Well the comment I was responding to specifically called out employees meeting metrics and still not being considered good employees, so your point is a little moot to my comment but I will reapond anyways.
How do you measure a better writer? It depends on what the purpose of the writing is. If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold. If it is an online publication you can conduct surveys to determine the impact of a particular writer on subscription or view rates. If it is a techincal writer doing product documentation you can measure based upon meeting schedule, number of defects and by conducting customer surveys.
There are no objective criteria as to what is "good" writing vs "bad" writing.
> If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold.
This is a fairly lousy metric. It depends enormously on the marketing campaign and the ability of salesmen to sell it.
For example, I read an article about the author of the "Slow Horses" book. It languished for years selling at a rate that was indistinguishable from zero. Then some journalist read it, wrote a glowing review of it, and it took off. Now it's a best seller, with sequels, and a miniseries.
Good writing is writing that allows the publishing house to achieve their end goal and bad writing is that which doesn't. The end goal is the same as for other businesses to make money. If you don't sale books you are a bad writer for their purposes.
It is possible to both have some metrics and not have them be the only way you determine if an employee is doing a good job. Because some things can't be measured, and some can.
They meet these metrics while they are under formal process just before termination. I used to work with a couple people clearly working multiple jobs who switched focus when they were PIPed.
If they are refocused on their job and now meeting metrics why terminate them? People can become unfocused for a variety of reasons beyond working other jobs. Life happens. If they don't remain focused and again don't meet metrics they have already been given an opportunity and should then be terminated.
> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true.
Of course not. They fire people with different taste in music, or who don't listen enthusiastically to their complaints about other people, or who refuse them sexual favours, or...
Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.
You can still be pro-worker even if you think sometimes a certain worker is bad, or hard to work with, or otherwise a "bad employee." It is more something political and something about how you view the world/humanity in general. It is not an "identity politics" where the discussion is around certain kinds of people or not. That would be kinda silly anyway on its face, we are virtually all workers!
>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.
Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line, it isn't a question of skill or ability. It is a failure of the company to properly motivate, challenge, and reward them for their work.
> Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line
It’s HN. We’ve all been maliciously compliant. I can close tickets without solving any problems or be on call in the most useless ways imaginable just fine.
I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees".
Either the company should be able to evaluate an employee's performance and therefore can show proof of poor performance or it can't properly evaluate an employee's performance and therefore shouldn't be firing people based off an admittedly inaccurate measure of performance.
> I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees".
You probably couldn't explain how you walk, or how you cook an egg, or how you speak English, at the level of detail that would be required for something like this. Yet you do know how to do all those things.
Just because you can't write down detailed objective instructions for how to do something does not at all mean you have no idea how to do it.
So should we apply this logic to other areas where one person's "gut reactions" can have a huge negative effect on someone else's life?
Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?
What's being asked for is accountability for decisions that can literally result in someone ending up homeless—and that are hugely subject to bias, both conscious and unconscious, in a country that is currently riven by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
> Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?
This is a bit fallacious and a false analogy. Due process under law exists because it's definable. We have standards for evidence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, etc.
The challenges in cleanly defining what it means to be a "good employee" don't somehow mean other aspects of society that can be defined shouldn't be.
This assumes that evaluations can be neatly defined and tracked. There's another front page post right now about exactly this. The soft (often difficult to define/measure) skills required of a manager are the same skills that are required to make the decisions to fire people.
I think almost everyone has worked with someone who they know shouldn't be there, but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance". And yet they are clearly a huge anchor for the team, and everyone knows the team would be better off without them.
I wish we could perfectly evaluate what it means to be a good employee, and we could show the exact measurements used to do so. But this simply is not realistic, never has been, nor will it likely ever be. The spectrum of possible behaviors and the intricate interplay unique to various teams makes such a task impossible. I'm not saying an effort shouldn't be made, but that these decisions are often highly subjective, without much hope of arriving at something more objective.
I've worked at places that had stringent requirements for firing people. The net result was that good people all leave voluntarily instead of being stuck with the problem individuals, ultimately resulting in teams full of mediocre-to-awful teammates.
Managers can both know how to evaluate quality and fit while not having any hope of perfectly defining and documenting those evaluations. I'd rather work in an environment that has at-will employment with all of the downsides that come with that than a place that can't fire employees without spending a year creating a mountain of paperwork that ultimately doesn't get anyone much closer to the objectivity people are striving to achieve.
> but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance"
Remember that homework assignment or group project where you spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on not doing the work as intended in some silly way? This is the adult version of that.
Yup. And while it's cutesy when you do it when you're young and in school, it's really quite mystifying when someone with ample career choices does it at work.
I've noticed it is entirely possible for code to be written that absolutely conforms with every good coding style rule, and is utter garbage (even if it works!).
Comically, the entire world basically has no idea how to evaluate the quality of management. Not with metrics, anyway. It's all vibes and guesswork, or else it's "data-driven" but transparently bullshit.
Good employees make the company successful in spite of bad management. If you don't want to do this, fine, find another company to work for where you do want to do this.
...crazy that pro-labor has gone for "reasonable wages and hours please" to "there cannot possibly be a lazy employee." Sure, sometimes there's a lousy manager or exec. But honestly people aren't expected to be particularly "motivated" beyond salary, incentive pay, etc. Like what do you want, the kindergarten-style pizza party tactics? The cringey corporate slogans? Are those actually motivating anyone? There are garbage managers who de-motivate people but that's something of a different problem and hits the whole team rather than just one person. When there's a bad, lazy employee, or when there's that one guy who's just a jerk, fire him. Contracts that say you can't do that are dumb, and they are bad for the majority of workers.
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 to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.
I read a statistic some years ago that public school teachers have the lowest rate of firing of any profession. The union has been successful in instituting a "process" for firing a teacher that is so onerous, time consuming, and complicated that it never happens.
The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student.
(And yes, in spite of this, there are some gems of teachers.)
> showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student
having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high.
it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly.
back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people.
when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district.
they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.
There are multiple unions involved with teaching, depending on the state, not just one national one (the NEA or what have you). In some states teachers unions are effectively toothless and aren't even part of the contract negotiation process.
This should make it pretty easy to see how union strength affects firing rates (no, I don't happen to have the data on hand). IME schools tend to avoid firing teachers even when they easily could, in favor of pushing them out, because they don't want the bad press from a firing, so my guess is firing rates for teachers are low everywhere.
We might further hope to see whether union strength affects education quality, but there are too many confounders—the states with weak teachers unions tend to be red states and to have weak economies, either or both of which may have stronger effects on educational outcomes than union activity. But, on the specific question of the effect of teachers unions on teacher firing rates, we can maybe get something like a useful experiment out of these state-by-state differences.
“Union teacher” isn’t the distinction, as unions also provide useful professional insurance even in states where they do practically nothing when it comes to employer/employee relations, so many teachers are still members. Do states with strong teachers unions have lower firing rates than those where the unions do almost nothing? I’m saying we may have to look elsewhere for the explanation, if the firing rate in states with nearly-useless teachers unions aren’t closer to where you think they should be.
I’d guess the rates remain low even with weak unions because schools are piss-pants scared of bad publicity, due to the public’s role in (indirectly) hiring and firing the top of their pyramid, and in allocating funding. But maybe I’m wrong and rates of firing are closer to whatever you consider a desirable rate, in states with weak unions. I did go looking, but couldn’t find datasets tackling that in particular. Frustrating, because with that we could get at least a strong hint of the actual effect of unions on this specific thing.
> 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.
Everyone who has interacted with a large company has met a more highly-paid negative-productivity employee than even the worst government worker.
> Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.
If managers aren't competent or motivated enough to follow a process, I sure as hell don't want those same managers firing people just on their say-so.
> This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers.
No, this is about making it harder for management to fire programmers who do pesky things like informing other employees of their rights, or refusing to work unpaid hours.
>Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement
This is not because "it's hard to fire government workers" as often stated, but simply because government runs on a shoestring budget and cannot hire only good people.
Also because a shocking amount of people working in local government didn't realize Ron Swanson was a fucking satire character.
> No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing
The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.
Mild issue with this. Mostly, cause it's a one size fits all. There's a certain kind of productivity worker that actually responds relatively well to that type of metric. That vagueness results in stagnation and analysis paralysis.
Those workers tend to actually respond better to what the game community almost considers the grind mindset. Give us a well defined hallway, with well defined tasks, and then we'll walk down the well defined hallway. It may not be "super creative" productivity, yet it's a "form" or "type" of productivity.
Part of the issue also, is a lot of the time, people seem to always want to be the Einstein of the company, and nobody really wants to deal with the day-to-day shit. It's simply not status enough, or management visible enough, or high-level content enough, or similar.
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 don't want to be fired for low performance.
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?
It's incredibly hard to quantify "low-performing" for white-collar workers, because any measure is either easily gamed, actually creates roadblocks and bad incentives, or both.
Now companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire.
> companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire
This is another one of those obvious "unintended" consequences. The harder it is to fire someone, the correspondingly harder it will be to get hired. Companies will be unwilling to "take a chance" on someone.
On the hiring side, I felt US and Asian companies were a lot more wary and had tougher "on the paper" requirements to enter.
For comparison most French companies I've seen can hire an engineer within 3 interviews.
I entered a company in the past in a single interview.
In comparison talking with an US company's HR, the plan was 4 rounds with a coding test, for an average of about a month to go through the whole process and there's still a probation period.
Requiring management to document these decisions is already itself placing low trust in management. I do not want to work at any workplace where trust in management is so low that low performance needs to be documented with a paper trail. I'd rather work at a workplace where the management is consistently competent and people place high trust in the management; so that when management fires someone everyone else agrees without having a need for documentation to prove low performance.
Disclaimer: this is only my opinion on where to work. I'm fully aware there are many other good reasons why management needs to document low performance.
I'm genuinely curious, are there any employees that work with a company that has good managers? I have heard so many bad stories of poisonous corporate culture its hard for me to see how there would be good managers. I haven't worked as an employee since the early 2000's.
I worked lots of places. Never worked for a manager I didn't trust to fire me.
Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.
Nearly all the managers I’ve had throughout my career have been good. Of course people in a bad situation are more likely to complain about it, so the impression you might get from reading a forum like this is heavily biased.
Most NYT-sized companies won't let you deploy a bugfix without a documented rationale and a second person's signoff. It's far from an unreasonable requirement for firing someone.
Except there are people who are extremely good at passive-aggressively dragging their feet specifically such that it's hard to quantify. Metrics are entirely gameable and people know this. In development, this could be the guy who always somehow grabs the easy tickets then says "Hey I closed like 3 tickets yesterday I'm performing." Or he consistently overestimates his stuff - how much time should a busy manager spend assigning everyone's story points just in case they have to build a case to fire someone later?
There are also people who are technically performing but in practice but are jerks. And please don't start with "that's what HR is for" because I have never - not once - seen HR solve, or even significantly help, this sort of problem. Plus everybody hates dealing with them.
Just let people fire lousy workers man. This isn't that hard. Or, employees should push for employment contracts where the commitment is reciprocal: employers promise to keep them on for a few years and they promise to stay on for a few years.
That conclusion does not explain your arguments. The place is over 100 years old and surely have HR processes. This is more likely about the union trying to prevent layoffs
Yes in absence of an employment contract that says otherwise. One of the primary objectives of any US union is to establish guidelines for dismissal of employee members that override at-will.
Low performance is an example of just cause. The employer simply has to prove that this was the case, and that they gave the employee notice, a chance to improve, and a reasonable standard to reach.
Who says it's notoriously difficult? I've worked many places with clear processes for identifying and resolving poor performance issues (firing being one possible resolution).
The crux of growth in knowledge workers is that our current norms of measurement and productivity were developed in a manufacturing or manual task-oriented mindset. According to Peter Drucker, productivity for knowledge workers needs a different set of considerations
While in manual work the targets and outputs are usually clear, knowledge work
and its results are less tangible, and therefore harder to define, measure and evaluate
Drucker (1999) has even stated that knowledge worker productivity is the biggest challenge
for modern work life. Other researchers have also discovered that the performance
of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational
success... The need for general performance measurement is great as the theme is still quite
new and there are very few previous studies measuring the effectiveness of
NewWoW practices. There is also a need for practical tools for analysing and
managing the performance of knowledge work from the NewWoW perspective.
Organisations are still planning and making NewWoW changes, without clear
evidence of their benefits and without any measurement information
> Other researchers have also discovered that the performance of an individual knowledge worker is the most important factor for organisational success...
Great, which means we have a way to measure individual performance with respect to what matters (organizational success). So what's the problem?
We have a reliable way to do it: The same way the researchers did when they showed that performance is the most important factor for organizational success. If your knowledge workers measure the same way the workers did in that research, you're golden.
Unless you question the validity of the research? But if that's the case, why did you mention it as being significant in the first place?
If those are literally the only choices, then I vote for "practically impossible to get rid of."
But I think this is a bit of hyperbole - some kind of ongoing, documented low performance seems obviously better than just letting managers fire on a whim.
why are tech workers, my industry, so committed to this ideology? Do you think the tech layoffs of the last few years was a justified culling of lazy idiots?
I'm old enough to remember a time when people in tech were called 'wizards' and there was an air of mystery that surrounded the industry. A large subset of this group really seems to have bought into the idea that working in tech makes you 'special'. It does not. It's a skilled profession that is trainable and attainable by large swaths of the population. Working in tech does not make you special (Yes - you) and the tech industry is well overdue for quality of life improvements that other, organized, sectors have had for decades.
Back in 1978, when I worked as an electronics assembly technician, the company (Aph) decided to take us to a local electronics convention in Los Angeles. We showed up and got in line to get our steenkin' badges. I was in front, and was asked what my job title was.
As I was soldering boards together, I said "gnome". The clerk laughed, and said "no, seriously". I said "seriously, gnome". We argued a bit, and he capitulated, saying I was going to be sorry. The Aph guy behind me heard the debate, and asked for "wizard" as his job title. And so forth for all the employees. I think the owner of Aph asked for "grand wizard" or something like that.
Wandering around the convention floor, people would read our badges and laugh. It was all great fun.
After that, such job titles appeared on business cards, convention badges, etc.
I flatter myself in suspecting that it was I who started it!
When I was at Apple (before Steve returned, when it was going out of business), the employees got to pick their titles. Most were approved, but one woman wanted to be "Madonna of the File System", I think that was not. She did, however, know that code inside and out and deserved to get it.
Have you found the things you say to actually be true?
I've worked with people that were passionate about the art their entire life , and I've worked with on-job trained people in equivalent positions -- the difference in code quality/structure/logic is pretty telling between the two camps.
It certainly makes one think that either the skill set is 'special', or that we're really in the experimental trial phase of learning how to teach it to those otherwise uninterested.
I think people who entered the industry before 2010 (maybe even later) don't understand the current reality.
Previously, you were probably a dork in high school and mostly self taught for the love of technology. You might have gone through a prestigious academic CS program and cultivated a sense of superiority over the humanities and biz school kids. Outsourcing / off shoring was a thing but you had the innate protection of skin color and acculturation.
Today it's just another thing some people study because that's where the jobs are.
> "trainable and attainable by large swaths of the population"
Bold assertions requires evidence.
I mean sure we are not "wizards" , but I highly doubt "large swaths of population " can qualify to work in tech as you claim.
Tech remains be a highly desirable position specifically because it's difficult for an average person to fully grasp it. CS has one of the highest drop rates compared to other fields because people fundamentally have a hard time comprehending systems.
I never understand why our profession actively tries to undermine its own status compared to other fields. You never hear Lawyers going around telling people their profession is pointless and any average Joe can master it by taking a 6 week boot camp course.. or that they are "overpaid" for sending a single letter via email.
My pet theory is that the underlying nerd culture enables this due to our insecurities.
I bet this is also why we are not taken very seriously and lack accountability.
Honestly yes. I've been interviewing people that have gotten laid off and almost 75% of the time I'm thinking that they were probably chosen for layoffs due to low performance
> I've been interviewing people that have gotten laid off and almost 75% of the time I'm thinking that they were probably chosen for layoffs due to low performance
The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off. I don’t mean anything about your company, which could be great or terrible, I have no idea. But I would expect the best performers to get new positions quickly through their networks and connections. You would not see these people replying to random offers, but it does not mean that they were not high-performers who were laid off.
> The people interviewing with you might be a biased subset of those that were laid off.
I suspect this to be very likely the case but I don't think it changes anything here. If we laid off people that were high performers and they got taken up in the job market quickly that means things are still healthy and we are still giving jobs to people that deserve jobs. A net neutral effect on the system as a whole.
The stragglers that can't find new jobs because they were laid off for low performance AND also are low performing interviewers are not useful to the system. Now they just kind of eat up some interviewing productivity but thats probably a net-positive for the entire job market as a whole.
The reason given is usually to cut costs, because the company claims to lack the cashflow or income to pay them. If the company can't afford it or doesn't believe they need it, they cut meat and bone and not just fat.
Look at the news organizations laying off reporters in large numbers. The news organizations' product suffers considerably.
Most of the anti-union tech workers I've encountered over my career have vastly overestimated their abilities and value to the workforce. Their willingness to suffer abuse from employers (while taking pride in their refusal to establish boundaries) makes working conditions worse for all of us.
Most of the pro-union tech workers I know have never been forced to join a corrupt union that does nothing to help them while keeping the good old boys who contribute little to the company employed. Many tech workers are paid in stock so theres tons of incentive to get rid of low performers.
If the alternative is to be under constant existential threat of being laid off... I could see is as the lesser evil. IMO, recent events are the reason for this item being included.
A sensible person would not have their finances stretched so thin that they cannot deal with an interruption in their employment. I.e. one should be setting aside at least 10% of their income.
I worked for a company once that was doing poorly, and management decided to do an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of my coworkers was livid with rage. I asked him why didn't he just quit and get another job? He said he didn't have any savings at all, and bills to pay. He had a mcmansion with expensive new furniture, new cars for himself and his wife, and expensive clothes. He had forged the chain connecting him to his desk - not the company's fault.
Savings don't protect you from the stress unless you've saved enough to retire. Savings provides a buffer of time you get to find another job, but you still have to find (and land) that job. Given how f'd-up tech hiring is and the current job market that might not be as easy as it sounds... So I can understand why people want to avoid that level of stress and the compromises they will make to do that.
No doubt it is way less stressful... going from "I'm going to need to have an accident so my family can live off my life insurance" to "I need to see a doctor about all this ulcer". But you'd still rather not have the ulcer.
If people don't have stress in their lives, they'll invent it.
For example, my dad survived 32 missions over Germany. His group had 80% casualties. He had resigned himself to inevitable death. When he arrived home, he was amused by the trivial things people were stressed about. After all, they would survive to the next morning.
Thereafter, whenever he felt down, he'd think about what a golden opportunity he had to live, that his buddies did not have.
This morning, it was rainy and gloomy. In the afternoon, the sun came out and lit up the wet trees. It was spectacular. What a fine day to be alive.
Ages ago, I spoke with someone who had experience doing union organizing in the steel industry about why tech workers didn't unionize.
I told him that the first step would be for tech workers to stop thinking that their greatest competition is other tech workers.
(Flip the question: "If your coworkers are low-performing but the union prevents the company from firing them, why don't you just go form your own company with your three closest buddies and compete? That's the dream, right?")
How about you open a new company with your low performing buddies and form union with them elsewhere?
Fields where skill disparity is extreme, only low performing leeches or lazy ones want union so they can leech off of colleagues who do real work.
Usually they don't like someone because they are poor performers. As a person who has owned a business with employees, you naturally like the ones that are making you money. In fact, I'd put up with a whole lot of things I don't like if they make money for me.
As a manager, I'd naturally want to retain the people who made me look good to my manager, regardless of my personal feelings.
Having a personal vendetta against particular employees has never happened in my experience, though it's been alleged a lot.
One wonders if it is not solved simply because of at will employlemt? Almost like firms are lazy, and unwilling to go beyond the bare minumum required by law.
If you ever went through interview loop at Google or a similar company, I doubt you would call those companies "lazy" wrt. hiring.
An interview is at least 4 people, each grilling you for an hour, asking hard questions.
Their hiring bar is high and they optimize for avoiding bad hires (which of course is pissing off the commenters who want to be hired and therefore would prefer lower hiring standard).
In Europe they make it harder to fire people and guess what happened?
First, companies have probatory period (2-6 months, depending on the country) where you're hired but can be fired at will. This is to minimize chances of being stuck with a poor performer.
Second, EU economy is about the size of US and China but software industry (and the tax / employment riches associated with it) is largely in US Chine. Might be a coincidence but I think there's causality between over-regulation and stagnation of the economy.
There's also the confounding factor that software engineers, historically, were more in demand as a baseline, so in an environment where you think you can get a job if you're fired, people optimize more for higher risk/higher reward plays, while having job security improvements much more heavily benefits industries where you're seen as more disposable.
With the endless seas of SWE layoffs, we'll see if that behavior continues.
> Look at the countries that are generally regarded as happiest: are their economies the biggest?
Assuming when you say "biggest" you mean per capita... yes. Obviously it's not the only factor, but generally I think it's generally accepted that people in rich countries are better off than people in poor countries.
Why is your original comment downvoted? It makes no sense to me. This is simply common sense. Most of the very high quality places to live are also wealthy, highly developed countries.
I have lots of experience hiring tech people. Most of the time they turn out to be just as good as we thought they would be. But sometimes they don't. It would be terrible if it was impossible for us to let those people go.
also isn't that why trial periods exist? as in you have 3 month or so to change your mind after hiring someone/taking a job if it turns out to be a bad fit, for whatever reason, at either employer or employees initiative?
It would be terrible for businesses to fire people arbitrarily. I'd rather give more rights to individuals than to businesses, because I am biased in an anti-business way: businesses arent bounded by human lifespans or biological constraints, get preferential treatment by the American legal system, have orders of magnitude more money and political power than individuals. It's almost like the USA fought a war and chartered individual rights in a document over this kind of shit, but never imagined businesses would be more encompassing than governments.
Would it be terrible if employees could fire their employers arbitrarily?
Both parties have freedom in this arrangement, but we can find examples of both employees and employers with weak negotiating positions. I don't think that invalidates the benefits of freedoms of association.
To your point about business being bound by constraints, they absolutely are bound by the niche they operate in. As markets change, world events unfold, competitors appear, decisions are made, companies can struggle and fail, yet are typically unable to pivot.
Consider a company that makes ICE cars that can't follow the market into making EVs. Or a company that has never had competition might be in the stranglehold of "this is the way we've always done it" when a fierce competitor emerges, and won't adapt.
True, most employees typically don't have equity (so they don't share in all the upside), but they also aren't married to the company when it looks like a supertanker headed for an inevitable collision with a bridge (getting wiped out on the downside).
Off-shoring is already very prevalent in US tech work. So there certainly needs to be a balance in workers rights and business interest if those jobs are going to stay domestic. In general I agree with your perspective. But there is a harsh alternative reality that we're going to continue to face in the tech workforce.
To be clear, in many countries with stronger labour laws, "just cause" employment is the national standard -- a requirement. As I understand, the US has many laws that protect again discrimination (hiring and firing), but very few laws that protect all workers from arbitrary layoffs. (Companies can hire and fire as they please with very few severance requirements.) In practice, when you want to layoff low performing workers in places with stronger labour laws, you need to offer large enough severance for them to voluntarily resign. Depending on the country, culture, seniority, and industry, this can be anywhere from 3 to 24 months. Yes, there is a huge variance.
One thing that I don't see being discussed here: If you add "just cause" to your employment contract, you are pretty much trading away future pay raises for security. That is fine, but it needs to be said out loud.
I hear a lot of anti-worker propaganda like this and it baffles me.
I live in the Netherlands where these types of worker protections are enshrined in law, and I don't think I've ever encountered this boogeyman of the super low performing coworker that somehow ruins things for everyone else. News flash, low performance is still a valid reason for dismissal, it just has to actually be backed up by proof rather than being done on a whim because some manager has a vendetta.
Also, I don't give a shit how low performance my colleagues are as long as the useless managerial class exists. The laziest and most worthless people I've ever interacted with were always managers or manager-adjacent, never a regular employee.
As a sometimes-engineer, sometimes-manager in mostly multinational tech, this doesn't reflect my experience at all.
I've worked with plenty of low performing ICs (as both peer and manager), and the trends are clear:
* companies that don't do, or don't do sufficient, technical interviewing
* employees with heavy worker protections, like in Germany.
I've also worked with fantastic German colleagues btw. But one reason they tended to get paid so much less is that they came with much, much higher risk, as they were essentially un-fireable. Even with imminently clear under performance you're looking at a year of PIPs, paperwork, and CYA bureaucracy.
Personally, I've found it more fulfilling to work in at-will places, for much higher wages, with more uniformly excellent colleagues. There's a reason so many of the best software engineers in the world make their way to the US.
As if only low-performing coworkers would be terminated.
The total freedom of the company to terminate anyone any time for any reason or no reason is extreme, and now we are pivoting to the other extreme. Funny how that happens.
Why is that extreme? If you own a company, why shouldn't you be able to fire someone at any time? If you work a job, why shouldn't you be able to quit at any time?
I don't think it's great that our society tries to treat work like it's family, and jobs like they're some guaranteed long-term relationship. It sets people up with the wrong expectations.
Your company will lay you off or fire you once they run out of money to pay you or reason to keep you on board. That's how it works. Just as you will quit your job and take a new one if you interview and get a better offer elsewhere.
For the same reason companies shouldn't be able to band together with other companies to not allow raises. They're anti-competitive practices, which eats away at the entire point of having a market, which is for competition to force parties to offer better prices, bid higher amounts, and produce better products/services, which benefits everyone. For example:
- Landlords should not be able to collude to keep rent prices high. They should be forced to compete against each other, either by offering lower rent or better premises and services to tenants. The result is that over time, society gets better and better places to live, that are nicer, updated, and safer, at cheaper prices.
- Healthcare providers shouldn't be allowed to collude to set uniform prices for services. They should have to compete on price, quality of care, or access to treatments, ensuring patients can choose better or more affordable options. The result is that more and more people can afford healthcare services, which themselves become increasingly effective over time.
- Internet service providers shouldn't be able to divide territories or coordinate to prevent competition in specific regions. They should have to compete, driving down prices or increasing service quality for consumers.
- Software companies shouldn't agree to not hire each other's employees to keep wages low. This prevents employees from negotiating higher salaries and better benefits, hurting workforce dynamism and innovation.
Etc.
Capitalism is simply a collection of laws and regulations that blocks all means of profit other than simply offering a better deal or better services. The goal is for those to be the only real ways to profit. The side effect of workers and companies all competing to do this in order to profit is that society benefits by having a ton of innovation to make better and better things, at cheaper and cheaper prices. Which is the central reason why, today, the average person can have a cell phone, a TV, the internet, amazing healthcare treatments, and an almost infinite array of options for clothing, food, entertainment, etc.
Allowing people to profit in ways that disrupt competition gunks up the entire functioning of the market. Maybe you get some short-term benefit, but ultimately you end up with a system that doesn't create nearly as much wealth and prosperity. Because why go through the trouble to create great things for your customers (as a company), your employers (as an employee), or your employees (as an employer) if you can instead benefit by simply banding together with others and colluding, or monopolizing some essential resource, or fixing prices, etc.
I recommend you travel to LATAM or EMEA, where worker protections are much higher. No one gets fired because protections are so high. At-will is unheard of [1]. In some countries, there's a mandatory X months of salary for Y months worked. The regulation of the labor
market, however, is strict and inflexible [2], and all LATAM jurisdictions impose mandatory severance pay for wrongful terminations.[2]
What are the results of worker protections mentioned above ? Literally no jobs with protections. See for yourself. LATAM has an average of ~65% informal employment. Take Argentina for example. Close to 50% of the labor market are under-the-table "jobs" for this reason.[3]. Even more developed countries suffer the consequences , such as UK having 24% informal sector [4]
All those governments intended to look out for humans before corporations. It didn't work out that way.
The road to poverty is paved with good intentions.
US dynamism actually creates more jobs as more are willing to try new things and experiment.
Yes, you can protect workers, very very well.
But only if you are OK with a tiny amount of protected workers, and let everyone else toil in the informal sector where zero protections exist
From your own source: UK's informal employment rate? 6.5%, not 24%. Ireland? 1.8%. Germany: 2.5%. Norway: 2%. Many EU countries have strong labor protections alongside low informality and high employment. While labor protections pose challenges, they do not inherently lead to high informality or low job creation. Effective policy design and enforcement are key to achieving economic stability with strong worker rights.
I'm not surprised, on a startup-angled site, that there'd be dissatisfaction with not being able to hire and fire at will. COVID had employees re-assess what was important for them. Tangentially, now we're seeing that shorter working weeks results in higher employee productivity and satisfaction.[1]
Having job security, when you've taken on long-term commitments like a mortgage and raising kids, is considered important in many parts of the world. The EU isn't SV; for employees that's probably a good thing.
>>>I'm not surprised, on a startup-angled site, that there'd be dissatisfaction with not being able to hire and fire at will
Its not just startups. The chickens always come home to roost.
Lets go into COVID since it is a wonderful example. Employers in Ecuador dealt with minimum wage protections well outpacing productivity growth precovid, doubling the cost of protections relative to Colombia and 75 percent higher than in Peru [1] . Then COVID hit.
The central government had no choice but to temporarily rescind the rules of strict protections under "force majeure". This eliminated all severance payments to employees under 'force majeure'. [2]
What happened?
A bunch of low performers who had built a decade or more in 1 job, got unexpectedly laid off, despite working in perfectly operating businesses with no risk of bankruptcy (AG, export adjacent etc) Then, with zero marketable skills from a decade of non-work, these workers are chronically unemployable now. [3]
PS - Regarding the UK number cited, which some people felt very strongly about.. I made a mistake and quoted the wrong year. I can't edit my comment any longer [4]
[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/downloadpdf/journals/002/2021/2... , see page 13, section 6 ("the recovery has been very partially among the less educated (persons with basic education or less) ....'they exited' the labor force in larger numbers from the crisis onset")
Why are you now talking about Ecuador and COVID? And you haven't addressed the UK link where you say 24% but it's 6.5%. Makes the rest of what you blather more untrustworthy than it was
I work in the EU, and I'd rather see the American "at-will" system, but with a basic income + additional financial distress protections.
It is IMO ridiculous that in a lot of EU countries, chronic low performance is not just cause for firing.
It makes economical sense to reduce the friction of allocating workers where they'll be most productive. It just shouldn't destroy those workers' financial security.
I'd argue the main reason low performance employees don't get fired is because managers either don't know who the low performers are, or don't want to have an unpleasant conversation and can choose to put it off indefinitely.
> You think LATAM is in poverty because of their worker protections? Not the decades of western exploitation of their natural resources? Not the decades of American interference in their political systems to destabilize their government? Sure.
No, countries regularly go from poverty to wealth quickly. It's purely cultural which is upstream from policy.
It's not black and white. It's a sliding scale. Society already does a ton to look out for the individual worker. It's more a question of where things should fall on that scale.
Coddling workers by expecting corporations to basically act as their family, their parents, their financial planners, their healthcare providers, etc., is terrible.
We should not be telling people to expect any particular corporation to provide them a livelihood indefinitely, when it's a simple fact that corporations cannot do that. They can afford to pay you when it's profitable for them to do so, and that's it. That's the deal. Period.
I'm all for taking care of people. That's what our government should do itself. We should not be placing that role on corporations. And we should not be telling people to expect that their jobs will last forever and they can't be fired. We should instead tell people to maintain their skillsets, maintain their savings, and live within their means, so they can weather inevitable job changes. That's what caring for people actually looks like.
Not necessarily. Sure it is better if every other factor is held equal, but it's not: everyone benefits from living in a more highly economically developed society where industry is more successful. So you have to weigh pro-worker concerns against these other benefits.
If your argument were valid then its logical conclusion would be that all profit from the business has to distributed to the employees (as in most traditional strains of far-left thought). In practice systems like that have major flaws.
When your company gets even a little big, the decision making process gets filtered through sufficient levels of management that it's not the company owner firing people at any time: It's an employee who doesn't necessarily have to be aligned at all with what is good for the company that is firing people at any time.
Eventually you learn that one of your middle managers managed to fire someone for some reason that is illegal, or is related to some kind of crime, and guess what? It seeps upward, and your company is in the wrong.
A process doesn't just protect the employee, it protects you from the iffy middle management that, without exception, gets in. And the more freedom you give them, the worse the behavior.
I would agree with this but if that's the case why employees are not given the same perks as companies from a tax point of view? My personal preference is to treat every human as a business. The alternative would be to eliminate all taxes except sales tax with some cutoff for low income persons.
Yes, and it's an employee's responsibility to not depend on a single job, and to be prepared for the possibility that it might go away. That's the mindset we should be teaching people, because it's REALITY.
Plenty of people are aware of this, and they navigate this successfully by saving part of their income, by maintaining an employable skillset, and by living within their means, while working a job.
When you suggest to people that it's their company's responsibility to take care of them, to guarantee their job into their future, or to look out for their personal financial livelihood, that IS NOT REALITY. That's not how it works. You're telling people that their own responsibilities are someone else's, when that's not in fact true. When people mistakenly believe this drivel, they're far more likely to take bad risks and make huge financial mistakes.
Employers employ many people at once. The risk of a bad employee is divided by the entire workforce.
Employees, on the other hand, put all their eggs into one basket at a time. Many (most?) employers specifically forbid moonlighting and working multiple full-time jobs at once, so employees are forced to depend on a single job at a time. The risk of having a bad employer is shouldered 100% by the employee.
It's this power dynamic that justifies different standards for employers and employees.
Business is not all huge companies with infinite redundancy. There are 30M small businesses in America that employ 60M people. For the vast majority of businesses and teams, losing an employee hurts, and employees have lots of leverage. These business owners have to do the work to ensure redundancy, to plan their budgets and products and systems to ensure they can weather inevitable employee turnover. Plenty of businesses fail to do this and have to close their doors. It happens with regularity.
On the flip side, unemployment is the US is super low. It's true that workers can only hold one job at a time, but they are not "trapped" at a job. In fact, they have more mobility than ever, which also gives them leverage to negotiate for higher salaries or to hop jobs. Not to mention more gig jobs, remote jobs, and contract jobs than ever, even for highly paid positions. Sure, losing a job hurts. But the employees who plan for this possibility, who maintain skills, maintain savings, and live within their means, can find new jobs, just as businesses who plan well can weather employee turnover.
It goes both ways.
So if you're in a position where your employer has some huge power dynamic hold on you, is that some universal truth for all employees resulting from the nature of the employer-employee dynamic? I don't think so. I think that's the result of poor personal decisions, or bad luck at best.
All that said, I'm 100% on board with legal protections that set a high standard for employers. We have plenty of those already. And I'm 100% on board with government stepping in to help take care of people who fall through the cracks. For example, I love that COBRA allowed me to stay on my previous employer-provided group healthcare plan for 18 months(!) after my last job ended.
What I'm against is any cultural or legal change that begins to suggest that its employers' responsibility to keep their people employed. It's not. Financially, the system can't work that way. Employers are not our parents or our nannies or our caretakers, and we should not try to make them into that.
Hundred percent. Yet, it's also reality, today, that the power asymmetry between individuals and corporations are huge. Anybody trying to bootstrap an independent business is heavily punished, simply because corporations want you to be an employee, just because they can. Unless the system balances the power dynamics, it's futile to tell people that they shouldn't ask for more rights from corporations.
I literally run the biggest website for people trying to bootstrap independent businesses, and I haven't seen anyone complain about being heavily punished for trying to do so. Founders are the most employable people I know, and they typically find it the easiest to go get jobs when their businesses fail (although they hate doing so).
Not everyone has a rich family to fall back on, bud. You could say "fall back on the government" but then this is how the government would do it. They wouldn't want you to fire people for no reason at all. In the same way that people are paid a certain wage as an agreement, there are other conditions too. This can be part of those conditions.
Your claim of:
> Yes, and it's an employee's responsibility to not depend on a single job, and to be prepared for the possibility that it might go away. That's the mindset we should be teaching people, because it's REALITY.
is capitalist mindset that thinks there's never a chance of change. Kinda pathetic for a MIT grad, tbh.
Personal attacks are shite, especially when they dig into someone's background for extra 'bite'.
P.s. what rock have you been living under where you have a preconception that all MIT graduates are ethical white knights that share all of your own opinions?
It's one of the most varietal student bodies at a school that forks people majorly into military programs and research labs.. to expect harmonious homogeny regarding ethical opinions from the graduates is ridiculous.
My understanding from the comments was that this prevents people who don't do their job from being fired, as long as they don't set fire to the servers or something. If I misunderstood, then the union is being nicer than they have to.
Why wouldn't it be? Businesses doing pro-business things are the main reason well paying jobs exist. And people love well paying jobs rather than poor paying jobs.
Government is in charge of regulating the minimum wage. Private companies are in charge of bidding for the "maximum wage", they have no obligation for providing a minimum as they serve their shareholders not the public, the government serves the public.
>Private companies are in charge of bidding for the "maximum wage", they have no obligation for providing a minimum as they serve their shareholders not the public, the government serves the public.
This doesn't support your point the way you think it might.
My own experience working in a white-collar union with a just cause provision is that the process is much more cumbersome and time consuming, and includes some off-ramps, but it is certainly possible to fire and or punish low performers. The more concretely "low performance" can be measured, the quicker and easier, but we're still talking months or years.
That is your problem right there. You cannot trust comments to give you an accurate idea of what actually happened. The linked source is marginally better (but keep in mind that it is close to one side of the story, even though it is more independent than some people here seem to believe).
Are you deliberately ignoring the concept of power imbalance and wide spectrum on which it occurs?
All of those examples you cited are drastically different types of relationships, set in very different contexts, that absolutely deserve different terms of engagement.
>Do we now hate the rich so much that we want to impose that burden on them when they pay someone
I don't even know how to parse this. We're talking about companies of a certain size. I guess we have fully stopped pretending they are anything other than an appendage of the wealthy class, and have no other responsibilities to society.
That power imbalance mainly exists if you don't save any money and/or live in an area with only a couple of employment options in your field and can't move. If you save up enough money to take a couple years off, there's no power imbalance.
i agree with you but you do realize what you’re saying right? the vast majority of people will never have 150k+ in liquid capital they can tap in to if they don’t like their job
That doesn’t mean the last company that they happened to work for owes them these things.
If you think people should be entitled to food and shelter, fine. But it should be provided by the state, not by a private business that was unlucky enough to make a bad hiring decision.
(And in fact, the state does provide various forms of welfare including unemployment insurance. I’d be in favor of increasing those.)
Personally, I prefer having a few low-performing people around than being in a state of existential threat of being fired for no reason by a middle manager. They are easier to work around.
Who your boss says is "low-performing" may not match your own experience of who is "low-performing", and may include e.g. people who the boss doesn't personally like, or indeed may include you yourself.
Interestingly, this comment can be interpreted both ways. The act of pushing people through a lower barrier based on their race can be inferred as racist, or the claim that such a thing is happening can also be inferred as racist.
I spent eight years at Google, starting long before these DEI mandates came in (and did over a hundred interviews during that period). I think the person you're responding to is being sensationalist, but I also feel the way these measures were rolled out did end up missing out on a lot of great hires due to them not fitting the perceived makeup of the company.
Funnily enough, I recall a specific meeting where they were planning to roll out measures to equalize pay between male and females. Prior to the rollout, they did an internal audit to understand the extent of the problem, and the audit came back highly favoring females over males. To Google's credit, they didn't move forward with it.
> You rarely knew if the people you interviewed were hired or not
Perhaps this has changed over the years. I recall there is a website listing all the people you have interviewed and their status (e.g. upcoming interview, rejected, application withdrawn etc)
I mean, in the context of most union agreements with a similar provision, kinda.
Your union might protect you from termination on an assembly line, and at least they can move you around the facility or bring in extra workers. Or for a teacher they bring in more supervision and resources.
In contexts where unions have similar provisions, direct supervision is implied.
When the wealth created by those who work at the New York Times is sent out in dividends to those who do no work or create wealth there, what is performance of these rentiers?
You're arguing on the side of the rentiers and parasites who do not work, and lecturing about "low performance".
It's the people doing the work's purview to discuss performance, not the parasites.
Why were those "rentiers and parasites" ever involved? Why wasn't the NYT (or any other Thing) just created by the workers without their involvement? The answer in practice is that they provided value by providing the necessary capital to build the thing, and they did so in return for a cut of the future wealth earned by the thing. It's arguable that the wealth inequality that set the initial conditions for this is out of hand, but given the starting conditions, how else do you make big things?
Nothing forces you to go work for those so-called “parasites” if you don’t want to. You are perfectly allowed to start your own worker-owned journalism collective if that’s what you prefer.
1: If a union strikes when it has too much leverage, there's a risk there as well at overplaying the hand. If the Times does just fine during the election, then the union helps make the case their members are overrated. If the Times crashes and burns during the election, they might make the value of the contract weaker.
2: In an election where trust and reliability of independent media are really being called into question, something like this could have outsized negative impact. There's potentially a lot of damage to innocent third parties, including smaller syndication partners.
Does SWE striking even mean anything to a company? If factory workers don't show up, no products are made. If a SWE doesn't show up, the website is just fine (see elon buys twitter).
SWE impact is measured in quarters or years, especially at a big company that doesn't have public deadlines for project delivery.
If you don’t have a fire department and your house catches on fire, it is an obvious demonstration of their value. Likewise, if NYT goes down tomorrow or they don’t have content to drive traffic, it shows management they can’t mess around. The best case scenario for management is a dip in traffic but no major issues.
Also, it takes two to tango. For any of the negative outcomes you mention, NYT management is equally to blame. Why is it the union’s responsibility to acquiesce to whatever terms to maintain trust and reliability?
When Rail unions in Europe strike during holidays, they do get leverage, but it infuriates the general public and creates a lot of bad press for the union.
Because waiting for the time when you can apply the most leverage is a shitty thing to do? How would you feel if your house was on fire and the fire fighters went on strike only then to demand they be given bounties?
They had a contract, waiting for the time when the work they do is absolutely critical is antisocial behavior. Society is built on people honoring their commitments.
> How would you feel if your house was on fire and the fire fighters went on strike only then to demand they be given bounties?
What a terrible analogy promoting a ridiculous narrative.
A better analogy is if it's the mayors house on fire, it was predetermined when exactly the mayors house would catch fire, the mayor had been warned well in advance of his house catching fire that the firefighters would like to negotiate their contract, and had in fact been involved in negotiations for years already. Not quite the same zing to it though...
If they didn't like their contract, the responsible thing to do would have been to go on strike earlier or quit. Waiting till the moment of maximal pain is just spiteful and done in bad faith.
Ultimately, labor unions exist to extract additional compensation from employers. Imo in cases where the employer can afford it and the employees in question are being unfairly treated, I think it's reasonable for them to quit or strike in good faith, but I don't think many of those things are true here.
Newspapers are barely surviving these days. These people took jobs at the nytimes knowing they wouldn't make big tech salaries, and most companies have ended WFH policies. If they can force the NYTimes to give them concessions by holding them hostage during one of the most contentious moments in US history, I won't admire them one bit.
Lastly, thanks for drawing that better comparison. It still wouldn't be right for the firefighters to let someone's house burn down in that case.
Let me correct you, this will be election month at minimum.
The NYT kind of brings this kind of heat on itself because it has shifted from being just the paper of record over to an institution to the current definition of progressivism. You can only really do this union kinda stuff against self-important institutions. Which developer is ever going to attempt this on Accenture? They are straight up and honest about their business, which is they are trying to rake profits from connecting developers with companies - whatever it takes, whoever, from wherever, at whatever price is profitable.
The Times adorned itself as something more than a business, a special kind of business, a business that fights for something. So there you go, live up to it I guess.
Here is some of the content that the NYTimes focuses on:
It's a fairly pro-business paper, certainly not very critical of Israel, and you appear to have completely missed all of its somewhat trans-skeptical reporting and opinion. (The latter pervasive enough to rankle many of its own employees about the tone and tenor of NYT coverage of trans issues.)
I want to believe you, but my hunch is your reply is similar to someone suggesting "Well, you see, you forgot all the pro liberal coverage that Fox News has been doing all year".
Does NYT not have a reputation or am I truly out of touch here? I went through some of their podcasts recently and it's all quite one-sided, for example.
Yes, you are absolutely out of touch. drawkward gave you three incredibly specific examples but you just kept on sticking with your hunch.
A paper that is the "epitome of progressivism" probably isn't going to have multiple conservative opinion columnists heavily featured and isn't going to have recurring problems with fawning interviews of white supremacists over barbecue.
I suppose if you're any further than center-right, a paper that is narrowly center-left is going to appear to be the "epitome of progressivism", but many years of critique would probably suggest otherwise. politely, i don't think this would be something you'd get tripped up on if you'd paid attention for a few years longer than a singular skim of the podcasts recently.
I think it’s a mistake to judge the NYT by their podcasts. I canceled my subscription when they reported on the concessions the UAW had won from automakers mostly in terms of how it might affect the bottom line of the companies, and with little to no mention of the effect on the workers and their families.
It depends where you're coming from. Some (many now?) see Dick Cheney as a progressive liberal liar, and many on the left see him as a right-wing devil incarnate.
I was very disappointed with NYT’s coverage of the 2020 elections, and it has been difficult for me to take their reporting seriously since then. That they had their own workers striking is not a good look, yet unsurprising to me at this point. Just my opinion, I don’t know if this counts as reputation.
(NPR was even more disappointing because they positioned themselves as centrist; APM’s Marketplace was closer centrist that than NPR).
> It's a fairly pro-business paper, certainly not very critical of Israel
Sorry, are we both talking about the New York Times in 2024 here? Not a day goes by that there isn’t an article crying about Palestinians and bashing Israel - there’s one right now, just scroll down to the section just above sports.
Calling it the preeminent progressive institution in America media today is axiomatic.
The NYT is most definitely pro-Israel - so much that after October 7, it made up[1] a story of mass rape[2] to justify the attacks on Gaza. Just because it's not as pro-Israel as you doesn't mean it's not pro-Israel.
This comment will be deleted by moderators, though, just like every other comment which points this out. Yet no moderator has ever mentioned why they are doing that. It's factual and relevant to the discussion.
I'm sorry, when did the NYT call Isreal's behavior genocidal? I must have missed it.
Any objective observer would call Israel's behavior abhorrent wrt Gaza. In fact, it seems like the majority of the planet is doing that, if the UN is representative.
I like the implication that being "trans-skeptical" is "non-progressive" and therefore to be a progressive you have to buy into the ideology without questioning anything. That does align with my current views of where progressive ideology is headed
I think the bulk of the pro-trans movement would consider themselves progressive. I think that the bulk of progressives would consider themselves pro-trans.
I don't consider myself a progressive for just this reason. I would be considered a TERF by the trans community, not because I think trans people don't exist or arent worth of love, employment, and respect, but rather because there are some hot issues (bathroom access, sports access, how to handle children permanently transitioning, replacing cisgendered terminology in medical textbooks) that I believe merit more study or nuanced approaches.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the question of who has the right to define what labels, and I think most progressives would not call you a progressive if you don't 100% accept trans rights. Of course, this demands lockstep ideological behavior, which is rarely a good thing for long. Could you be progressive on some issues and not others? Certainly! But which mix defines you as "progressive" or not is not up to me.
I had to look that up. I'm I out of touch with the times by not knowing such acronyms? I am standing here at the station minding my business and Overton Express is passing by at 60 mph. "TERF" seem to describe most progressives. But I think I lag the avant guard conscious by 10 years of something.
But anyhow, I would say NYT is very much not left nor progressive. Maybe on some tangential culture issues. It is a centre corporate newspaper.
> The NYT kind of brings this kind of heat on itself because it has shifted from being just the paper of record over to an institution to the current definition of progressivism.
This sounds like how American conservatives describe it rather than how most readers or actual progressives would - the latter having significant misgivings about how it covered Iraq, Occupy Wall Street, the 2016 election coverage of things like the email hacks and FBI investigations relative to their actual substance, the tone of their coverage and editorials about transgender issues, etc.
The best way I’ve found to describe the NYT is as representing the east coast establishment. The issues which earned them attacks as liberal were things like favorably covering gay rights, which affects those elites (even rich sons of influential families can be born gay so everyone knows someone who benefits from that), but they tend to be more conservative on things like workers rights or tax issues which don’t affect or may even threaten their affluent readers. Climate change affects everyone but their opinion pieces are going to be things like “buy an induction stove” or “vacation in Nepal before the snow melts and buy some carbon offsets” rather than “stop flying and eat less beef” because their target reader wants to do the former and not the latter.
You are comically uninformed. If the NYT were even remotely progressive, they'd have been consistently flogging the living shit out of Donald Trump and his idiotic, dementia-driven behavior behind a podium for months now instead of pretending like we should accept it as normal while excoriating Harris for behaving like a mainstream political candidate.
Dementia driven? We can certainly disagree on policy objectives, but claiming Trump has dementia is absolute nonsense. Did you watch the Rogan interview? Regardless of one’s views on his politics, there is not even a remote hint of dementia.
Have you? Just last not he was confused about what *state he was in. A week ago he spent 40 minutes kn stage doing nothing as music played until his handlers yanked him.
Yeah the media have been salivating for this week for months now. Exactly why I'm not planning to read or watch any news this week.
I'll vote tomorrow. That's what I can do. All the rest of it is out of my hands and I'm not going to spend any of my time or mental energy engaging in the manufactured drama sure to come.
Like my barber said at my last haircut: the only sure thing about this election is that an idiot will be our next president.
Exactly why I'm not planning to read or watch any news this week.
I see we share the same strategy. My new policy is that I shut the news off once the polls open on election day and don't turn it back on until the following morning. Over the course of my life, I'll accrue enough saved hours to have achieved something minor, yet meaningful.
It boggles my mind at how proud people are to refuse to draw a distinction between two completely different candidates. One has demonstrated competence and public service, while the other has demonstrated incompetence and chronic self-dealing.
Refusing to draw a distinction is moral cowardice.
I agree they are completely different. I don't think either are remotely qualified. I have been struggling with whether I'll vote for president at all. I cannot in good conscience endorse either candidate, on the other hand those are the choices I have. I guess I could do a symbolic write-in. I have never been less motivated for a presidential election in my life.
I don't blindly give unions a pass, but you're asking if a business would use the value of their product at a particular point in time to set terms. Of course they do. If NYT didn't want to be caught in the lurch, that's what contracts are for, which they've had plenty of time to secure.
By the way, the price of Christmas trees is about to skyrocket, ridiculous!
If using what leverage you have is so ridiculous, a suggestion to NYT management: agree to every contract provision on a temporary basis, and continue ongoing negotiations with the union which provisions to take away in the permanent contract.
That would end some of the leverage the NYT has and level the playing field for fruitful negotiations.
Yes, a business would use all their advantages at the maximum, with disregard for any other consideration than money, and tell you "it's just business". Or "it's fiduciary duty".
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, suddenly they want to be reasonable? Funny that.
I don't know, probably the lowest common denominator is paying more attention but most everyone i know is desperately trying to shove their heads anywhere that is quiet and calm. The fervor and anger with which all common media explodes during election month is unbearable.
TBH, i don't see the crappy angle at all. I think the country will be just fine without its favored boutique-news-coverage-election-needle-software. Besides, the actual coverage isn't being effected at all.
I'm extremely anti-union principally because they drive up costs to consumers while yielding a product or service of at best comparable (but usually degraded) quality. Some easy examples are UAW destroying Detroit automakers or the recent dockworkers strike involving uneducated laborers demanding compensation ludicrously in excess of what even most people with master's degrees make, all to drastically under-perform equivalent workers from almost anywhere else in the world. To top it off, those same dockworkers zealously guard access to those highly lucrative jobs with some very questionable tactics.
When you drive by a highway construction project that doesn't progress for years or, worse, a horde of workers, most of whom appear to be doing absolutely nothing, there's a good chance that's union fuckery. When you go to almost any hotel in NYC and are treated with borderline disdain by highly incompetent staff while paying $500+ a night, that's union fuckery. When you wonder why you can't get cheap sufficiently high quality EVs like those from China, that's union fuckery. I could go on.
Unions are not comprised of saints. They're doing the same thing as the companies they despise: getting theirs while fucking over everyone else.
Not sure how risky this really is for the Union. Their software engineers are taking a pay cut for the prestige of working for the most influential newspaper on earth. When your BATNA is getting a 50% pay bump somewhere else then strike away. God forbid if the servers crash while reporting on the second hand recount in Georgia next month.
> 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.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull.
According to the NY Times article, this was outlined and agreed to by the union on September 10th. So this is the poison pill because the agreement wasn't finished over the last 2 months.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull.
They are so silly, why have the strike when you have the greatest leverage, they should wait with their strike until a more convenient moment when they could be easier ignored.
The impact on election news coverage may not be that serious. Quoting from a NYT newsroom person:
"NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems."
> This seems like a LOT of issues that still need to be hammered out.
They have been negotiating for two and half years. That seems like plenty of time to me. Can you imagine a union nego taking that long in a country where labour laws are stronger? Seriously: Can you imagine Germany's IG Metall spending 2.5 years to negotiate (without success!) a new contract? It is unthinkable.
One thing I have observed over the years, no matter what are the core issues, it is "never a good time" to strike as a union. I see this sentiment repeated over and over again (over decades!) by anti-unionists.
> there's not a clear button the Times can push on behalf of the union to end the strike immediately
I’m never sure how to feel about arguments that take the form of “it’s obvious, just compare to <thing a statistically vanishing number of people could possibly be in a position to evaluate>”. I’m not sure how many Americans in an average group of 100 are aware of the average union negotiation time of a specific German union, but I’d guess between 0 and 1? I asked my German wife and she looked quizzical and asked if I needed her to Google it.
I’m not disagreeing with you but I’m not sure this form of argument-by-esoteric-fact accomplishes your goals. Maybe I’m just uninformed, but as an uninformed reader, I’m not inclined to believe you. Present it as novel information and not something hilarious obvious, and you would probably have won at least one supporter.
I understand you sentiment. I was trying to offer an outsider's perspective.
It's like talking a Swede about what happens when you don't have health insurance. They will look at you confused. "What do you mean 'don't have health insurance'? That is impossible in Sweden."
Also, according to Wiki, IG Metall is <<the dominant metalworkers' union in Germany, making it the country's largest union as well as Europe's largest industrial union.>> I did some Google searches to find last few negotiations. It normally takes a couple of months. 2.5 years (NYT) is just... well... insane.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull
Siblings are doubting this, but you can think of it like price gouging. It's the right behavior for extracting maximum value, but it burns a lot of trust, and that's important for a long-term business arrangement. It's playing the short game when they should be playing the long game.
Maybe there is little trust left? I don't know about NYT in particular, but the news regularly suggests employees trusting businesses are nothing but suckers.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull.
I love that the default ideology here is to side with the employer. I'm glad that when I am negotiating my salary with my employer, there are no comments from the Peanuts gallery.
Do NYT reporters wait for a quiet time to pump sources for information?
Time and space is strategic. If you have a unionized workforce without a contract or productive negotiations in progress ahead of a critical time, you’re rolling the dice.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull
Hard disagree. They're exerting what little leverage they have. Also there's plenty of places to get reliable election coverage besides NYT so who cares?
> which means workers can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason
So the company would be required to retain and pay deadwood, low productive people, and staff for obsoleted positions? That'll cripple any company over time.
If people demand those working conditions, they should get a government job.
> 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.
The point of strikes isn't to be unobtrusive or convenient. You're just saying people should work for nothing and not take the fat cats to task for underpaying them. Maybe if you stood for solidarity with the workers, you would have some credibility.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull.
Can we get a definitive list of weeks where workers’ rights are officially less important than $world_event? That way we can schedule our requests appropriately. We don’t want to inconvenience anyone.
Of course people understand a term like 'snark' in different ways, so in that sense your point is fine.
But the comment was clearly using sarcasm as an internet hammer, which is what that guideline is asking people not to do. It's bad for curious conversation, which is what we want here.
I know you are trying to be flip, but there topics that are more important than worker's rights. I'm not going to argue that the NYTimes crossword is up there, but I think a good case can be made that independent journalism is up there, especially during open elections.
There is a long list of organizations and governments that made worker's rights more important than inclusive democratic institutions, and it didn't work out for anyone, especially the workers.
Maybe any of the 207 weeks between presidential elections? Or any of the thousands of weeks when one of the running candidates has threatened the legitimacy of their institution directly?
Day of election there is a big tally when votes come in and pictures of American Democracy In Action with a bunch of puff stories about people in lines. Huge time for viewership, not a huge time for important journalism.
There is no perfect time to strike, but I think other outlets can cover the typical:
- "huge lines in Pennsylvania!"
- "Polls close in [KEY SWING STATE] in 2 hours!"
- "Wow the whole west coast went blue, who would have thought!"
- "Shocker that one battleground is going into recount which will somehow last 4 weeks."
There will be absolutely no shortage of other places where Americans get their election news, and arguably at a higher quality than NYT. I will miss their election ticker dashboard widget thing though, that thing is cool.
All people who don't care say "can you please go over there, in the corner, where I can't see you, so you can protest and I can appropriately ignore you."
The point of a protest is to annoy you. Annoy you enough into action.
Annoyance so that bystanders support the protesters' demands or annoyance so that bystanders act against the protesters out of spite? After all, the Westboro Baptist Church's protests don't seem to have been very effective at promoting the cause of homophobia.
I think that protests are a risky move unless the general population is already sympathetic to the protesters' goals.
> After all, the Westboro Baptist Church's protests don't seem to have been very effective at promoting the cause of homophobia
Those protests are to provoke people into physical violence. They are organized by a personal injury lawyer.
> Annoyance so that bystanders support the protesters' demands or annoyance so that bystanders act against the protesters out of spite?
People say a lot of shit, but actually doing an effort out of spite is work, if they do that, they probably think. This is how all protests work. The 1960s black rights protests would like to have a word with you regarding efficacy. :)
Support them by boycotting. I don't understand your statement here. Are you saying that because you have it fairly well, that you should let your labor be as exploited as possible?
If I earn 200k a year, and my employer earns 1MM a year from my labor, why should I not protest for better work conditions, or more % of my labor? If my labor is valuable I should be able to capitalize on it as well.
A worker earning 20k who is making the employer 40k a year is earning a higher % of their labor value than someone making 200k earning 1M a year for the employer.
It seems extremely bad taste for you to comment on the situation like this with such little insight. Like do you even have any union negotiation experience? Monday morning quarterbacking is always so tacky.
> Like do you even have any union negotiation experience?
I spent 3 years working for a professional union negotiator. I don't know everything, but I feel like I have a bit more insight into how the sausage gets made.
Man I sincerely doubt that because I would never ever feel comfortable commenting like that. I looked through your post history for union references and it seems like you're not all that onboard with american unionization practices. I guess I'm forced to believe you due to anonymity though.
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.
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.
Thanks for mentioning that! One of my libraries does a 3 day code. It looks reasonably insecure and scriptable to fetch since it is hard coded as a hidden element in the page that opens the NYT page upon successful login.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040802. (Nothing wrong with your post, I just want to pin the parent to the top so people don't miss the links, and it's better not to consume extra real estate up there)
The guild said it was asking readers to honor its digital picket line by not playing Times Games products, such as Wordle, and not using the Cooking app.
As much as I am a bolshy union member and supporter, this doesn't seem too bad on the surface, the article doesn't make clear what the issues with it are?
Times management said in an email to workers on Sunday that it had offered a 2.5 percent annual wage increase, a minimum 5 percent pay increase for promotions and a $1,000 ratification bonus. It also said that the company would maintain its current in-office work requirements of two days a week through June 2025, while allowing employees to work fully remotely for three weeks per year.
> As much as I am a bolshy union member and supporter, this doesn't seem too bad on the surface, the article doesn't make clear what the issues with it are?
The linked article is the New York Times writing about a strike _against_ the New York Times. Factor this into your assessments.
But factor in how? (rhetorical question) Understanding bias well cannot simply reduce to a high-school debate style of tallying arguments for and against. First, there are more than two sides. Second, reasoning under uncertainty (with probabilities) is essential. Third, the best way for humans to reason requires getting the complexity out of your head. So one way or another, if you want to win [1], you have write down your model (we're not yet doing this here, but at least we're laying out some of the moving parts).
Anyhow, I'm not making a "final" assessment of overall bias; I'm trying to (a) expand discussion of the moving parts and (b) promote a rational and probabilistic approach here.
> the article doesn't make clear what the issues with it are?
What is not clear? The article tells that the issues are contention around return to office policies (as your quote tells, change is planned for July) and wanting a “just cause” provision.
You find it reasonable. THe union, and I, do not find a RTO announcement in June (or anytime really) to be a reasonable request. So yes, the article justified the strike. You just don't think the justification is reasonable.
If they are tech workers who only need a laptop and can work remotely 3 days a week normally, and therefore 5 as well? Yes, its unreasonable as their specific location at a specific time is unnecessary. If you don't need to be physically present to work, then it is unreasonable to force someone to relocate or to come into an office.
Is it reasonable to tell your factory worker employees that they have to be at the factory at certain times? Yes, that's reasonable because these workers must be physically there.
Using broad words like "employees" and "employment" simplifies your thinking.
But you have no idea about internals of NYT, do you? You have no idea whats reasonable and whats not in their team.
BTW why people create a new accounts just to furiously comment all over pretty basic topics like this? Are you really that ashamed of your own opinions (which are still anonymous) or you feel your employer may trace you back? Or NYT employee?
It's not about the internals of NYT. It's 2024, WFH should be already a non-negotiable perk for tech employees because:
- the tech is there to offer this kind of work. It's not that NYT is somehow special about this
- it's better for the employees. Would we be in favour of companies asking to work 80h/week as a normal thing? Would we be in favour of companies asking to work 6 days per week? Maybe 100 years ago, but in 2024 the answer is (or should be) no. Why? Because we as employees have gained some rights over the last decades to make things better for ourselves. WFH is one more right in that list and shouldn't be taken as a privilege
I'm amazed by the people who are bashing against WFH. This is not about the free market, this is about moving the human race in the right direction.
Yet, strangely, your list doesn't contain any rights. Employers absolutely can ask you to work 80 hours per week / six days per week if they so choose (with assumptions about you being an average US resident; obviously jurisdictions can vary). You have the right to a higher rate of pay after a certain number of hours (with some exceptions) if you accept, but that's something quite different.
> WFH is one more right in that list
While rights can have exceptions, when those excepted are greater in numbers than than those eligible... Good luck! The right to higher pay if you work on location seems more politically tenable, but isn't that already priced in anyway?
> You don’t think it’s reasonable to tell your employees that as a condition of employment they have to be at a specific location at specific times?
You think it's reasonable to hire someone remotely, then later forcibly relocate them to another, more expensive city, with no compensation? Because that's what's happened here.
In jurisdictions with stronger labor laws, that is not only not reasonable, but outright illegal (constructive termination).
Of course it is reasonable. But it is equally reasonable for workers, as a condition of employment, to be able to work remotely. Everyone gets to choose what they want for themselves.
It’s a negotiation. What is reasonable is for the two parties to determine. But it’s not crazy to imagine. This is not Walter White asking to work remotely from a professional-grade chemistry lab. These are tech workers who can carry the professional-grade equipment in their backpacks.
They don’t think RTO is reasonable, which is a completely logical stance to take if you’ve setup your life working from home (esp if it’s hours from the office).
... which is something people did on their own, without agreeing with their employers on duration etc.
I love working from home, but its just a non-guaranteed perk that can go away anytime and eventually it will, and companies shouldn't break their backs to accommodate people. There is free job market to match one's expectations, triple especially in places like New York.
I really, really don't get folks who setup their lives in the middle of nowhere to save some bucks and then they complain that world and work doesn't come to their doorstep. You took the risk in maybe unclear situation, you bear the consequences if the risk doesn't pan out your way.
"Perk" is another way of saying "working conditions". They are bargaining over salary, benefits, and working conditions. Therefore, it's on the table.
Whether or not the bargaining workers are responsible (or even sympathetic) with their private living arrangements is not part of the negotiations, and so it doesn't materially matter.
The workers are not "owed" WFH, but neither is the paper "owed" RTO. They have to bargain over it. One side, or likely both sides, will have to give somewhere on the basket of issues they are bargaining over. Maybe the paper loses on this, but gets something else they want like lower salary. Or maybe workers are willing to RTO if they get some kind of commute allotment (pay for their gas/metrocard/whatever).
The bargaining is holistic, over the whole contract terms. The process is not simply that they go item by item and try to convince each other to change their minds. The process is that they bargain the entire package until they are both OK with accepting it.
> you bear the consequences if the risk doesn't pan out your way.
Okay, but that's what they are doing. They can't work there anymore under the current situation, so they have accepted that their risk didn't bear fruit and are now no longer working for the NYT. Consequences bore.
They have graciously extended an opportunity to the NYT for it to reconsider the current state before the workers walk away for good. Accepting risk doesn't mean you can't still be cordial. At this point they are still willing to go back if the conditions allow them to. But if the NYT in the end says "no, we don't need you anymore, it is time for us to close up shop", so be it.
> and companies shouldn't break their backs to accommodate people.
Why isn't the inverse equally true? That workers shouldn't have to break their back to accommodate a change in company policy?
> You took the risk in maybe unclear situation, you bear the consequences if the risk doesn't pan out your way.
Again, I think this is equally true going the other way. Companies allowed their workers to move away from the office, why don't they assume any risk that workers won't want to return?
I get that there needs to be a balance of power, but I don't understand why any request from the company is valid by default and any request by workers is somehow an imposition that the workers need to justify. Why isn't the company asked to justify why workers need to RTO?
> Why isn't the company asked to justify why workers need to RTO?
Well, we do know the state of New York offered the NYT (among others) tax incentives/subsidies earlier in the year. I can't imagine the state of New York will be happy if the workforce works from New Jersey (or Texas). Calling upon the workers to work in New York gives the state the economic activity it expects in return for the subsidies it offered.
But does that make any difference to the workers? If they want to work remotely, whatever reason the NYT has is not their problem.
Were you around during Covid? Many of these employers hired fully remote positions with no timeline to move to an office as a contingency.
This isn’t taking away free coffee, this is a significant altering of the employment. It’s no different than moving everyone in a location to a completely different office on a whim.
Your comment is pretty tone deaf in that it is essentially “I really, really don’t get folks who setup their lives to live in a specific location”. The same thing is happening for people in cities and it has nothing do with middle of nowhere.
> I love working from home, but its just a non-guaranteed perk that can go away anytime and eventually it will,
So is getting paid more than minimum wage and getting extra days off. What a non-argument.
> but its just a non-guaranteed perk that can go away anytime and eventually it will, and companies shouldn't break their backs to accommodate people
I think this is the key to the question. We should start seeing WFH as a right rather than as a perk. Just like the dozens of other rights we have gained over the years. If it were for the companies, we would still be working 6 days/week, 80h/day with little or no vacation/sick/parental days. I'm sure those rights were considered normal in the past but not anymore.
> Eg if they said we haven't had a pay rise for ten years, that would provide context.
That wouldn't provide any kind of justification either, though. All it might indicate is that they desire more pay, just as we know here that they desire a different policy around remote work and desire a “just cause” provision.
And it seems that is the motivation – simply that they want it. Which is all the justification that is needed. One does not have to work if they don't want to. It is up to the NYT to decide if it wants to compel them to or not.
idk 2.5% yearly raise and 5% for promotions seems kind of meager to me. Seems like a yearly raise should both cover cost of living and throw in another percent or 2 to compensate for having another year of experience. I know a lot of people in a lot of professions don't get this but tech comp is what it is.
Then a promotion raise that constitute only 2 years of yearly base raises seems pretty lacking to me since a promotion generally comes with increased responsibilities and higher standards.
I've worked as a developer for companies outside of big tech who complain all day long about the fact that they can't compete with big tech on compensation while they hemorrhage engineers to big tech. I'm sure NYT does the same. No amount of moaning about this will change the fact that they are directly competing with these companies for talent.
I'm not anti-union at all and see them as necessary in certain types of jobs (I hope the Boeing Machinist's Union guts Boeing), but I have no interest in being a part of a union as a developer because it seems like collective bargaining just ends up locking everyone into the level of salary/career progression of the lowest common denominator.
If my understanding is correct, they haven't yet. The raise is spread out evenly over 6 years, so it'll probably be at least 3 years before they return to pre-pandemic purchasing power.
Still quite extraordinary, though I'm not sure how long they had already been at their current rates, so maybe less impressive? Not really sure.
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).
> ...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.
If editorialization is ever appropriate, this feels to me like the right time. Substantively, Perplexity make LLM tools - that's all they advertise on their website and what they are known for. Maybe they do have some jack-of-all-trade engineers who could turn their hands to web development or something, but there are also no doubt cleaners working at Perplexity. They aren't offering the New York Times help with the toilets!
Thank you for pointing that out; I missed it myself. That would imply that Perplexity's offer probably isn't even helpful in this situation, and it rather proves lxgr's point about TechCrunch's editorialization! It seems that the original journalist has made a correction:
> Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch’s post on X saying that “the offer was not to ‘replace’ journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day.” The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It’s not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question. (However, in response to the clarification, we have opted to change the headline to reflect the claim that this offer was not necessarily specific to AI services.)
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.
> Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.”
> "Because if a "machine/AI" does the work, it's not scabbing!"
Who is claiming that in this thread, the linked Techcrunch article, or the tweet quoted in that article?
And even if the Perplexity CEO in particular, or AI tech executives generally were to make that claim elsewhere: Misquoting somebody to strengthen a point like that immediately and significantly reduces my trust in a source.
Also, I'd say that the fact that Techcrunch just changed the headline speaks for itself.
Oh, mine wasn't intended to be a literal quote from anyone, hence why I said `- executives, lying through their teeth.` and didn't name anyone specific.
But this notion is definitely rolling around in the heads of these people, even if they won't say so because it's bad optics. What a CEO/executive says and what they believe and what they do are three very different things. You often cannot trust their weasel words.
But as for "the PerplexityAI CEO didn't say "with AI" in those words!!!"... how else exactly would an AI company help out with striking workers without their product of AI? That is an obvious subtext unsaid.
This is pretty much implied here. Perplexity is an AI-focused company. They're trying to make money off of a shitty situation. AI is a "cheap" tool to use for this purpose. It's really, really scummy.
I'm not disagreeing with that assertion at all: He's clearly offering them something to sabotage the strike.
I'm just pointing out that "offering to help" does equal "offering to help with AI". Sure, it's somewhat heavily implied by context, but journalistic integrity means making it clear what's an implication and what somebody actually said.
TechCrunch even seems to agree: They changed the headline retroactively.
I think the NYT should take him up on that offer. Those striking can probably pull off a 404media business model instead while they watch NYT turn into USA Today, except worse.
But they write software for NYTimes, they don't write journalism.
Additionally NYTimes benefits from huge networks effects – both in that they are a comprehensive source of (reasonably) reliable journalism which attracts lots of readers but also that they know lots of sources. It also helps that it's one of the better newspapers around (probably second to the FT).
FYI (and to those concerned) I ended up changing the headline after Aravind clarified. Since they are an AI company offering AI-powered election-day tracking that would presumably have replaced what the striking folks supported, I think it was well justified at the outset, but now that he's backtracked would be misleading to leave it. Still not great!
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
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.
I dunno. It is a negotiation between the union and the company. They might not have prepared much marketing material because they aren’t really selling anything to those of us in the general public, right?
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.
An an American it's hard for me to imagine how companies could ever work with universal protections from firing at will. What if you're running a painting business, and there's a downturn in construction. Do you just have to pay people to do nothing, since they haven't done anything wrong and aren't allowed to be fired? Or what if a large company needs to make a strategic pivot and fire some employees to hire others with a different skillset.
It seems like economists do consider this to be one of the big reasons why the U.S. economy has grown so much faster than the EU. Hiring in Europe is much riskier, so companies would rather stay small.
For a start all implementations of such protections i'm aware of don't apply till you have over X employees which rules out your specific example. eg. Australia allows businesses with under 15 employees to fire at will. Small businesses have very little employee protection for exactly the reason you stated; You need to be able to hire/fire since each individual employee is such a large part of your workforce. It's generally understood that if you work for a small employer you are more at risk because of this. Large employers are seen as a safer job.
So these protections are always tradeoffs. You can actually earn more at the smaller companies and those places are typically good to get your foot in the door. The larger companies where these protections apply can afford to follow the process and having the process there gives stability that some people need in a career.
I actually think it comes down to the viewpoints on careers. There's no risk to any particular business since the laws are written to only target business that can reasonably follow the process. There is a different viewpoint on working at bigger stable companies vs smaller companies though. One's seen as a stable career and the others seen as temporary (of course exceptions apply).
In all those cases, it sounds like the company would actually suffer the consequences of their prior mismanagement (compared to today where mostly just employees suffer from bad management decisions).
Yes, that means some companies might go under when they could have saved themselves by mass layoffs. I'd be okay with that trade.
Yes, that means growth might slow down to more reasonable levels. I'd be okay with that trade. Europe isn't booming economically like the US, but if you've ever traveled there, their quality of life seems perfectly fine, and costs are much lower.
> but if you've ever traveled there, their quality of life seems perfectly fine
I'm not sure if traveling there is much of an indicator of anything. Doing business there over the course of many years might be a very basic table stakes start to get any idea of what is happening. Even then it will have large blind spots. Most folks traveling to Europe are also traveling to the richest parts of the richest countries and ignoring the rest.
Inertia is a hell of a drug. For how much longer can western Europe stagnate and continue to fall behind the entire world little by little? There are bright spots, but those seem to becoming fewer and further in between. Talk with the younger generations and you may start to get different answers than you expect.
The US system certainly isn't how I'd design things today, but I very much would avoid what the EU is seemingly running headlong into. How much of that has to do with worker protection laws is certainly highly debatable though.
In this scenario, you would go through redundancy processes instead of simply firing people.
Depending on the laws and the country, it involves consultations, handing out offers for alternative roles in the company, mandatory notice periods and timelines, and severance pay.
Or what many multinationals do, you offer non-legally-redundancy severance deals by paying the employees out.
Severance already happens in many industries in the US, however it’s generally only for those paid very well, which arguably need the legal protections less. So such laws are designed to level the play field and prevent abuse of the system. For instance, if you make an accountant redundant, you can’t go and hire another one for a period of time because that means the role was required the whole time. If you want to remove a specific person from a role, you fire them for cause (say bad culture fit or inadequate work) or offer them a payout to leave.
There are usually provisions for firing people due to financial hardship or having too few contracts. The employer must declare the reason, but if it’s found out that they lied, there is an avenue for the worker to get compensated.
That's not how it works at all. Of course you can fire someone with proper cause, you just can't fire someone __at will__. Lack of demand for the position is proper cause. If you don't need staff you can fire them, but you cannot fire someone and hire someone else in the same position.
What's the argument to not be able to fire someone because you can hire someone with better or relevant skills instead? That makes the business stronger, which means it can make more money, which means it can hire more people.
Well the arguments are many, and the counter-arguments also many. The point of my comment was not say that the (typically European) system is better, but it's not like described as parent commenter where you cannot fire people and are stuck with too much staff. That is not the case. I wasn't really arguing for it being better for the company and/or society.
Relevant skill could be proper cause. You can absolutely fire someone for not having the skills you need and hire someone else with the right skillset.
There’s a huge gap between at-will-employment and no ability to fire people at all.
FWIW, it looks like 11 US states have “Implied covenant-of-good-faith and fair dealing” which mean “an employee may only get fired for a reasonable, lawful, and sufficient reason.” The list is also interestingly bipartisan, Alabama, Utah, and Massachusetts are on there. And it must not hurt business too much, since Massachusetts has that very high GDPPP stat.
There are shades of grey. Large institutions should fall back on other means (reduced hours, pay cuts, comfortable severance, longer heads-up for firing) before resorting to overnight-mass-layoffs.
> why the U.S. economy has grown so much faster than the EU
Again, shades of grey.
The economy is a means to an end. If economic growth leads to worse life-outcomes for the populace, when what's the point of having a 'powerful economy'. Now, govt. policies shouldn't knee cap the economy. But, let's not tunnel vision on it as the sole indicator of development.
In my experience, Europeans with a $80k wage live better lives than American tech workers on $300k. To put in concrete light : most American tech workers get 14 days of vacation a year. All that work and all that money, and you only get to enjoy 2 weeks a year in the world's richest country ? That's pathetic.
Exactly! US workers have to fight tooth and nail for things that employees can just expect from other countries. That's why strikes like this are such a big deal.
> They might not have prepared much marketing material because they aren’t really selling anything to those of us in the general public, right?
NYT isn't a highly regulated interstate employer like Boeing or the rail industry or the dockworkers so it's dispute with the union isn't a de-facto matter of national politics like those strikes were so appealing to the public to have a particular opinion on the matter is not of as much use therefore neither side of this dispute has invested heavily in it.
Interesting. I spot checked the Boeing strike, and it does seem like unions often aren't too specific about their demands in public. I guess a lot of stuff that I thought came from unions is actually coming from internal reports like this.
I know some folks who’ve done union organizing a bit, although I’m personally not that interested in it, so take this with a HUGE grain of salt.
But I think appealing to the general public is a tool in the toolset, something they consider, but not an automatic go-to. Ultimately, the NYT tech guild doesn’t actually want the general public to think their boss is a “bad guy,” right? Like, getting the general public to boycott their employer too effectively is a risk to their own paychecks, haha.
The research backs up all the good things that have come out of remote working since at least the pandemic started. Everything is great, employees do better work and the employer gets better work done.
Which was never in doubt if you look at research and metrics.
The kerfuffle about remote being bad only has the stated negative of something about "culture" according to every company that is forcing people off of remote work.
What they don't tell you is
1: the company wants to shift their tax burden to workers from local governments.
2: It is impacting the Commercial Real-estate that the leadership team and board members are getting paid for, on the back end, for leasing office spaces back to the company.
Further:
3: The company is already or will be soon opening a remote team office in Hydrabad, so they are already going to lose #1 and #2 and still not have a decent culture.
Why can't they have a good company culture in Hyderabad? Is there something about Indians that you believe prevents them from developing good company culture?
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 reason as non-union shops. You have bad management. Just Cause is almost entirely asking management to do a little paperwork and a little planning, things that are supposed to be their job anyway.
What argument have I made other than a question? I would like to see data how it plays out. Now I have some ideas of how it plays out but it would be interesting if there was a way to have a test/control group in these types of contracts. I find the struggles here interesting and its fun to watch them play out.
> 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."
Dumb comparison. Losing a job is not the same as losing a legal action. You can’t just go get a different life if you’re convicted of robbery.
> it happens for the same reason as non-union shops. You have bad management.
No, sometimes employees are just bad and work the system to keep the job as long as possible with no intention of improving.
It doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to. The current job market makes it abundantly clear that people are able to get some form of employment easily, even if it’s not what they want.
The point is that the comparison to due process is shockingly stupid. If the government imprisons you, you are done. Your life in civilization is over for the duration of your incarceration and you have no other options.
Anyone who thinks due process against the monopoly of violence is the same as due process for a payment from a company is completely tone deaf and has never dealt with the impact of government imprisonment.
Being unemployed indefinitely is far better than imprisonment.
The actual development of capitalism around the world has shown that when business is thriving, there tends to be lots of employers willing to mop up any excess labour.
We’ve seen a ton of automation and offshoring for centuries now but employment around the world just keeps improving.
- in a thriving environment, lots of companies are hiring
- some people quit or get fired, and it takes a couple of months to get a new job. This is no biggie in a country where the median individual has a net worth of 192k. [0] (yet another argument in favour of a thriving business environment).
- so some % of people will always be temporarily unemployed.
Loll, youre a pretty funny person. No biggie, ill just sell my house to feed myself.
You conveniently ignore the fact that this is the median family net worth, not individual net worth. Further, this will include retired families, who will have access to social security, medicare, and mature 401k/pension plans. This is not anywherenearthe median net worth of a working individual.
If youre going to quote statistics, please at least do so responsibly.
Beyond complete misrepresentation of basic statistics, you have also failed to contextualize the statistics in a way that is useful for the conversation.
A better number would be: the median time an american in the labor force would be able to live off their net worth, something like net worth divided by annual salary. What's the median of that? We could then compare it to the amount of time the median job search takes, and have a fact-based discussion around the policy implications of that number.
But I expect no such intellectual honesty from you; you've already shown your cards.
When you run up against a fact (see? we’re being fact-based) that doesn’t fit your worldview, that doesn’t mean someone had to “completely misrepresent basic statistics”.
It could simply mean that you are wrong.
A possibility you no doubt spend a great deal of time thinking about, oh even-handed one.
I have yet to come across a fact in your comments! You are literally calling median family net worth median individual net worth, and then making arguments on the basis of that misrepresentation.
Further, this thread is about the labor force, not retirees, who generally have more assets, all else equal.
Stop making clownish claims and you wont be treated like a clown.
>Middle class Americans have high net worths; some in stocks, some in cash, some in home equity.
>All of the above can be leveraged when cash is needed.
And what percentage of Americans are working middle class? What percentage of those could liquidate their home equity or retirement portfolio (what you actually mean by "stocks") without causing a huge change in life plans?
They way it usually works is there is a probationary period that you can fire someone under for any reason (usually 90 days), but after that, supposedly you're more protected.
That said, in practice, it doesn't really prevent you from being part of a layoff or anything. You'll just get more notice and complaints.
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 default for the US is "at-will employment", which means that your employer can fire you at any time, no reason needed. The definition of "just cause" would be collectively bargained, so both management and the union will understand and agree on what constitutes just cause or not.
FWIW, layoffs are regulated differently from firings.
>The default for the US is "at-will employment", which means that your employer can fire you at any time, no reason needed.
That seems... fine? In most transaction neither party needs to give "just cause" to terminate a contract. Imagine having to give documentation to move out of your current apartment, for instance. Getting fired is disruptive to someone's finances that some notice/severance would be justified, but "you have to give just cause" (which in practice, means multiple formal write-ups and several months of PIP, even in places without a union contract) seems excessive.
>>The default for the US is "at-will employment", which means that your employer can fire you at any time, no reason needed.
>> That seems... fine? In most transaction neither party needs to give "just cause" to terminate a contract.
You like having a sword over your neck at all times that an employer can just swing and take away your salary and your health insurance for any reason at all?
To be honest, yeah. I want to reduce the fixed costs of job transfer so that I can be efficiently allocated in the economy because that usually means I can make a lot of money. But I can see how someone who is at a lower skill level would want to raise the friction for hiring - less job mobility is good for them.
If someone wants to fire me, I hope they find it easy.
The point is that he wants to be employed at a company because the company values him, not because they're forced to keep him around. This shouldn't be an alien concept. In personal relationships, you want your friends/partner to stay around because they like you, not because they're forced to. In other business relationships, you want to get paid because you're delivering value, not because you'd be a pain to get rid of.
The point isn't keeping a job, it's being well liked by others. While it's unlikely to be anyone's overriding objective (I too would rather be employed but hated, than well-liked but starving), it's still something that people care about. More importantly, it shows that he cares about the other side of the transaction, rather than being some sociopath that only cares about what he gets.
You know you can quit yourself, right? That labor protections that protect you from bad employers do not preclude you from, you know, quitting your job and finding employment elsewhere?
Sure but those same protections might discourage other employers from hiring me in the first place.
It's not such an issue for me now that I have a fair bit of experience, but if I was fresh out of university it would be harder to convince an employer to take a risk.
Never knew people are unemployable in countries with strong labor protections. I must be lucky to have landed a job counts on fingers multiple times now.
> Also severance is a thing.
Indeed it is. Not in the US though
---
The absolute delusion Americans live in never ceases to amaze me. I'm surprised China came up with 996, not the US, and that the US didn't immediately adopt it with the masses cheering it on.
Look at the average wage (especially for tech workers) in the US and compare it to basically any country with strong labour protections and maybe you will reach enlightenment.
Let's see: health insurance not tied to employer, no bankruptcies due to loss of job (or loss of health insurance), no fear of on-the-spot firing with impactful consequences (loss of medical insurance, loss of income), more than a few weeks of maternity leave (and significantly more than just a few days of paid maternity leave) etc. etc.
Not every delusion that Americans have is enlightenment.
Higher wages make up for all that, especially in big tech where people do get basically the same benefits as Europeans but at 4x the wage lol: unlimited or at least several weeks of vacation, excellent healthcare, etc. Sure, your point stands for regular workers, but not for tech workers. There's a reason people clamor to come to the US for tech jobs, and it's not because Europe is better for benefits.
Did you stop reading there and not the subsequent independent clause?
> but "you have to give just cause" (which in practice, means multiple formal write-ups and several months of PIP, even in places without a union contract) seems excessive.
You still said requiring "just cause" is excessive. So you still want an "at-will" sword over your head.
>So you still want an "at-will" sword over your head.
That sword is still going to be over your head regardless of at will employment. You could be laid off (no cause needed), the company goes bankrupt, or you become disabled. Where do you draw the line? If you don't want to accept "sword over your head" for firings, why would you accept it for layoffs?
It doesn't work like that. I worked for a tech company in Germany and it went brankrupt. By contract I have 3 months notice period, and I got them. That's plenty of time to find another job (which I did). It goes both ways too (whenever I want to quit, I give my 3 months notice period).
I would hate it to have an "at-will" contract. Just thinking that my manager or his manager or whoever can just fire me the very same day because of who knows what is just awful.
Yeah I don't want to give 3 months notice to quit, that sounds terrible. I'll take at will any day of the week if it means that I can quit immediately if needed.
Layoffs are negotiated separately, and in normal countries (with collective bargaining and healthcare) layoffs, while impactful, won't cripple your life
But whatabout being laid off, whatabout company bankruptcy, and whatabout becoming disabled? MY god, we're talking about at-will employment being a threat to a human's life insurance and salary, and you bring up NON at-will issues? Those are fundamentally different swords than an at-will employment one.
Is your manager going to disable your body? How is this even remotely close to a manager being able to fire you for whatever? You're just ignoring the whole "at-will".
I'm not talking about a "sword" of any possible negative thing happening to you. Why not bring up asteroids? Or another plague? Or just suddenly a REAL sword beheads me? THe "sword" is solely the at-will. Learn how metaphors work.
It's the same sword: loss of income and healthcare. Semantic games aside, if the premise is that we shouldn't accept the risk of losing income/healthcare due to poor performance/internal politics, why would you accept losing income/healthcare due to layoffs (which also involve poor performance/internal politics)? It's fine to argue "people should be shielded from the risk of losing their income/healthcare", but you can't arbitrarily decide when it's fine to apply that principle.
THAT'S LITERALLY NOT THE PREMISE. AND IT'S NOT THE SAME SWORD. So much whataboutism and changing definitions to fit your needs. And also, you keep forgetting the more important thing: SOMEONE IS SWINGING THE SWORD AND WHY.
> It's fine to argue "people should be shielded from the risk of losing their income/healthcare", but you can't arbitrarily decide when it's fine to apply that principle.
You keep deleting key parts, like "people should be shielded from the risk of losing their income/healthcare from manager's whims". It's not arbitrary.
>You keep deleting key parts, like "people should be shielded from the risk of losing their income/healthcare from manager's whims". It's not arbitrary.
1. Layoffs are usually not "you manager fires you on the spot for whatever reason and with no severance/compensation"
2. Layoffs are usually a less common occurrence than firing people. While the US sucks at labor laws in general, there's at least the WARN act for mass layoffs
3. Layoffs are when multiple people are let go at the same time, which is a distinct category from firing a single person
4. Hence there are often separate negotiations and separate clauses in the union contracts regarding firing a single person (one category) and laying off multiple people (a separate category)
Why the hell you're arguing (in extremely bad faith) against labor protections is beyond anyone's understanding
>1. Layoffs are usually not "you manager fires you on the spot for whatever reason and with no severance/compensation"
>Why the hell you're arguing (in extremely bad faith) against labor protections is beyond anyone's understanding
I'm not sure why you're focusing so hard on the "no severance/compensation" part, when from the start I said that "some notice/severance would be justified". Is it because I said that at-will employment "seems... fine?", and you can't get over that, despite my subsequent statements?
Until we get to the bottom of this, I don't think it's worth it for me to engage with any of your other points.
This fails to consider second order effects. Adding more friction to firings also makes teams less performant (as they fail to get rid of underperforming employees), as makes finding a job more difficult (because companies are more reluctant to hire on the off chance they get a bad employee they can't get rid of). This isn't theoretical. Returns suck for retailers, but they still voluntarily offer it because it entices consumers to buy things they wouldn't otherwise buy.
There's no evidence that "adding more friction to firings also makes teams less performant". Your statement relies on two assumptions: (1) employers are reliable at determining "underperforming", (2) employers are making choices based of performance. There's no evidence that it makes "finding a job more difficult". There are entire swaths of this earth that have the framework that we're talking about and their job markets are just fine.
I know that an online form makes it easy to just position yourself as correct, but you're arguing against reality.
>Your statement relies on two assumptions: (1) employers are reliable at determining "underperforming", (2) employers are making choices based of performance.
1. You could make similar arguments about consumers being qualified to determine product quality. Are retailers dumbasses for wasting money accepting returns?
2. When it comes to hiring/firing decisions, perception of competence is as important (if not more so), as actual competence (if you can even define that). No manager is going to be assuaged by "well actually, you're pretty bad at determining competence, so you should be glad that we're requiring you to file a bunch of paperwork before you can fire someone".
>There's no evidence that it makes "finding a job more difficult". There are entire swaths of this earth that have the framework that we're talking about and their job markets are just fine.
New hires rate in Europe (with famously stronger labor protections) is around 10% per year in 2022. US meanwhile is more than 4% per month.
I'm sure the paper feels it's excessive too. The union doesn't. They've already failed to work this out without a strike, so the question now is who can suffer the longest before the other breaks, or is willing to give some other concession in return for getting their way on this issue.
In other words, one side will win, or both will compromise. It's just another contract negotiation, like any other between two parties. Unions are allowed to do it with businesses, just like businesses are allowed to do it among themselves. This is literally the ruling ideology of the West and has been for generations, but somehow when a union takes advantage of it, that's radical marxism.
I'll take a wild guess and assume that the big sticking point is the demand for just cause termination, with RTO being a somewhat distant second. I can't see management being in love with a just cause protection for employees as an alternative to what I assume is the current employee-at-will arrangement. But, from labor's perspective, it's probably the one thing they'd really like to gain, and for which they'd sacrifice or adjust all their other demands if necessary. To be safe in ones position, with its earnings and benefits, is a desirable position.
It “feels like a stretch” and “sounds like it could make sense” and “but in reality it does not play out”. You’re just gesturing here. In turn the reply is either yes/no depending on if we agree with the general vibes you are putting out.
Can you be clearer with what you are trying to say? I am simply stating that I have rarely heard of "Just Cause" clauses and I wonder how it plays out in reality. I have my ideas about it but I don't have much of any data but I also generally think its hard to craft well thought out rules like this. Maybe you should take your vibes elsewhere if you don't like data and questions.
It’s not common in the US but over here in Europe it’s standard practice that you cannot fire an employee at will, most of the time you need to give 1-3 months notice. You can only fire them immediately if there’s misconduct, breach of contract etc.
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, and PMs who stand to gain from a successful movement to win these rights.
> I encourage everyone to respect the picket line and get your news elsewhere
Technically, wouldn't "respecting the picket line" be not doing any "scab" work for the NYTimes? Asking us not to use the NYTimes is more of a boycott and a separate question (and not always something strikers ask for). Is it official policy of the strike that they request people boycott in solidarity as well?
What they're asking from readers is far more limited in scope than not using the whole website:
> The Tech Guild is asking readers to honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as Wordle and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app. Members of the newsroom union, Times Guild, have pledged not to do struck work, a right that’s protected under their contract.
According to Maggie Astor, news is not behind the picket line -
NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems.
> NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
If I pay for a service, I expect it to be available.
It’s not my job to track the status of labor disputes - it’s the job of the NYTimes (the organization) to ensure they deliver that service.
If they can’t, because they are dealing with ongoing labor disputes, then I’ll probably complain and cancel. The threat of those cancellations seems like plenty enough leverage for a striking union.
I don’t understand why I would need to preemptively refrain from a service I’ve already paid for.
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.
Not OP, but I work in a company that is fully remote with a mix of offshore and onshore.
It's possible we'd hire junior engineers locally for the offshore roles if we went fully local, but there's zero chance that we could offshore any of our existing onshore roles. This is for a few reasons:
1. Data law compliance. We can't let people outside the US see PII, which precludes them from participating fully in many support roles, including rotations within engineering.
2. Time zone differences are huge. We have some developers in Eastern Europe who we love, but coordinating their work with the roles that we can't offshore is substantially trickier than local employees. At a certain point it's more rational to pay higher salaries for US-timezone employees.
3. Cultural differences get in the way. It's far easier for a product person or a designer to get an idea across to someone with shared cultural context, so there are fewer back and forth iterations when there are US employees on a project than when there aren't. For the same reason we can't offshore design roles since we're serving a US market, so that doesn't work as a solution.
4. There's substantial difficulty in filtering for quality. We have some offshore contractors who've been with us for years, but we've struggled whenever we tried to add new ones. Hiring is always hard but it's particularly hard when you're either doing it indirectly through a contracting company or doing it yourself across cultural barriers.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, when we're doing offshoring through contracting companies who take a share of the fee, the difference in cost versus a US employee is much less significant. And if we're not using a contracting company then we're on the hook for figuring out the tax situation ourselves and as I mentioned filtering for quality is much harder. So it doesn't save as much money as people would assume to offshore a role.
As well as take shared cultural context / communication for granted.
That isn't to say that teams should be monocultural, but expecting to have high performing teams without any thought to culture, time zone, or communication ability is optimistic.
IMO those issues are fixable with good hiring and firing. But all the fixes for large timezone differences that I've seen have significant costs and tradeoffs. Usually you pay with velocity.
Ok. Wasn't intending to address any of the other issues you raised, but I can because on further reflection there are many issues with your points:
(1) This generally isn't true for most companies. You must be in healthcare? Otherwise there are a bunch of state-level data protection laws which to my knowledge do not prevent access to PII by persons not within the US.
(2) Partially covered with my first comment about South America. I'll also note that asynchronous work seems to be more productive for a lot of people, and practically everyone in the corporate world complains about too many meetings – so maybe making it harder to constantly have meetings is a feature, not a bug (even if your org isn't great at async).
(3) Shared context might be helpful, but the design part is nonsense. Obviously non-Americans can design for the US market. Suggesting otherwise is just so ludicrous I don't know where to start.
(4) This is just a skill issue. You can definitely filter for quality in off-shore roles just as well as you can for on-shore roles. If you're bad at it, that's on you, not intrinsic to the off-shore labor or their circumstances.
(5) Saving money isn't the only reason to off-shore roles. Believe it or not there are actually more talented people you have access to if you consider all 8 billion of the world's population rather than only looking at 4% of it. Or for example with your first point where off-shoring can actually be a huge boon because diff timezones means all of your employees can work a 9-5 without needing people to work graveyard shifts. Also there are solutions like Deel which are less expensive than your average contracting middleman, but still allow you to hire people globally without needing to deal (pun intended by them I guess) with all the local tax etc issues. So even if money is your only concern, there is plenty of room left in the market for labor arbitrage.
That was clearly intended to permanently damage/destroy the equipment.
Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.
Just saying, if it's built acceptably well, it shouldn't require engineers putting out fires constantly to not go down. But I'm sure you're right that I'm underestimating the complexity of the system as it's been constructed.
And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.
In particular, tomorrow night is going to have a lot of things needing rapid tweaking; some random county in Missouri is gonna somehow have an emoji in their election count CSV because someone hit the wrong key, some new microservice will choke under the once-every-four-years load, etc.
There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area. For a long time now. Clearly there are more variables at play here. Or else the local NYT employees could be the most subservient and diligent workers ever: they would still get replaced by the cheaper offshore labor eventually.
What prevents the NYT? In part: workers not just lying down and taking it. Just not “complaining” at all, like your implicit feel-for-you advice.
> There are already places with Internet access that can work for cheaper than people that live in the NY area.
Hell, even in the NY area. Median household in the Bronx is only $37,397, meaning that half of the households are living there for less than that. And that's household income, which is usually about 1.5-2x above individual income. That's a huge margin against what these workers are being paid.
But people don't sell things based on cost. Hell, a lot of people lose money when they sell things. Around 10% of the US population have a negative income in a given year! People instead charge as much as they can (or think they can, at least) get.
And anyone who is worth hiring offshore can get just as much as a local (within some reasonable margin; there can be frictional costs to offshore hiring that won't change the cost to the employer, but will reduce what makes it to the worker). You can sometimes get lucky and hire someone who doesn't understand their worth, both locally and offshore, but you can't count on that (and they aren't apt to stick around for long once they realize their worth). On balance, it costs the same no matter where you go.
It's fairly difficult to do American news, centered around American politics and American culture, from not-America. This, at least, applies to editors and journalists. But for tech, I'd imagine they need quite a bit of context too.
Thats actually a big separator between quality tech companies and lower tier ones ime. Lower tier ones treat devs as a cost center and code monkeys. Higher quality ones treat them as a value generator and expect them to know about and engage with the business. Its what lets them work with more autonomy and intuition to ship the stuff people need most, that generates the most value.
Also the tech team at NYT is co-innovating with the business and journalism sides. Their work is highly ambiguous and changing year to year as they move their capabilities forward. That can't be outsourced or it undermines the strategy. NYT could build that capacity over time in another location that's cheaper but it would still need to be tightly integrated (i.e. employees).
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 matter where their seat happens to be located. But I'm not sure that is applicable here as the parent is not talking about cost-cutting, but filling the roles that are no longer filled due to the strike.
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.
I worked both as an offshore contractor, and as part of a team with offshore members. I can ensure that #1 is bullshit. You can have the whole offshore team in an office butts in seats all day and meet with failure. Happened many times in the past.
#2 is a possibility. What happens when you do it is that your cheap hires tend to stay for a short time (as they will get better offers later, possibly involving relocation to better countries). You end up with the ones that are cheap for a reason.
Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences, etc.
You've misinterpreted their comment. US companies that offshore usually have offices in other countries and these offshore offices typically have stricter RTO policies than the onshore offices. They weren't saying that all of the workers for a given company were in an offshore office, but that the offshore employees were required to be in-office.
Again, offshoring normally implies that there are workers still in an "onshore" office. This has traditionally failed because the workers in the "onshore" office didn't know how to bridge the gap with the workers in the "offshore" office.
But that's not the case anymore. The "onshore" workers are (or at least did for several years, giving the needed experience) also working remotely, so there is no longer an office barrier between the "onshore" business and the workers abroad.
Whether or not the workers "offshore" work together in an office or independently at coffee shops really makes no difference and has nothing to do with the conversation. If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true. But we're not going to change the subject just because he is confused.
> Again, offshoring normally implies that there are workers still in an "onshore" office.
Not workers doing the same jobs though. Look at how manufacturing was offshored over the past several decades -- for many companies, entire job trees within the US were eliminated. HQ is still in the US, but anything remotely having to do with manufacturing isn't. You have to go really high up the chain in those offshored manufacturing jobs before you see anyone actually interacting with an employee in the US.
There aren't workers doing those jobs in the US anymore. 100% of those close-to-the-actual-manufacturing jobs were outsourced. The remaining people in the US aren't doing the same jobs; they're doing HQ stuff.
> If you mean the parent misinterpreted what we're talking about – that is likely true.
No, like I spelled out, your response that I replied to misinterpreted the comment that you replied to. What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office, but because other other problems, such as culture. Also, the user that you replied to was the one who made the upper-level comment that you originally responded to, not the other way around.
> What they were pointing out was that the failure rate of offshore work was never due to offshore teams being unable to coordinate due to not being in-office
Yes, that is what they pointed out, but it made no sense. The only way that could have applicability to the conversation is if you moved the entire business into that new "offshore" office, but then you wouldn't be "offshoring" anymore. You will have moved the business instead. Which isn't what anyone is talking about. The original comment is clearly about offshoring, not relocating businesses.
I expect you are right that the other commenter misinterpreted something and replied based on that misinterpretation. But, no need to change the subject because of their confusion. Especially when, as you point out, they established the subject! If it was good enough then, it remains good enough now.
"Most of reasons for failure is that incentives in between contractors and hiring company is misaligned, leadership have no idea what they are doing, cultural differences, time zone differences"
No-one was referring to moving business and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that. Moving a contained software business unit of a US based business to another country is not "moving the business", but is often how offshoring works. This doesn't involve moving the entire business, but just a mostly self-contained portion of it. I don't think surgical_fire misinterpreted anything. The quote above from surgical_fire explains their sentiment. Businesses in the US getting used to their onshore employees being remote doesn't solve any of these offshoring issues.
Exactly. So where do you think the statement in question fits?
> and I'm still not sure where you are coming from with that.
Well, you're certainly not going to figure it out if you keep going off on some strange tangent about an entirely separate part of the comment that has nothing to do with the discussion here and which nobody replied to. And, I might add, offered nothing of value as that part said the same thing as the comment posted approximately two hours prior.
But what is your motivation for being in that state? We can see you are purposefully trying to not figure it out. Not only are you not staying on topic, you haven't even asked a single question to try and help your understanding. What is to be gained in acting like an idiot? Just a show put on for the sake of the lolz?
It is very beneficial for the newspaper to have them working eastern timezone hours (frequent meetings with NYC-based staff and deadlines driven by daily publishing schedule), and be familiar with the subject matter they are working on. They aren't reporters but they are still part of the reporting team and it will significantly slow things down for everyone if they don't know or care about the news.
Yes! Outsourced HR has been a thing for a while, the same as IT or customer support. Offshoring the dev team makes sense, and offshoring of lower management has started, because it’s just easier if they’re in the same timezone as their team. Obviously senior management is too important to be replaced, for now.
The goal of a company is indeed to make as much money while spending as little as possible. Why hire people when you don’t have to?
The purpose, point, goal, and desire of a company, which in real terms means the people who work in the C-Suite and make all the choices, is to make as much money as possible. They have no loyalties, it's more profitable that way.
For example, multiple fast food companies have driven themselves into the ground by exploiting their franchise owners for fast cash. That's how Quiznos died. You would think murdering a company would actually be bad for C level people, but they just move on to the next company. They never seem to have a problem getting hired despite their past performance.
They're striking against return to office? I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right. Almost everyone in the world has to go on location for their jobs. I am curious why it is so important to NYT workers in particular that they would strike over it - is there something particularly bad about the location?
> They're striking against return to office? I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right
Meanwhile in the early 20th century:
> They're striking over a weekend? I work five days a week and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that. I view it as a privilege and not a right
Like, this is generally how it goes; workers' rights are generally won, not granted by divine authority.
In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organised the 1835 Philadelphia general strike, the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.[37] Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.
Except it didn't exactly work out like that, companies were constantly looking for loopholes to avoid it and it didn't become normalized until the Henry Ford did it voluntarily for capitalist reasons and it payed off.
It is one of the many things they strike against, and I imagine it's not the most important issue and they are willing to compromise on.
Also a reminder that just a few years ago, CEOs thought remote work was good, everyone was productive, and they didn't see how they wanted to force everybody back. No, it's not a privilege, it's just how you get work done.
If enough people fight for the recognition of their need and desire to work from home, enough to enshrine it in some legal norms or at least in widely accepted and expected practices in the industry, WFH may become a right. This is how 40-hour work weeks became a right, or collective bargaining became a right, etc.
It became a standard in the US, but is not a right. And while the idea of the 40-hour work week did, indeed, come from labour groups, it was the Great Depression needing effort to try and compel businesses to hire more workers, not the fight of workers, that pushed to see it become a standard.
A wage is debt, so not beneficial in and of itself. It can be beneficial when you call the debt and turn it into something tangible (e.g. food), of course, but that is also of benefit to the business who derives joy in giving you that food. It is not for the benefit of workers. It is for the benefit of everyone.
One of the things they're striking against is arbitrary return to office mandates. Why did you leave off two words that change the nature of what they're fighting for?
Other folks have already pointed out the "rights" unions have fought for that we take for granted today. On top of that, being in a union is about solidarity with your fellow workers. You can support your coworkers' who need or just want to work from home. This should be easy, since it would affect you in approximately zero ways. They'll have your back for fighting for Just Cause protections.
> One of the things they're striking against is arbitrary return to office mandates.
If it is arbitrary, why is the NYT seemingly standing firm on the issue? As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
Perhaps you mean they are striking against mandates that are motivated by undisclosed reasons?
If it is arbitrary, why is the NYT seemingly standing firm on the issue?
You'll have to ask NYT management if you're curious why they're doing something. I can venture a guess though. A lot of companies use RTO mandates as a way to avoid layoffs (and the negative press and severance requirements that come with them). This seems to go hand in hand with the demand for "just cause".
As the article tells, NYT have agreed to a seven month grace period to give workers a chance to get their houses in order. That is not indicative of an arbitrary move.
> You'll have to ask NYT management if you're curious why they're doing something.
I don't have to ask them anything if they are truly doing it arbitrarily. That's the answer.
But the question is if you are confusing "arbitrary" with "not knowing". Which is I guess I am to take that the answer is yes, that you are confused, since you admit to not knowing – which means you can't know that it is arbitrary.
How did you end up so confused?
> This doesn't follow.
If it is arbitrary, why not institute it today on a whim (strike notwithstanding)? Why wait? This indicates that there is planning involved, which suggests that it isn't arbitrary. It does not prove it without a doubt, but when playing the odds…
> Almost everyone in the world has to go on location for their jobs
I think it's fair to point out that progressive worker rights acquisition would initially always be a small case minority context (vs the vast majority that would lack those rights).
In the distant past almost everyone in the world lacked xyz worker rights.
I would totally join a strike against RTO if I were in a union or if someone organized one in response. The only other option for me would be to quit and look for another remote job.
I'm not going back to having to bring earmuffs and blast music all day just to have any hope of getting anything done, I'm not starting a commute, and I'm not sacrificing lunches with my kids for some executive's opinion about how I ought to collaborate most effectively.
Have you got a family? How long is your commute? What did you (and your family) gain from the move to WFH? Speaking for myself I gained over two hours of free time a day and a lot less stress from traffic. I wouldn't mind so much if my office was in walking or cycling distance, but living where you work is rare in this field.
> I work from home and value it but it never would occur to me to strike for that.
I believe that the value from WFH varies a lot from person to person.
If you were working from the office before and the company changed to a WFH policy, you might see it as a nice to have. You already made some life choices to accommodate going to the office. Maybe you even go to the office anyway.
But, if you were hired when the company already had WFH, you probably made some life choices based on that (buying a house far away from the city, having kids, not buying a car,...). In that case, mandatory RTO is a complete disaster (especially with the housing crisis) and you pretty much have no option other than resigning.
I assume NYT was doing WFH since ~2020, so a lot of employees probably took decisions based on WFH, therefore the strikes.
> I am curious why it is so important to NYT workers in particular that they would strike over it - is there something particularly bad about the location?
You're aware that NYC is an extremely expensive place to live, right?
It sounds like the biggest contention is just cause for terminations instead of at will. If the employer normally isn't firing people without a good reason it sounds like an easy win. Why do they fight these negotiations so much?
I imagine they want to be able to let people go without building extensive cases against them. While being let go without a good reason isn't fun, neither is working with toxic people while the company tries to build a case against them.
> If the employer normally isn't firing people without a good reason
Isn't this the default state of affairs for american private enterprise? This is why PIPs are so wildly popular—it's trivial to fabricate performance reasoning regardless of the actual motivations for firing.
Granted, I don't see how you could negotiate your way out of this. We need federal labor protections to make serious movement on this.
Pretty sure the NYT has entire contributors and foreign correspondents working remotely, forever.
Not in a position to help you guys in any way, but fight the good fight against the mythology of the grand collaborative campfire that apparently happens in-office.
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?
Individual employees do not matter. Get a group of employees together to act in concert and you have a negotiating bloc that a company cannot ignore.
Especially as the bloc grows. If the "someone abroad" is also part of the same bloc, management ends up running out of people to turn to. A rising tide floats all boats.
(It's even more extreme in some countries. I've heard tale of situations in Scandinavian nations where a restaurant owner who mistreats their serving staff will find, in addition to the staff leaving and nobody being willing to scab for them, that their deliveries are delayed because nobody will drive ingredients to them and if their sink breaks down no plumber will take the contract to fix it).
Do the tech unions at these organizations get along/have solidarity with the journalistic unions or is there animosity between the two on deals like this?
I have been avoiding NYT ever since they started suing LLM developers for copyright infringement. I find it distasteful to own abstract ideas or claim copyright over them.
I rely on them to know what is going on, and tomorrow is the biggest day of every four years for needing to know what the heck is going on.
I find your suggestion that I should consider the trust I've built with their news division destroyed on this day of all days ridiculous and irresponsible, especially given the fact that the timing of the strike was chosen to hurt me extremely badly if I should feel morally obligated to follow your advice
If there is ANY political violence from this election, you should be checking LOCAL news, not the NYT, unless you plan to drive out to the Capital to participate in that violence.
What the shit does it help the Capital police if there is some sort of coup attempt and you watch it on TV? Does that really save America somehow? People are so desperate to be bystanders to things they could have prevented by making better choices months earlier.
And what harm to you would it be to not be aware of whatever nonsense is happening for a few days? Would you have been extremely damaged if you had not heard about January 6th until a week later?
Unless you sincerely think there's going to be widespread political violence in your specific area, knowing about what's going on in at this exact moment is honestly as much about entertainment as anything else. And if you need local news, the NYT is typically not the best place.
I'm as guilty of rubbernecking as anyone, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that boycotting my favorite news source for a few days would be extremely damaging to me.
One way I get to have faith in our country and pride in being an American for the next four years.
You're talking about Jan 6 like it was just some minor scuffle. And I agree that it did not ultimately amount to more than that, but do not forget that at the time there were two live bombs on the ground, we were in a constitutional crisis, the president seemed to be hoping that if he maintained silence his supporters would carry out a forceful takeover of the government which he assured them would be righteous in his view.
The fact that there was not more escalation had a lot to do with how many people were watching closely, as well as with the actions of a few individuals like Mike Pence and Brad Reffensperger who, at the most important moments, decided that their duty was to all Americans and not just to one man.
> The fact that there was not more escalation had a lot to do with how many people were watching closely
It had absolutely nothing to do with the rubberneckers (myself included) who were following it from moment to moment on the other side of the country.
Some small percentage of the watchers are in a place to actually do something about it, and if that's you then fine. Most of us don't need to know on the day of, we've just grown accustomed to knowing, and it's probably honestly a net negative for the world that we do follow things that are outside of our control so closely.
Trump was literally watching television news, taking the temperature of people's reactions on Twitter, and deciding in real time what he should do based on that information. The insurrectionists were closely watching the news and Twitter as well. Probably more people would have died or the coup would have been successful if there was lag in the coverage of a few days.
If you believe this you fundamentally misunderstand the kinds of people who were participating in the insurrection.
The opinions of the people who are comfortable sitting by while the conspiracy "steals the election" (or more likely, the astrotufed reactions put forward by sockpuppets of the conspirators themselves) don't matter by the time you get to the point of invading the US capitol.
Trump was being cynical, but the insurrectionists themselves were just nuts. They couldn't have cared less what Twitter thought.
> The fact that there was not more escalation had a lot to do with how many people were watching closely, as well as with the actions of a few individuals like Mike Pence and Brad Reffensperger who, at the most important moments, decided that their duty was to all Americans and not just to one man.
... and in no small part due to the actions of police officer Eugene Goodman [1], who diverted away the incoming rioters with about 60 seconds or so to spare - had he not done that, the mob would likely have been able to take hostages.
It was sheer fucking luck and a couple of very VERY brave individuals that kept the death count of Jan 6th in the single digits (at least if one excludes the police officers committing suicide in the months after).
I like coming to the Hacker News comments to get a sense of what other perspectives people have.
"Insurrection" is, in the most tone-deaf language-nerd sense, the word for what happened on that day. You could say that the US had a famous insurrection against the British, but we call it a revolution and we call the people who fought in the resulting war patriots and heroes. I've no doubt that the people who went and fought at the capitol believed that they were fighting as soldiers and patriots, so I'm less inclined to judge their moral character than I am to judge that of the person who told them that their lives and futures were over unless they took action.
Lawmakers are still exiting the chamber as a throng of bodies rushes towards the door. The nation watches on TV as someone with a deadly serious job waits on the other side to start shooting in defense of the lawmakers if the protesters break in. These protesters already know somewhere in their mind that they've committed a crime that will land them in prison. Should they gain tactical control of the chamber, especially after losing lives in doing so, especially before all the lawmakers were out... I agree that hostages would have been taken. It does not take a democratic vote for a mob to take hostages.
But I'm not judging -- they were just people, doing pretty much what I suspect you or I would do if we could contrive a comparable set of circumstances.
Really? War paint, mob mentality, tactical gear, and many of the police that engaged with them ended up wounded or dead. People were climbing the walls, smashing through windows. Can you imagine these people doing any of these things if they weren't riding a surge of adrenaline that justified any risk to further the cause? Can you imagine them being alone, without the (presumed) support of the sitting president, and doing these things? I can imagine them standing outside with signs, and if that's what they did we wouldn't be having a conversation now.
Well Trump claimed to have a secret strategy to deploy if he loses. The rhetoric of violence and retribution is increasing from that camp. I don’t think widespread physical violence and an assault on the institutions of democracy are out of the question. It’s not unreasonable for the poster to want access to their trusted source of news in this trying time.
The thing is, if people only go on strikes at times when it would be convenient to customers of the employer, then strikes wouldn't be particularly effective.
(There actually are strikes which are consciously run on this basis, but mostly only in the most safety-critical fields.)
Like, it's not as if the NYTimes was unaware that it'd be a big news week; you should probably be blaming management more than anyone else here.
While I wholeheartedly support their legal right to organize, I am not required to celebrate at the cynicism of attempting to undermine faith in democracy to win a better job
> I am not required to celebrate at the cynicism of attempting to undermine faith in democracy to win a better job
You're being melodramatic. There are piles of news sources to choose from, absent NYT. And that assumes it falls over due to the strike, although it seems likely they need workers on hand to do ops.
I am being a bit melodramatic, yes. My working assumption is that the services they offer are critical enough that management will somehow make sure they stand up, because it is their obligation to me as their customer to do so.
But with there being such a strong probability that there will be coordinated far-right attempts to undermine faith in our system of elections tomorrow, I do really do think of tomorrow as a kind of holy day for democracy that is not acceptable to use as bargaining chip.
> While I wholeheartedly support their legal right to organize, I am not required to celebrate at the cynicism of attempting to undermine faith in democracy to win a better job
I’m not gonna support your cynical anti-union, anti-worker policy of blaming everything on the part of the workers while dismissing the management side with a “I don’t doubt it”.
Election day, assuming that is what you are referring to, is the least important day in democracy. It is every day after the person is hired, when you stay on top of them and communicate your expectations to them, when democracy happens.
I can't imagine that the strike was not timed. I suppose the idea is that the management may say "come on, let's quickly solve it and get back to the really important issues", if this indeed can be solved quickly. E.g. by saying that WFH is officially allowed for another year, or something similar, that actually requires no change except some change of heart among the higher-ups.
Not having this solved well ahead of time speaks poorly of NYT overlords. My trust in NYT has deteriorated quite a bit over the years :(
> tomorrow is the biggest day of every four years for needing to know what the heck is going on
Watching a car crash, totally outside of your control in real time is not healthy. Skip the will they / won't they and find something healthier to do with the 24 hours or so of uncertainty.
Good luck. I'm curious what you feel about the following:
These days news publications generally have a pretty weak business model and a lot of competition. Does it still make sense to have a union in this case? Why?
Unions are about more than compensation, they can also fight for working conditions, like the ability to work from home and the processes involved in termination, which are both at issue in this strike.
Contrary to perhaps popular misconception, if the business is unprofitable, unions aren't going to demand a larger piece of a disappearing pie. If there isn't money to be paid out, there's nothing to fight over. Leading a union or negotiating for a union does not fundamentally turn you into an unreasonable person at the negotiating table.
Something I've learned from 404 media is journalism actually has a fine business model. People are willing to pay for good journalism.
The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.
For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].
This article[0]from 404 said it well.
>Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.
I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.
> For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors
Really? I don't believe this at all. I have not seen a properly edited published piece online in over a decade, and it continues to get worse. From obvious spelling errors and sentence fragments to full blown loss of coherent thoughts. The obviousness of multiple contributors' work being mashed together with the same information being repeated multiple times within the piece clearly shows that no editor is looking over the work at all. No editor worth their salt would allow that kind of work.
No one has a right, legally or morally, to another person's labor if they can't come to terms. Workers have power when they act together, and in this case are using that power strategically to advance their interests and those of many other workers.
If management were rational actors, they would have reached a deal at some point in the last two years of bargaining.
Well strikes are only effective when they hurt. I fully support aiming strikes at points of time when they have most impact. That is only way to show importance of the workers. Maybe excluding things like natural emergencies.
That is what strikes are by definition, yes. It doesn't just seem like it. There is no other weapon workers can wield if they don't have a legal basis to make leadership meet their demands.
Obviously this can backfire in countries that don't have good union law and if you are too replaceable (hello AI).
This isn't Extortion because there's no gun to your head saying you HAVE to provide labor. At least in most industries. If I choose not to help you, I'm not extorting anything - you're free to find someone else. If you can't, and I'm your only option, that's still your problem, not mine.
I mean, unless you're arguing that employers are in some sense entitled to the labour of their employees under terms dictated by the employer, I'm not sure how that works.
You can easily compare the civilian/combatant death ratio in the Israel / Hamas conflict to any other recent war, or alternatively look at the population growth of Gaza since Israel has left, to confirm this is false.
> You can easily compare the civilian/combatant death ratio in the Israel / Hamas conflict to any other recent war, or alternatively look at the population growth of Gaza since Israel has left, to confirm this is false.
I'm not understanding how the population of Gaza is supposed to disprove the fact that the NYT made up fake stories. Please enlighten me?
/* It does, as soon as your karma reaches 500 or something. A comment voted down sufficiently enough becomes "dead". But again, with sufficient karma you can vouch for a comment and resurrect it from the dead, thus preventing e.g. effects of a brigade attack. There are several more automatic preventive tools. HN is slightly less simple than it looks; maybe this is one of the secrets why it's still alive and relevant after 17 years online. */
I have digital / print subscription to the NYT. It seems like stories were being published online Monday, and the paper paper arrived. Strike doesn't start until Tuesday?
It depends on the internal infrastructure for electoral votes and real-time access of official data. If it’s been set up for a while and a few switches need flipped then it’s likely readers won’t notice. If however the system needs to be changed in any way there may just be some problems. Definitely gonna be fun to see if this causes any problems.
With few exceptions (pre-made obituaries for the famous, for example) print media is always yesterday’s news. The strike started today at 12:01am, as the very first line of the article states, production of today’s news was completed yesterday.
Does the nyt tech guild have a union security agreement? If so, how does that work with remote workers in right to work states? If not, are non union workers also required to walk out (or be considered crossing the picket lines)?
Grindr devs did ("large"). Announced intention to unionize in July of 2023. In August 2023, the gay republican CEO then made a RTO requirement to force all of engineering to Chicago, after hiring everyone as remote first for years. But designers and project managers would be forced to move to LA.
The union filed an unfair labor practice with the NLRB, but that process has dragged for over a year, even after the union successfully won their vote AFTER the purge.
Why don't workers unionize? Because management can fire them right away with repurcussions only after years, if that, and even then, the repurcussions aren't to the CEO who broke the law. Breaking labor laws should put executives in prison, but noooo, instead penalties are paid by the company and the CEO's move to another company to do the same illegal shit.
The government agencies must move faster if they want to protect workers. Delays only help management, who still get salaries throughout and are never actually punished or face any negative consequences.
When I worked in tech in Germany, we had no union and my WFH contract explicitly said I could be reassigned to any office at any time.
A friend in another industry had this happen: management forced everyone out of Berlin (or you could take a package). He ended up having to move for five days per week.
Historically big tech provided amazing compensation and benefits compared to everyone except some finance companies. Why unionize and potentially risk a very good thing?
For context, the NY Times does not provide amazing compensation or benefits.
Maybe in the bay area. My experience elsewhere is that both are sliding much more towards white collar norms. As more and more people fall under the “tech” umbrella I expect those trends to accelerate.
I said historically and unions do not form overnight. Although even right now outside the Bay Area, the pay from big tech is significantly higher than other software engineer roles.
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 factor in software development is that the jobs are comfortable and pay very well. So lots of people would happily apply to the job. IIRC, it's something like a 40:1 ratio of applicants to offers at big tech companies.
> 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
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 benefits of the company, but that's exactly why unions are typically harmful to businesses.
If one worker is willing to respond to alerts at 3 AM and another only works 9-5, then those two workers are providing different levels of value to the company assuming equal ability. Why shouldn't the worker that contributes more get rewarded?
This is why unionized workplaces are
> if you adjust for hours worked, unionized employees will make more
This is in large part because unions artificially restrict the workforce. A union job at the docks is great... if you can actually get a job. Plenty of unions practice institutionalized nepotism, with friends and family given priority in hiring. Take the LA port union for example:
> This time around, about 80,000 put their names in for the drawing, and 25,000 were picked out and placed in sequential order. The first 2,300 on the list will be eligible for a part-time dockworker position that can lead to full-time employment, PMA officials have previously said.
> Negotiated between the ILWU and PMA, the controversial lottery process has been criticized over the years for being a two-tiered system that favors ILWU friends and family.
> Anyone can put their name in the drawing by sending in a postcard, but ILWU members get a specially marked postcard for their friends and family.
>The two are placed in separate barrels and drawn randomly from alternating piles. The two groups hired an outside party, Moorpark-based InterOptimis, to conduct the drawing behind closed doors, stoking distrust from those outside the process.
Institutionalized nepotism to restrict lucrative jobs to friend and family. That's what happens when unions control well paying jobs.
Union jobs that actually are accessible are things like public school teachers, electricians, plumbers. They pay okay, but nothing compared to to $150,000 median wage of a longshoremen.
> Why shouldn't the worker that contributes more get rewarded?
Expecting work at 3AM is inhumane. Incorporating it into the incentive structure enables a race to the bottom that jeopardizes sleep schedule which has numerous health consequences
Also let's consider a bunch of these workers are on a visa and can get deported at the whim of their employer
> Plenty of unions practice institutionalized nepotism, with friends and family given priority in hiring
I mean, are you saying that the corporations they're negotiating against don't do this also? It's a problem anywhere where there's money
Dismissing any form of dissent as purely the result of propaganda is not a good way to bring people to your side.
> In what world should a UNION of the workers care about the COMPANY? Maybe if the workers in the union partly owned the company.
For one, a meaningful amount of tech worker compensation comes in the form of company stock. For another, I would argue that anyone who wants to stay in their job long term should care about the company and it's long term health.
I'm not dismissing ANY form of dissent. I'm dismissing the "unions mostly cater to the mediocre employees" as propaganda which ignores the universal benefits a union gives to all employees, mediocre and superstar alike. Benefits that would either not be guaranteed without a negotiated contract or would be hard to have conceded on an individual basis.
> In what world should a UNION of the workers care about the COMPANY?
Some unions are more powerful than companies (think UAW). They're able to negotiate terms that are bad for the long-term health of the company, and not having backgrounds in running companies, union leaders might not be thinking about that.
All companies are more powerful than individual workers (think anywhere without a union). They're able to negotiate terms that are bad for the long-term health of the human workers, and not having backgrounds in caring about people and only money, CEOs might not be thinking about that.
Unions look out for workers. That's their priority. They should not cater to the business.
My point is that unions should (but don't always) think about long-term business health because if the business loses market share or fails, it's bad for workers. If negotiating power is balanced, this might not matter, but if the union has more power, it can negotiate terms the company can't afford.
My point is business should (but never do) think about their employees as humans and not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
So, rather than try to balance the individual worker against the company with a union on the off-chance the union becomes more "powerful" than the business, you'd keep the business (i.e., billionaires and capital) more powerful than the workers.
You: Unions? bad for workers. No union? also bad for workers. Whelp, can't do anything like other countries have done with stronger labor laws
This comes down to your valuing a "successful" business over humans, where "successful" means American exploitation of profits to owners, whereas some of those profits should go to the workers.
> My point is business should (but never do) think about their employees as humans and not just numbers on a spreadsheet
This has not been my experience. The businesses I've worked at have had great benefits and amenities for their employees. The one time I was laid off, they vested everyone's stock who hasn't yet got their cliff, gave us 3 months worth of pay, and paid for a year of healthcare.
I don't doubt your lived experiences with bad workplaces if that's been the case, but know they are not universal. Especially in fields where demand for employees is high, companies do need to care about their employees if they want to keep them.
I'm glad you had a good company do the right thing on their own. I would like to have those same enforcements universal so everyone can be as lucky as you were. This is what a society does.
> All companies are more powerful than individual workers
Nonsense. Maybe once a business reaches a certain level of power that becomes true, but as a small business owner, the individual workers who work for me have way more power than I do.
> Unions look out for workers. That's their priority. They should not cater to the business.
A worker union is just a collective of workers who have agreed to associate. It would be unusual for workers to look out for anything other than themselves (humans are selfish), but theoretically nothing says they can't cater to the business instead. It depends on what they want.
Google workers created a union (Alphabet Workers Union). However for the most part it is a non-contract union (aka solidarity union or minority union) which means that for now it isn't attempting to get a majority vote of the workforce, which is the process to get formal union recognition and start bargaining for a contract. Instead they are pooling resources and using collective action without that. There are a few small units of workers that have run and won elections though (all contractors I think).
In the 90s there was also a minority union of field engineers at NCR Corporation.
Many big tech companies have a software union, but despite substantial efforts invested from CWA none have gotten close to majority support across a whole company. Microsoft has some majority unions in specific segments of their gaming org.
Media organizations like the New York Times have had unions for a long time. The Times Tech Guild is part of the New York Times Guild, which is part of the NewsGuild of New York, an umbrella organization for a lot of media unions in New York.
There is no tradition of unionization in most tech companies, and tech employees are paid very well and have usually had an easy time moving between companies. If you're unhappy with something, you can probably solve that as an individual without needing collective bargaining.
Tech workers at a company that's already unionized would be more likely to unionize in part because their colleagues are unionized, so they look around and say, "Hey, how come I'm not a part of that?" And the unions themselves can evangelize unions and recruit tech workers to unionize, which is good for the union because it gives them more resources and more bargaining partner. It's much harder for a union to come into a non-unionized workplace and start a movement from scratch, especially with a bunch of people who make six figures.
There's also a libertarian streak to Silicon Valley and the tech industry more broadly. This makes startup culture vibrant but at the expense of more individualism and less collectivism.
It's no coincidence that one of the few areas of tech to have seen a meaningful unionization push in recent years is gaming. Workers in gaming are in much more volatile positions, since it's a hit-driven business with long, expensive development cycles. And there's a constant stream of young, idealistic people who have dreamed of working in games their whole life and are willing to take on terrible working conditions and low pay to live that dream, at least for a while. There's also a lot of roles like art, music, and game design that are hard to parlay into other industries, whereas a software engineer or product manager who works can move between industries with relative ease. So there's an incentive for people in those roles to fix the companies and industries where they are instead of just moving on.
Indeed. When tech workers actually had some bargaining power. The rise of remote work, AI, and the flooding of the industry with bootcamp and CS grads has changed everything. We'll probably look back at the last 20 years as a golden age akin to the postwar manufacturing boom in the US, where a single person could reasonably provide for a family.
I love all the bellyaching about the NYT missing that election coverage money. Perfect time to go on strike. They're only asking for a 2.5% salary increase YoY (which is very inflation-y) and some WFH days. That's a pretty mild ask.
NYT will be signing on the dotted line within a week I believe given the risk to their revenue if they don't cover the second Trump-vs-Kamala. The section vs-Woman-Candidate election in a decade is going to get a lot of eyeballs.
There are much bigger asks from the union. For instance extreme limits on being able to terminate employees. Which… yikes. If nyt caves on this, look for it to go the way of police and teacher unions where incompetent people flourish while the quality of output nosedives.
The article (which is paywalled) says average compensation is $190,000.
They also have 600 technologists on staff, which is massively higher than comparable news organizations. I think this is the real elephant in the room: They're hiring (and therefore spending) at a rate that already far outstrips comparable news organizations.
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.
The concerns are not around excessive pay but future demands related to seniority. 170k sounds reasonable today, but when you add in a yearly 5% pay raise AND inflation adjustments AND overtime and sick time and retirement contributions it adds up to be a lot.
For example there was a cop in Massachusetts who had "retired" twice and was getting 280k/year due to the way the union rules were set up.
My simplified equation for stress is:
```
(workload) * (giving a shit)
```
Workload is set by company, giving a shit is set by you. You may not last long, but nothing is stopping you from letting those Jira tickets pile up. It's especially a promising strat if layoffs are market-based instead of performance-based.
Of course I imagine most engineers enjoy feeling productive, and wasting everyone's time does take a psychological toll.
With the shit show that the current tech industry has turned into, unionization is crucial. US has a very low percentage of unionized workers compared to Iceland, Finland and Scandinavian countries for instance. Time to change and make our voice heard.
I think tech workers have gotten a little spoiled. At my company, we have about 35 people in our IT department. 3/4 are directors and managers and I honestly have no fucking idea what they do all day. 600 people on the IT staff at the NYT is insane, and I guarantee the majority of those jobs is "attend meetings every day to jerk each other off with 1 deliverable a week".
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 benefits that rivaled unionized positions. But over the last 20 years, that "bargain" has slowly eroded and now the unionized shops are the only ones getting benefits for the employees.
Capitalism being what it is, each company MUST pursue the lowest costs and highest margin. Without collective bargaining, a single worker has no power against the whims and desires of board members, to whom you are just a rounding error.
"If hard work were good for you, the rich would have it all to themselves."
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 completely clueless as to how little the IT dept actually does day to day.
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.
Yeah that would be great. There's a bachelor's degree requirement for all management positions. Even if you've been there 20 years, you can never be "one of them". Pretty crazy imo. They passed up people with multi decade experience in the company for someone completely new because they had a bachelor's. That blows my mind.
everything is as usual, including the needle. I asked one of the guild leaders myself.
My big question is, how much % of their engineers are participating in this? I can't find a single clear answer. For all we know there are another 400 engineers not part of this activity
As far as I can tell this isn't a Boeing situation where a decision is made and all employees are part of it. the NYT building is still full of workers today
Why would anybody trust a NYT article about internal drama at the NYT? Does HN not understand bias?
Compare the NYT article to other reporting, and you can see the difference. There's a few things the NYT forgot to mention, like the fact that these negotiations have been drawn out for 2 years now. Or this:
"Throughout the bargaining process, Times management has engaged in numerous labor law violations, including implementing return-to-office mandates without bargaining and attempting to intimidate members through interrogations about their strike intentions. The NewsGuild of NY has filed unfair labor practice charges against The Times on these tactics as well as numerous other violations of labor law."
The NYT does include a quote blaming everything on the Tech Guild though: “We are disappointed that the Tech Guild leadership is attempting to jeopardize our journalistic mission at this critical time,”
Too many people believe that we can balance excessive bias with excessive bias in another direction. In reality:
- bias cannot be eliminated, merely mitigated;
- the truth is not the average of all opinions;
- some sources are important even if their point of view is subjective.
Unfortunately, the whole internet seems to be engulfed in a nihilistic tribal war where everything is black or white. This kind of argument is a hammer you can use at any point when you don’t like an argument, because there is no objective source. Then, the conversation shifts to a discussion of the various point of views and all contact with reality is lost.
Why? The piece is written by "Katie Robertson", which according to her profile is "a reporter covering the media industry for The New York Times". That dosen't sound like new york times company management to me. She (and therefore the article) is at least more distanced away from this story than the union itself.
It’s not that black and white. Over the long term, shareholders are better off if the journal can maintain a reputation of impartiality, so it would be difficult to prove mismanagement in this case. It’s like when Apple cared more about customer satisfaction and doing the right thing than short-term ROI. Sure, shareholder could sue, but they would likely lose.
The idea that a company must only do what brings shareholder money immediately is a meme that is widely propagated by a certain class of people who stand to profit from it, but the law does not impose that behaviour.
The point is that you’re not going to learn about the world by averaging religious texts with flat Eartherism. Only once you have a foundation can you start measuring how each side is describing events.
Yes and it's a very good point but it's not relevant here is it? This isn't a case of one side being sane and the other crazy, or even both being crazy. It's two sides of a business dispute. Are you really going to draw your conclusion based on what just one side says?
> Yes and it's a very good point but it's not relevant here is it?
I was broadly agreeing with this in the parent post:
> Do you think bias is a one-dimensional tug of war that cancels each other out when combined?
I am not saying that we should not seek other sources, just that quoting the union on one side of the dispute is not better than a reporter paid by the journal on the other side. Even worse, because a journal has some incentives to keep a reputation for being truthful, while communications from a union are purely partisan. (That’s not some criticism and unions play an important role; journalism is just not it)
The point is, two wrong points of view do not magically average out to something right. Ideally someone reporting with some distance would be better.
Being unbiased yourself does mean listening to both sides. What an off request that you would want to hear only from one party and then only additionally neutral parties but not hear from the other side at all because of “bias”.
I also prefer the old fashioned notion that opinions from the writer of the piece are appropriate in stories labeled as opinion pieces and editorials, but not in news reporting.
Are you implying every person capable of writing about this has a personal investment in the outcome? That seems so obviously false that I have to be misunderstanding you.
People are claiming they want 3rd party reporting would you be happy with NPR? Why do you think any for profit newspaper wouldn't be biased against unions? Do you think the WSJ has ever published a pro- or even neutral union story? Or will you get fluff like someone, in quotes, implying the NYT will have to shut it's doors if they are forced to pay some of their record profits to their employees.
And before you start. The problem affecting article quality in reporting ISN'T a direct conflict of interest, it's bias. A direct conflict of interest just implies bias.
is this really true? With one side we can at least get something done and move on with are lives. Two extreme perspectives does not lead to finding a friendly middle ground, it just leaves us locked in a painful & unpleasant stasis.
> who is also part of their own union (Times Guild).
This doesn't remove the conflict of interest because it's not the same union. Those in the other unions may well be more sympathetic to the company than to the strikers, especially given the timing of the strike.
It's likely interfering with their jobs right now in pursuit of a negotiation that they don't stand to gain from.
I don't get this read, or your analogy really. Seems more like "former bible editor here; the author of the psalm about bible editor unions is also a member of a bible editor's union, so is probably not super anti-union. They're unlikely to be just presenting the pope's narrative."
NYT's political coverage has been extremely poor this year, with very obvious editorial control preventing negative coverage of Trump.
It's not obvious to me they have a bias here, but given the clear systemic issues in other reporting it's reasonable to bring a skeptical view to their own reporting.
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.
The NYT has awesome interactive web features for things like the election tomorrow, which I'm guessing take a lot of development work to land. It's much more than a CMS.
There was clearly a non-trivial amount of frontend development work necessary to build the dynamic visualization in this article. This has nothing to do with CMS's. The work has nothing to do with persisting data anywhere. It has nothing to do with backend anything. It's all frontend work to get a visualization in a browser. Absolutely nothing do with CMS's.
"Charitable interpretation" it seems like that is what's missing from the internet (and world) today. Extreme perspectives and no interpersonal relationships == not trust, no willingness to learn.
Fair question. Having not worked at an organization like the New York Times, I really don't know. 5 people would obviously be too few, and 2,000 people would be too many. Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages with basically zero (by comparison) technical maintenance. Twitter (though not doing well as a business) was overloaded with tech employees.
> Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages
Traffic is not the primary driver of staffing. For a simple app, it is relatively straightforward to use commodity cloud offerings to scale to large volumes of traffic. Even something as simple as Heroku + a CDN can take a small team a long way.
But the NYT is not a simple app. I'm not even willing to accept that their CMS needs could be handled with an off-the-shelf CMS without modification. Without having worked there, I can see:
- CMSs for text/images, audio, video content
- syndication for audio content
- custom? subscription system
- some kind of interface to the printing system
- bespoke game studio
- Web dataviz studio
plus all the stuff needed to run a company as big as the NYT, which will include lots of integrations between things like payroll, accounting, 3P ad networks, reporting, HR software, etc.
I haven't even included the people who might make use of the copious data generated by the business.
These things add up fast.
> Twitter (though not doing well as a business)
That's a heck of a caveat! Most businesses aim to do well as businesses, so current Twitter is not a great model.
> Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages with basically zero (by comparison) technical maintenance.
Hacker News isn't exactly the kind of website for many millions of Internet users to engage with. Its interface and features work well for the kind of niche it serves, which is much smaller compared to many other websites. HN (at least the user-facing parts) seem to run on mostly the same code for years, where NYT likely needs to build many interactive, one-off features for the flavor of the day topic.
> Twitter (though not doing well as a business) was overloaded with tech employees.
I read this a lot and maybe it has a truth to it, though I remember before the Great Layoff of 2023 there was a time when Twitter was trying (and AFAICT often failing) to grow its business. One example is that they've tried (and failed) short-form videos way before Tiktok started. Today's Twitter seem to be in maintenance mode, and operates with less people.
Maybe it was 'overloaded' in the sense that it was the kind of business that could never grow and shrinking it down to the size where it can be profitable and squeezing it hard was the way to go, that I cannot know.
It’s actually that large organizations operate on people with average skill, and there is a significant inefficiencies as organizations grow.
So yes, 10 skilled people could run a site that large (and do). But you can’t run a company to recruit and manage that team over decades. “Well just find 10 smart and motivated people who work well together and can be given autonomy to do the right thing and hope they give us what we want” is not an actionable management plan.
Maybe that’s part of it but there are so many moving parts in a near-realtime CMS and world class publishing platform, so 600 people doesn’t surprise me when you consider the scope and scale of the NYT
Only in tech do people get so aggravated by employee count.
Legacy companies have armies of consultants building pretty decks with little end-product to show for it. Never questioned. Every industry has a certain amount of slack built in. Large institutions (big Hollywood, govt, defense, medical services) have oodles of bureaucracy. Tech looks like a paradise in comparison. Yes, tech workers should seek to be more efficient. But, when viewed from comparative lens, tech is in the top tier of efficient industries.
Personally, I am not sold on tech unions. But, tech workers have uniquely low leverage within their profession. Tech lacks paid overtime or paid on-calls. Engineers are routinely expected to work evenings for meetings with off-shore teams. There is limited mobility because unlike doctors or lawyers/ engineers/ hard-tech engineers.... SWEs are frequently managed by non-SWEs. The manner in which remote work was revoked is a canary for the lack of lobbying power among tech workers.
Yes, tech workers are paid upper-middle class wages. But, the quality of life afforded by the profession has gone for a plunge since the 2022 layoffs. Companies have revoked all the pros of covid (flexible & remote work replaced with mandatory in office days and 9-5 hours). But, they've kept all the negatives of covid (work never ends, notification on all devices, global teams, smaller offices, fewer in-office perks). It's like companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
To that end, I empathize with any tech coalition that wants to lobby for better 'worker rights'. Union strikes may be a suboptimal way of doing this. But, it's better than nothing.
> 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 previously sought a requirement that the company use unscented cleaning supplies and offer a pet bereavement policy that included a leave of up to seven days, though it has since backed down from those demands.
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 “comfortable”, or a single base income of $200k. That’s if you want to buy a new car (of which the bulk cost more than $50k), a starter home that doesn’t need major repairs ($800k+), and still have some money left over to save for retirement; in cities like NYC and Boston, you’re easily looking at $250k single/$400k couple for a “Middle Class” existence.
The brutal reality is that everyone who has to work to survive is grossly underpaid relative to the current cost of living. To ignore this fact (or worse, try to compartmentalize it or limit its scope to a reduced “other” category) endangers both the economy and the state.
>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.
The more I stare at this the more I think that using official inflation numbers / using the official CPI is wrong -- these baskets combine recreation and technology being nearly -50% (TVs can be had today for $300, whereas they used to cost $500 in 1995 dollars), assume you only buy new cars (only up ~25% since 2000, but used cars are now almost as expensive as new whereas they used to be available for half the price or less), and underweight housing (basically doubled since 2000, worse if you need to move to a HCOL major urban center for employment).
If you are a healthy person living frugally then I think the inflation in your personal basket of goods is actually higher than the fed numbers would dictate (esp for rent and housing).
>these baskets combine recreation and technology being nearly -50% (TVs can be had today for $300, whereas they used to cost $500 in 1995 dollars),
The entire "Recreation commodities" category (which includes other stuff like "Sporting goods" and "Pets and pet products") is only weighed at 2%, compared to 13% for food and 37% for shelter. Even if it's down 50% the impact on the overall CPI is negligible.
>assume you only buy new cars (only up ~25% since 2000, but used cars are now almost as expensive as new whereas they used to be available for half the price or less),
???
There's clearly a "Used cars and trucks" category.
>and underweight housing (basically doubled since 2000, worse if you need to move to a HCOL major urban center for employment).
The index is called "Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers", not "Consumer Price Index for Young Urban Professionals". Not everyone is a recent graduate who recently moved into a high COL city and paying for a market rate apartment. For every person fitting that criteria, there's probably also a retiree who owns their house and/or lives in a rent controlled apartment.
> The index is called "Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers", not "Consumer Price Index for Young Urban Professionals". Not everyone is a recent graduate who recently moved into a high COL city and paying for a market rate apartment.
The discussion here is about the cost of living difference for tech workers who I assume are clustered around NYC.
$45K in NYC in 2005 is not equivalent to $73K today for most such people. It is likely closer to $100K today, as the above poster said.
that's a pretty localized in time issue re: used cars. There's still covid supply issues being felt in the downstream used market as a result of underproduction for 2+ years.
This doesn't account for the fact that cost of living doesn't rise at the same rate everywhere. You can't just use national statistics for this. It's entirely possible that in NYC the cost of living went up more than 2x since the 2000s.
The same is also true if you use 2005 or 2009 as your start date. I agree there is variance in theory, but in practice it has been about the same as the national.
>and making everything in the “basket of goods” worse.
Given that food, energy, and shelter makes up the bulk of the CPI, I'm not sure how this can be done. The most plausible thing I can think of is "food is less nutritious than before", but I doubt that's an actual factor. "Food is getting less nutritious so I'm forced to shop at whole foods" isn't exactly a popular sentiment.
The first is you're using the Nationwide averages as opposed to the regional numbers for New York where a lot of these increases are much greater than on the nation.
The second thing is the way it includes housing is by using a thing called the owners imputed rent. And what that does is it tries to back out the rental from a housing unit. The problem is in New York City rent has been rising way faster than that.
30 is the cpi's consistently underestimated a number of its own provisions because of the way it does hedonics and substitution. It basically says that while meat might have risen 50% people switch to fish now and it uses in lower value for inflation.
The CPI over the last 30 years have been so massively game it's almost useless anymore
>The first is you're using the Nationwide averages as opposed to the regional numbers for New York where a lot of these increases are much greater than on the nation.
Another commenter has pointed out new york house prices actually rose slower compared to the rest of the country.
>The second thing is the way it includes housing is by using a thing called the owners imputed rent. And what that does is it tries to back out the rental from a housing unit. The problem is in New York City rent has been rising way faster than that.
Most Americans own their home. OER might not be perfect, but pretending that they pay market rent doesn't make much sense either. Even for people who don't own their home, new york has rent control, which provides similar inflation protections compared to owning a home.
>30 is the cpi's consistently underestimated a number of its own provisions because of the way it does hedonics and substitution. It basically says that while meat might have risen 50% people switch to fish now and it uses in lower value for inflation.
The part about hedonic adjustment is misleading. While it's true that such adjustments are used. It's only used for small minority of categories (basically clothes and technology), and doesn't include stuff like food (like in your example).
Meanwhile the part about substitution is straight up false:
Read that link. The BLS says "yes we try to adjust for the substitution, but really we are trying to calculate a basic level of satisfaction:
> In January 1999, the BLS began using a geometric mean formula in the CPI that reflects the fact that consumers shift their purchases toward products that have fallen in relative price. [It continues by saying it allows substitution withing categories and not between categories.]
This is exactly what I was saying. It has become a cost of living index, not a measure of inflation anymore. The hedonic adjustments can be laughably hand-wavy (it is a very difficult problem on how you measure inflation when using CPUs -- the real answer is you shouldn't and CPI's basked is a bad bad way to do it). That FAQ is always pretty funny and defensive (a lot of "give us a break -- it doesn't really affect anything much").
> Even for people who don't own their home, new york has rent control, which provides similar inflation protections compared to owning a home.
This is one of the huge issues. (1) Not sure if you live near NYC, but ask any new yorker about how much rent control has helped -- the answer is usually pretty low. don't have a heart attack looking at this rental rise in the last 5 years https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys...
However that isn't the important part - rent control shouldn't effect measures of inflation -- this is precisely why CPI is bad. You can't legislate away inflation, you mere push the money around and prices rise asymmetrically but you still have the fundamental issue that CPI no longer even tries to measure -- too many dollas chasing too few goods. So you stop some of using those dollars on housing -- they just bid of something else instead.
CPI is a terrible horrible very bad measure of inflation. Its been that way since the 70s at least when the concept was turned on its head.
These are NYC tech workers. "Food" isn't broccoli beef stir fry at home for $8. It's dinner at Del Frisco's for $300.
You need to understand that when people bitch about the "cost of living", they're not speaking in broad terms. They're speaking in specific terms, inclusive of their insane budgetary choices that they believe are mandatory to be seen as high-status.
Yes, you can live just fine on the median income. But in order to have your ego stroked as the super important high class person that you obviously are, you have to spend some money. Choosing to live in NYC in the first place is certainly part of that, the rest is just gravy.
Can we stick to stats over caricatures? If we’re going to go by “gut feel,” the stereotype is that the status climbers primarily go into finance, consulting, medicine, and law - not engineering.
My work at FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies would suggest that it’s far more probable that a random e.g. finance professional is driven primarily by perceived status than a software engineer.
The media and general public still openly poke fun at tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and even Jeff Bezos in a way that they would never do to e.g. Jamie Dimon. The perceived statuses are still incomparable, and I think any competent Gen Zer knows it.
How about medical appointments with nurses instead of doctors?
I wonder if there is a similar measure for time kids spend in school. My kid comes home early every Wednesday, and there’s are ~15 other early dismissal days during the school year too.
I would bet almost everything that relies heavily on labor has been increasing in price faster than official figures for the basket of all goods and services.
"Food" listed in there is not food at all. Thats some cheap filler that isn't really affected by inflation that much because of its just cheap garbage subsided by govt.
Look at the junk in this section for exampe
> Cereals and bakery products
And ofcourse all the items in fruits and vegetables had the highest inflation.
>And ofcourse all the items in fruits and vegetables had the highest inflation.
A simple check shows this is false. The "Cereals and bakery products" category went up by 28.6% since January 2020, compared to 17.9% for "Fruits and Vegetables". You get similar conclusions if you use compare against January 2005.
I had a feeling someone would dredge up a basic calculator and make this argument.
The problem with your retort is it ignores the very context I outlined above. The present rate of inflation appears more manageable, but because most of it is driven by absurd inflation in shelter and transport costs (homes and cars), those two areas are starkly higher than inflation overall - as much as 50% or more, in some metros.
So while your napkin math makes for a good soundbite, the reality is that it just hides the complex truth of inflation. So yes, while $45k might be inflation-equivalent to $73k today, that purchasing power is significantly different. $43k in the 2000s could buy you a starter home in most states, albeit not in most metros; nowadays, $73k can’t even cover basic necessities in many states and all metros, not without significant sacrifices.
The thing you always need to keep in mind about CPI is that it’s a weighted average for the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Like, retirees in Florida who own their own homes have a very different relationship with prices than young renters in NYC. It really only makes sense to use CPI and other inflation figures when you’re talking about the whole country.
No one cares that they can buy a 4k TV for $400. We want healthy food that we can regularly afford. That costs $400 a week for a family. These government indexes are incredibly warped.
If you assume a family of four with both children aged 9-11 and the parents a male and a female aged 19-50, the USDA says [0] it costs only $250.10 with a low-cost plan, $314.90 with a moderate-cost plan and $380 with a liberal plan. All three of these plans each support "a healthy diet through nutritious meals and snacks at home" [1] and would cover everything -- no restaurant budget required.
As in "people feel as though they want to be paid more"? You may find the idea interesting and resonant, but how does that affect anything? It's still true that they're on more than journalists, regardless of how they feel.
Yes, of course. Within their choices, everyone does what they want. But that's not something worth bringing into a discussion, unless we bring it into every discussion as a point to note every time before continuing with the actual discussion.
But, isn't that the discussion? That is, why would someone earning 100k feel that it's not enough, when all economic comparisons, with peers or peer-adjacents, insist that it's a load of money? Maybe it is, and maybe it's not; but if you go on strike you're probably not convinced by what the Fed, the DOL, and HN say.
Do you think people should be compensated more because they feel poorer, regardless of the actual costs of living...? As an avid Scanlon reader I personally think you're misrepresenting her position
Nope, I don't have a particular view on what would be adequate compensation, although I'm reflexively with labor. But it might get to the heart of why people do what they do. Why go on strike when the math says you're being payed above average on a nationwide basis? People are funny that way. Very few are calculators, they're just people.
I reckon people want to be paid as much as they can bargain for, regardless of their relative income level. Besides, it's not just about pay, it's often about working conditions.
Yes, and double yes. How these people view (feel about) their working conditions is more important to them than any explanation of why they ought to, or ought not to, feel that way based on some measure of comparative economics or conditions. If they want, for whatever reason (either allergy or solidarity), a scent-free cleaning product and they're willing to strike for it; well, why not? It's a political negotiation, a bargaining. That's sensible to me. Everything is people and politics. It might be justified by math, but it's not driven by it.
Of course, but I think people do (and should) bargain for as much as they can get. I don't think it should be motivated by and only when workers "feel bad" about the economy necessarily.
measures of core inflation that sites like this use leave out many things that massively impact purchasing power - namely food, fuel, and interest rates. When factoring these in, the gp comment is quite reasonable, as those costs have soared in the last 20 years for the typical household.
And median wage in NYC is $74k (according to Google). Sure, Manhattan is different, tech salaries are different, etc. I'm not claiming that these specific workers should/shouldn't be paid more, just that it's really tone-deaf to claim that you can't live on <$100k, when more than half of New Yorkers do.
I'm curious about what portion of those that are living on $74k or less are doing so solo, and how many are only able to do so by racking up debt / getting support from family / etc.
I live in an area less expensive than NYC and, at least anecdotally in my circles, if you don't have a partner (or other assistance like roommates, parents, or something along those lines) it seems pretty damn rough to get by on ~70k.
I have a good job in the Bay Area, and I spend 4K a month. Of course if I were a family, there is no way I could support a wife in 4K a month but that is rare anyway. If she were working too, I could surely support a child in 6k a month. At this cost my life includes:
1. A Tesla Model 3, on which I spend 1k a month with insurance
2. 1.5k rent for a studio in a good safe location with utilities
3. Rest on groceries, eating out movies etc.
If I decided to get a cheap car, I could easily have 600$ or more to spend on housing etc.
So it would be tight but as a single 20s male, I would make it with 50k a year after taxes. Everything else just goes into savings. I think people have lavish tastes, or no control over their spending if they can’t make do with 70k a year after taxes.
>if they can’t make do with 70k a year after taxes
I don't think the median income is after taxes, is it? That would be more reasonable, for sure. My comment was made in reference to friends who make $70k/yr before taxes.
// 2. 1.5k rent for a studio in a good safe location with utilities
I actually can't think of an EU Capital where that's achievable anymore, bar possibly the socialist outlier of Vienna. In Dublin a good studio is at least 2k, and you'll pay 52% tax on earnings over €70k as well...
It's all about rent. If you've lived somewhere a while and have rent control, or you have roommates, or an unorthodox living situation (e.g. no kitchen), or can find a below-market unit, or some combination of those, you can survive on FAR less than someone who is moving to the city today and signing a new lease on a market-rate 1-bedroom apartment.
Sometimes it's like a half fridge and a two burner electric stove. Maybe you have an air fryer. Maybe you just microwave a lot of stuff. Or do like I do, eat a lot of simple uncooked meals, like fresh fruits and veggies, nuts, smoked fish, cheese, etc. I'm constantly amazed at how so many people assume everyone must eat exactly like they do.
I'm amazed when someone assumes others must eat out every meal if they don't have the ability to broil a roast in their home. Though I shouldn't be amazed - the inability of people to understand lives that work differently then their own seems widespread.
Nah this is just false. I'm a founder and pay myself less than our employees, 70k does just fine. I define just fine as 'enough so you don't have to be distracted by coupon clipping for daily necessities, and can still travel on trips and buy splurge purchases like a fancy rice cooker or designer couch or fancy cocktails.'
I live alone in a 2br. I don't have assistance from family or a partner.
Now, I do not live in a luxury building, and I am not building up a nest egg from my salary. And I rent. But when people think about the costs of NYC, a lot of people forget that you don't need a car, car insurance, or gas.
Where you get into trouble is if you're paying a stupid large amount for rent. It is very possible to pay 1-2k / month in rent. Most people who move to the city at that budget live with roommates initially, but most find a really good deal, sometimes rent controlled, organically through networks after a year or two of living here. Deals are hard to find as they should be, but certainly exist, and most longterm locals have a great deal.
[on a salary of 70k] “I am not building up a nest egg from my salary”
You are robbing from your future to live in the present.
This might be ok for you specifically as you are making a gamble on your ownership of the startup paying off. Perhaps you have a family safety net. Or Perhaps you are ok with taking the risk that you don’t have enough money in your older years.
It’s not really ok for standard employees to live that way. The USA social contract is that each person must self-fund their own retirement. Deferring that savings to “later” has truly staggering costs in compound-interest-years lost.
I didn't make any claims other than saying that in my circles I see some of my friends and colleagues have trouble making it by on $70k. I'm not sure how you would be able to tell me that I'm wrong about that. I'm happy that you are able to make it on $70k, though.
>I didn't make any claims other than saying that in my circles I see some of my friends and colleagues have trouble making it by on $70k. I'm not sure how you would be able to tell me that I'm wrong about that.
Okay, then let's make this rigorous.
Falsifiable Claim: People live a life of struggle on 70k a year in new york, where struggle is defined by constant worries of physiological needs, safety, and security, as categorized in Manslow's hierarchy of needs. https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Falsified by counterexample.
QED.
For a lot of people, they may mean 'struggle' in the sense of living below where they want to be, which is relative. Maslow's hierarchy is helpful to categorize.
I personally could live off less than €1k/month for everything, before buying a house that reduced my costs by around €400/month.
Just because it's possible, doesn't mean most are willing to take the set of preferences in my head that allows me to be so cheap and rewire their own brains like that.
"Official" inflation numbers are fraudulent and have always been. Real life situations is what matters, because we're dealing with real people.
The Soviet Union "officially" had the highest production of food per capita in the world, yet they had to import food. Because you cannot eat government statistics.
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
If you did a 30 second search, you'd see it's factored into the CPI, with "Shelter" (which further breaks down into rent and owners' equivalent rent) making up 36% of the CPI basket.
One possible issue is that the largest component (27% out of 26%) is `OER`, which can be detached from reality.
Unless owners are completely in the loop in terms of the rental market (which they likely are not, they don't rent), they may not come up with good estimates for what an equivalent rent would be.
Yes, it's in there. But also, IMO, oer is a dreadful metric. It's very laggy, and more opinionated that it ought to be. Rent is rent, but oer seems neither fish nor fowl. It's a wild survey guess that's off by 6 months.
I meant the original source, the inflation calculator site. Anyway, thanks for the figures. House prices more than doubled but I guess other things must have become cheaper to compensate.
House prices aren't part of the CPI, but housing (ie. rent and owners' equivalent rent) is. The former is an investment but the latter is the thing you actually consume.
Purchasing power is part of the equation. Part of the dispute is about mandating that workers come into the office at least part time, which basically means living in a high-cost area.
However, journalism in general is a struggling business, which will probably push wages down on average across the profession.
Double however, the NYT has been doing really well at adapting to the modern media landscape and currently has record subscribers and profits [0], so I can see why the union thought it would be a good time to play hardball.
Triple however, I'd quibble a bit with your numbers, even if I think the overall point is well taken. It might be hard to live on the UES on 100K. It's not so hard to live by the Cortelyou stop in Brooklyn or in Sunset Park, both lovely areas.
Funny enough that it’s always “too high” for non executives but executive pay is never policed and any attempts to do so are met with fierce resistance.
Which reminds me of another thing. A good friend of mine is currently getting their MBA from a fairly well regarded school. One thing they recently learned about is structuring compensation. The general adage is that whatever you pay an employee must be in reflection of the multiple you get back from that employee. For example a ratio of 5:1 would be for every 1 dollar you pay you get 5 back.
When you start thinking about it like that, you realize just how underpaid people are. So many companies - in fact the vast majority - it’s much higher, in tech for example it’s usually around 10:1 and often as high as 25:1 or more.
This makes it much more straightforward in understanding things and the power imbalance when thinking about it like this
It is interesting that the person you're replying to used the compensation numbers for other guild employees rather than executives. I wonder why they made that decision
Seems like obfuscation. I doubt the NYT guild is striking to take money away from the lesser group, but instead to negotiate better working conditions and potentially a bigger slice of the profits pie for their workers, as would be their right.
Well executives are few and non-executives are many. So total outgoing money is more as per accounting department. Nothing funny or conspiratorial here.
> A good friend of mine is currently getting their MBA from a fairly well regarded school...
Let that good friend of yours get actual job in some non-superlative companies like Wall street banks or FAANG. They will learn how their fantastical ratios of 5:1, 10:1, or 25:1 work in real life.
> ... you realize just how underpaid people are...
If that were true those 100s of thousands companies be making enormous unheard of profits. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
>Well executives are few and non-executives are many. So total outgoing money is more as per accounting department. Nothing funny or conspiratorial here.
This means nothing. Its a red herring. The fact is executives are paid outsized to the rest of a company typically, certainly when you look at companies of size like Google, Microsoft or even Intel or Nvidia (and so it goes down the chain really), and I really question the value of most executives, as they tend not to like being scrutinized by outside parties, especially within their own organizations, but the reverse is untrue. They really seem to hate accountability but sure love getting the board to rubber stamp golden parachutes and big bonuses for themselves
If a corporation can find 350 million dollars to pay out in executive bonuses salaries etc. I'm certain than is an allocation problem not a money problem.
>If that were true those 100s of thousands companies be making enormous unheard of profits. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
>Let that good friend of yours get actual job in some non-superlative companies like Wall street banks or FAANG. They will learn how their fantastical ratios of 5:1, 10:1, or 25:1 work in real life.
They have one, I'm declining to use identifying information. The largest bonuses and salaries funnel upward, its no secret, with huge executive (and to be clear, I'm bundling VPs and SVPs in this) getting hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in bonuses that those below them see a fraction of.
Like profits being at record highs last year?[0] and thats just 5 seconds of running a search.
Not mention we are talking ratios here. So just because some SMBs aren’t taking in millions doesn’t mean the ratio is any less true
The value an employee creates is a function not only of their labor but also the *lever they are given by the company* It's amazing how often I see this asinine argument that assumes an employee is generating value in a vacuum.
Labor compensation is determined primarily by substitutability. A $200K engineer creating "$1M worth of value" is not automatically deserving of a higher wage unless there is no one else willing to do that engineer's job for $200K.
The business doesn’t really function without someone actually producing the work. Please tell me why executives are so much more entitled to profits than the people down the chain?
I’m not saying don’t people pay well but the executives - non executive power balance is huge and I don’t see how a person can deny this.
Materially executives are also rarely helped accountable for their terrible decisions or layoffs would actually be laid at their feet.
Labor market imbalances of power are well documented and easily discoverable. It’s really plain at this point that material productivity gains have almost entirely been funneled to the top, with workers benefitting very little. Wages have not kept pace with productivity gains since the 1970s, even if you include the recent blip of wage increases they aren’t meaningful in the grand scheme of things.
I don’t know why we just accept these as truths or whatever cause they don’t have to be
None of what you said is relevant to the core point that labor compensation is determined primarily by substitutability. As for why we "accept" that, it's because it makes rational sense. Why would anyone offer more to someone to do what someone else will do for less?
In your fictional utopia, you would need practically every single company in the world to agree to pay labor in excess of the rate dictated by market forces. Any company that deviates from that would have a considerable competitive advantage and quickly usurp its market. This is so categorically obvious that I hesitate to call it economics. It's not even just human nature. This is so self-evident that it may very well be a bedrock principle of sentience.
So what, if it costs you 300k to be comfortable then you are being suckered. When people are struggling to make it by on $30 and $40k and see these privileged propagandists complain about making six figures, no one has sympathy.
Sorry, I don't see a valid point in any of these salary arguments. In fact, they're down right insulting and ignorant.
I did strenuous manual labor for next to nothing once upon a time. After about 8 years of that, on top of regular 60 hour work weeks, I spent almost every waking moment of 4-5 years to learn and better myself with about every sacrifice you could imagine short of divorce. I'm now making significantly more and working much less with an extremely happy family.
I'm not some trust fund kid. I have a high school education. My father worked 3-5 jobs to provide for my family growing up. So if you haven't picked it up, I know what the other side looks like.
I work in tech now, I wouldn't even reply to a recruiter presenting a 190k job offer if it meant living in New York. I can get more working remote. It's not because I'm spoiled, it's not because I make bad financial decisions, it's because I know my value and won't compromise and I sure won't reduce my family's quality of life because some multi million dollar company wants to short change me.
I get paid fairly for my experience and what I bring to the table, I make sure of that. If my employer isn't matching what I know I can get on the market, I will first negotiate (which is right where the NYT Tech workers are at), then leave for greener pastures if that falls through. I can do that because I worked hard to bring more value to myself in an in demand field.
I'm sorry if you're making a lower salary, but that doesn't mean everyone should just take what they're given. That's how people are exploited.
These arguments aren't just wrong. They are backwards and self limiting.
There are many commenters that talk past each other given the emotionally charged topics of unions, pay, negotiations, etc. I think this is one of them.
What I read from parent is that lifestyle inflation must be high in some of these demographics when the rhetoric used is about survival, despite evidence of many more people 'surviving' on far less income.
What I read from you is that you fiercely maintain negotiating power because you can and feel it's only right given your high value. Why WOULD anyone leave money on the table, after all?
I called out my high value solely because I fall into the "privileged propagandist" rhetoric the comment I responded to and some other siblings are pushing.
Yes, the notion you need 300k to be comfortable anywhere is absurd, but just because someone makes more doesn't mean their desire to achieve a better quality of life is any less valid than anyone else. Do people with higher salaries need more? No. But why assume that just because an individual or group of people want a better quality of life they're "privileged?"
FTR, 100k as a average base salary is pretty low for tech in NYC. When the other 90k is bonus and RSUs that probably vest over 4 years, the stock has fluctuated 50%, and this being the journalism space, I wouldn't expect to see the full value. They have every right to try to negotiate better quality of life improvements out of NYT, especially for something as low impact on revenue as pet bereavement, as ridiculous as that is. I feel a lot of these comments don't understand tech compensation, where sometimes companies can't meet market value in cash so resort to all kinds of quirky benefits to attract/retain skilled workers. That is exactly where I see such a crazy request coming from when a company pushes back against giving more than a 2% annual raise.
You're "value" is entirely subjective and based on imaginary nonsense. Machine learning engineers making $500k are certainly not worth $500k just because its a hot trend right now. Gucci, Louis Vouton, etc, high fashion items are most certain not worth their price tags, much like diamonds. Eggs at Erawan aren't any different than likewise organic eggs elsewhere and are only $30 because someone decided they could rip off rich people and rich morons happily swallow it hook line and sinker. Value is entirely subjective and only quantifiable in the most abstract, opinionated manner and the richer people are the more often they are terrible at discerning any actual or reasonable value out of something.
If you think it's reasonable to pay exorbitant rent, food, gas, utilities, simply because you live in some concrete jungle then you are blind. It doesn't justify you actually deserving to make that much other than someone choosing to pay you that much.
Just because you can't be comfortable in a used car with a fixer upper home doesn't mean other people can't be. You're talking about your preferences like they're a bare minimum and they're not. Plenty of people live perfectly comfortable lives without those luxuries.
Careful with those assumptions. I drive a 16-year old used Honda and have already set aside cash for necessary home repairs when I finally buy a place. However, I do refuse to spend half a million dollars on an uncared-for shithole that hasn’t been renovated or repaired since the 60s; I have standards, and one of them involves not paying inflated rates for someone else’s crap, especially when doing so also eradicates my budget for repairs and maintenance.
You’re right that personal standards, subjective as they are, can make an argument highly misleading. However, you’d be careful not to make the mistaken assumption that your personal standards are the norm, either.
I’m seeing a lot of “you’re wrong, no sympathy for anyone over $100k” responses to my argument here, all of them making the same assumptions: that anyone making that much dosh must obviously be whinging about paying more for their Maserati or unable to afford rent on that high-rise condo anymore. Everyone is extrapolating some false narrative despite overwhelming evidence that even the most highly-paid among us are getting squeezed out of the housing market or struggling to make ends meet, and that’s exactly what the powers that be (people who don’t have to work to live, because they have all the money) want us to devolve into.
At the end of the day, there’s exactly two groups: those who must work to survive, and those who don’t need to due to immense wealth. Statistically speaking, you’re never going to be the latter, so you should be just as concerned about “highly paid” workers struggling to make ends meet as you are “low-skilled” workers, because we’re all workers.
Interesting that you didn't address the demands over pet bereavement and the scents of cleaning supplies. It makes sense that you chose to, of course. It's these types of demands that give away the underlying absurdity of these unions and their demands.
> grossly underpaid relative to the current cost of living
This is just very, very out of touch. The vast majority of the world lives just fine on far, far less than what the median worker at NYT currently makes.
And yet, remote work alone is not the solution to this issue. For those of us unable to drive, we must live in expensive cities with comprehensive mass transit systems if we want a decent quality of life and opportunities. For those of us who are LGBTQ+, we might not have the safety or support structures to thrive in different states. For those with chronic health issues, living in states with better patient protection laws or healthcare subsidies may be a necessity, driving up our costs on housing or transport to ensure our survival.
This is a global problem, and it requires solutions at all levels. Remote work is amazing, and I 100% support it (and exist on hybrid despite being in a major metro), but we need more on a local, state, and federal level as well. Heck, it’s so bad that we can’t even blame a singular or group of enployers anymore: the system is broken, and desperately needs updating so it can work again.
It is an immediately available solution for most if not almost all white collar workers. COVID was proof that it worked. However, the incentives and goals are not aligned with both employers and local governments.
And it's the uneven propagation of price information through the popular consciousness that makes inflation so insidious. You're absolutely right: a lot of people are calibrated on 2010 prices for income despite 2024 prices for expenses.
I will unashamedly admit I was one of those people until recently. When I got into the housing market, I thought $650k for a turnkey property fit for four adults would be sufficient, with another $70k set aside for repairs and projects (HVAC, oil tank removal, etc).
Turns out I was wrong, and my failure to adapt my standards has likely cost me an opportunity to own a home sans a significant pay rise.
Once I accepted that new data, however, I was able to see the immense gap between reality and expectation, as well as understand that it’s not necessarily my fault for missing that opportunity. I went with the widely-propagated programming for new homeowners at the time, and missed the pitfalls despite my ample additional research. Housing is complicated, and it’s the biggest hindrance to a more stable, equitable, and productive society in my personal opinion.
I'd love it if we could tie down salaries in terms of what they can pay for:
- Minimum is 1.0 Living Wage ™ (after taxes, rent, insurance, utilities, savings... you get to eat 3 meals and 2 snacks per person per home).
Having the mental stress of trying to determine when would be the right moment to approach the moody boss to make a case for your livelihood shouldn't be a thing.
I'd like the freedom of not having to pay the time tax of determining if I'll make rent or not...
At the end of the day, we’re all on the same side. I make ~5x the rest of my household combined, but spend a plurality of my time and energy advocating for their enrichment and support because I know that if they’re taken care of, I will be too, when I really need it.
If you have to work to live, then we’re on the same side, and we all deserve more money to help us offset this cost of living crisis.
Pretty sure other countries with similar CoL but much lower salaries are handling a middle class existence fine. 100k is literally better than 99% of other countries, if that isn't good enough what is?
I don't give a shit whether the workers are asking for "too much", whether they've got a cushy desk job, whether they want to eat avocado toast and drive a nice car. Everyone's entitled to whatever they can bargain for. Applying some kind of value judgement to it is doing ownership's work for free.
> I can’t help but think those people don’t understand that $100k is very much the new $45k of the 2000s
Yeah but if they're remote they can live in cheaper parts of the country so the 100K+ range of inner expensive cities is less justified and they're competing on a country wide market.
Cost of living has gotten really insane today compared to a couple decades ago.
Its pretty easy to go to college on loans and rack up $150k in debt for an average 4-year degree. Its easy to spend $35k-$50k on a new car, even 10 year old cars in good shape are $10k-$15k. Housing costs vary a lot more by area, but I think most would agree its extremely expensive these days.
The idea that a young family could have $5,000/mo just in debt payments between school, vehicles, and housing is insane to me. That doesn't even account for day to day expenses, children, vacations, etc.
> Its pretty easy to go to college on loans and rack up $150k in debt for an average 4-year degree.
It isn't easy for a 4-year degree. To get to that level generally requires law school or medical school debt or an unfunded graduate degree.
For 4-year degrees around 80% of students graduate with less than $30k in debt.
For public schools only 7% of graduates have debt above $50k. For private nonprofit schools 12% have debt above $50k. For private for-profit schools it is 32%.
The University of Alabama has estimates cost for in-state attendance of roughly $34k per year [1]. That is their general tuition unrelated to what school/department or degree you are there for.
That does include estimates for housing, food, books, etc so there's wiggle room especially if you have family near by and live at home.
For anyone going to school entirely on loans though, you wouldn't make it a year with only $30k in debt.
Sure, but most students at the University of Alabama don't go through entirely on loans. Only 42% of them take out loans. Median federal loan debt at graduation for them is $23k. 8% also take out private loans. The people with private loans have a median debt of $59k.
That wasn't actually my point though. My original comment was specifically calling out the cost to go to college entirely on loans, not what the average student ends up borrowing.
To me its less interesting to look at what the average person who is able to afford college today borrows to pay for it. That's a self-selected population and doesn't show what the impact would be on anyone who gets into college but doesn't have family money, scholarships, or grants to help pay for it.
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 company's gotta have money before they can give it to you. And newspapers don't have money.
> 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.
> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, from April through June, rose to $104.7 million from $92.2 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 5.8 percent, to $625.1 million, compared with the same period in 2023.
Ah, I must have misunderstood the rose to $104.7 million from $92.2 million a year
Even quadrupling the $18k per employee, you're still trying to get a $40k raise from an organisation with a profit of $72k per employee. That's going to be tough.
Far tougher than moving to a different job at a company with more money.
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.
It's the same in the US, but the NY Times is probably the most financially successful newspaper in the world at this point. They are not only the #1 news source by reputation, they made a huge push into digital very early and sell subscriptions to news, gaming (they have the #1 crossword and wordle), cooking, product reviews and sports. They supposedly make as much money on games as news which is why the message from the union has been to boycott wordle today.
I’d make the argument that the NYT is well positioned in the AI age to be an authority more so than before. The internet will be inundated with AI generated news, and the only way to keep your sanity is to check anything with a legitimate logo on the top of the site.
People will laugh at it, but pet bereavement should absolutely be a thing. The saddest I've ever been in my life was when my dog died. Perhaps seven days is a bit much, but when you go to the bargaining table you don't start with what you want, you start past that point then negotiate down.
Same. My boy pug dying in 2019 was so distressful that I was coughing up blood the following morning. My father had a massive heart attack a couple months later and I was still numb to the point where I couldn't process it emotionally.
For some, esp. those who choose to be childless, a relationship like that is probably the closest we'll come.
I was happy the startup I worked at during that time allowed me to take a week off as sick pay... sent flowers with a handwritten note from our HR leader the following morning, but I opted to come back after a couple days as I needed to take my mind off things.
Absolutely, pet bereavement should be taken seriously. Losing a pet can be one of the most devastating experiences, often comparable to losing a close family member. Pets are part of our daily lives, routines, and emotional support systems
The saddest I've ever been in my life was when my dog died.
I take it you've never lost a child? Because I've lost both and sad as it was, losing a dog doesn't even come close. Losing the dog was sad, but I got over it and eventually adopted another pup. Losing the child was so unimaginably awful that I struggle to find the words...
Police knocking on my door at 2am to tell me.
Calling my wife at 2:30am to tell her (she was away on business).
Waiting for her to find a flight home.
The funeral.
Dealing with the estate.
Waking up every few weeks feeling like it was all a nightmare, only to realize it was not.
Anything you don’t like is woke. No sexist jokes in office? Woke. Bro culture is frowned upon? Woke. Can’t make jokes about gay and black people? Woke, woke, woke.
Because of allergies basically. It's a big problem for some people. My mother's church asks people wearing perfumes or other scents to sit on one side every service.
Unscented cleaning products in a communal workplace setting makes complete sense to me, tbh. It minimizes the exposure to any sensitivities or allergies that could expose a company to legal liability. e.g. it only takes one poorly-paid cleaner to forget that someone's bathroom has an accessibility policy because they're deeply allergic to the lemon scent in the cleaning product or something.
Um, what? If anything, the bit about unscented cleaning products would be one of the more reasonable asks, since it's relatively cheap to provide, and makes a huge difference to quality of the workplace for those who care about it and are annoyed by the scents.
> I won't laugh at the pet bereavement leave request, but I most certainly will laugh at the ask for unscented cleaning products. What's the point then?
The point of cleaning products is to clean, which can be done perfectly well with no scent. If they're just covering up uncleanliness with a pretty scent, then they're not cleaning.
Some people have serious allergies to common scents, and some people just find them unpleasant and slightly nauseating.
To reductio ad absurdum, without the advertisers there'd be no journalists.
The problem remains that with the advertisers, there cannot be journalism.
Little distinguishes much of american mass-media 'journalism' from a ChatGPT precis of a Press Release or Reuters/AP wire. What does is generally in the form of an Op-Ed, and is generally at the behest or bias of a billionaire or their lobbying proxy.
In 2024 this has gotten to the point where America's Largest Newspaper chain will not endorse a presidential candidate out of fear. That's 200+ separate publications.
Both the advertisers and the journalists rely on the Tech Employees as their core dependency for distribution and scaling factor, and are weighted in compensation accordingly. Much as it ever was - the people selling adspace and doing the logistics of distribution always made more than the people writing copy or typesetting.
> Some background: The Tech Guild represents hundreds of software engineers, product designers, data analysts and others who make and run our website, apps, games and publishing systems. It’s a sister to my union, the NYT Guild, which reps the newsroom (and advertising, security & more!).
> The NYT Guild contract contains a no-strike clause. That means we in the newsroom are legally forbidden to go on strike with Tech. So we will be supporting them in other ways, some of which you can also do.
The only thing the times has to worry about is whether or not they can get other tech workers in the door to undercut the union.
When the union was formed in 2021, tech workers were insanely in demand and carried basically all the chips. But now that that has cooled significantly, and many tech workers are having trouble finding work, the union is in a precarious position of being founded on ideals of 2021, but having to negotiate with the reality of 2024.
> The guild said it was asking readers to honor its digital picket line by not playing Times Games products, such as Wordle, and not using the Cooking app.
I’m not familiar with digital picket lines, why not ask that people not read via the site? Tying the picket line to Wordle and the cooking app seems to trivialize the importance of the team – Wordle was an acquisition!
My understanding is that, if you judge by traffic, The New York Times is actually a cooking blog and online gaming platform that dabbles a bit in journalism on the side.
Hilarious but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true. Upon some reflection, Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce recipe is probably the most that i’ve actively sought the nyt’s content.
I mean, newspapers used to make all their money on classified ads which is why Craigslist has killed so much local news and Craig Newmark is now donating money to save journalism.
Considering the common pay for software devs thats not as high as I expect.
The unscented cleaning supplies is a weird request, but it does kinda make sense and the cost should be pretty low - don't know why they removed that requirement.
It's great the union was pushing for unscented cleaning supplies.
I have a friend who is very sensitive to scents. She may not be able to work in a typical office again because of it. I'm very sensitive to harsh fluorescent lighting and noisy office environments and get migraines. You can push through for a while but eventually you burn out.
We've also realized we're both "mildly" autistic [1] over the last few years, along with quite a few other software engineer friends. The sensory sensitivities fall under that umbrella.
Tech has traditionally been more accepting of neurodiversity than other careers, so it's great to see a tech union raising issue like this that don't cost much but make a big difference for anyone affected.
You've been mislead on the "common pay" for software developers by the overemphasis of total compensation from FAANG (partially due to HN bias). Outside of FAANG, most developers earn less than you think in the US, and outside the US, it's even drastically less.
I am very allergic to many common fragrances and it makes my life really uncomfortable very frequently. Some of them are worse than others but commercial grade cleaning products are some of the worst. And it’s not just problematic for me to be in the bathroom where they’re used, but sometimes entire sections of the building that are close to the bathrooms. I get immediate physically uncomfortable symptoms and prolonged exposure can actually cause ETD and a resulting debilitating vertigo where I can’t even sit up for five hours and vomit the entire time. It’s not just fragrances that contribute to this but it’s a large part of it
The idea that they “bristled” at a union supporting people like me is total shit
As a person whose very sensitive to scents there's an entire world of folks who are debilitated by them!
I can often tell if someone was wearing anything but the mere hint of perfume minutes after they've left an area, and anything stronger gives me headaches or worse.
Journalist salaries, especially at prestigious piblications, are quite famously set such that only people who can rely on external support to the tune of 5-6 figures a year can become journalists. It makes sense that the journalists union would prioritize things other than salary in bargaining - their W2 job isn't where their money comes from.
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.
A small sample size, but all of my kids which go to a pretty high-end daycare seem to have a bit leg up on peers who have stayed home in terms of social skills, language, reasoning, and reading. That's not just me acting like my kids are the best (of course they are), that's those other parents mentioning it to me.
It's practically a college tuition per kid at age 0 though.
It does when the biggest expenditure category is for a positional good (ie. rent). There's only so much land in new york and so many apartment units. Being in a wealthy country means your peers are also wealthy, which means a household with double income can easily outbid a household with a single income.
100% out of touch, yes, but not wrong. Before kids I had the same exact sentiment, and now, with kids, I still do.
Raising a family is a choice, and that choice should be made deliberately, considering all aspects, including financial impact.
It is no more the responsibility of the employer to consider the family of the employee anymore than for them to consider if the employee is a gambling addict, or spends frivolously on OnlyFans subs or funko pop collecting.
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?
The auto workers unions got established when auto work was high paid, high tech work. People deserve to have unions - which is to say, a voice in the terms of their employment - regardless of the size of their paycheck.
Ehhh, this is the counter-argument from the employer. That $190K seems highly dubious. I, an at-will employee earn ~60% more via benefits... and let me tell you that's definitely not the same as cash.
And the pet bereavement et al sounds like bargaining chips (no better proof than them being dropped in the negotiation process.)
If NYT goes down on election day I will cancel my subscription. I don't care whether its because of management being unreasonable or employees being unreasonable. Either way, it shows systemic disrespect to their customers.
Wirecutter (also a Times property) went on strike during Black Friday.
Unions can be pretty savage.
Like the one in Chicago that was striking at a hotel, but couldn't get any traction, so for weeks took to blaring bullhorns and sirens outside a children's hospital at 2am to put pressure on the city to put pressure on the hotel.
In the end, the hotel closed and the people who tortured the sick children ended up losing their jobs.
If you're talking about the Cambria, part of the issue there was that both the hotel and the hospital apparently refused to sign complaints. The length of the strike (it went on for almost a year) was a more salient issue than the hours, and a lot of the news coverage was driven by irritable neighbors. Either way: the City Council passed a noise-free zone ordinance as a result, and designated Lurie first.
It's a luxury to be able to do that, though the more of us who do it the more companies must oblige. In that sense, these kinds of strikes are doing us all a favor.
We all indirectly benefit from the pressure tech workers put on the sector in negotiations for higher wages, perks like wfh, additional non-cash comp, etc. too.
I agree, it's only a luxury because it's being taken away so we should support those fighting to keep it when it doesn't make any sense for them to RTO.
It's actual the height of privilege. And likely unrecognized and unappreciated privilege. It really is sad that the divide is so large that the person that can turn down jobs thinks they're the oppressed.
A creative 500 / 503 page saying something about the tech team being on strike and served off the fronting proxy or LB, not the application servers, would be a cool touch.
Striking is not damaging the workplace in any way other than removing employees. Actively misconfiguring equipment is a dismissable offense in pretty much every situation I've ever seen. It can also be considered criminal.
I see your point, but I don't see how that might be damaging. Deleting data would be damaging. Putting a flamboyant rant instead of the home page would be damaging. But this, to my mind, amounts closing the factory gates and writing "Strike" on them with a piece of chalk. Rolling it back would amount to commenting out a line or two in a config file, maybe even.carefully commented for that purpose.
Absent human meddling, computers tend to just chug along doing their work once set up. In fact, I would be surprised if NYT weren't under a code freeze for the event regardless of the strike. So this would be more like shutting down the automated assembly lines on the way out (knowing that they're designed to run with no human operator and are never supposed to be shut down) rather than just leaving.
Deliberately making your employer's services unavailable for anything other than authorized reasons is quite simply sabotage, mischievousness, or any other thing (IANAL) that could be used to describe the act. It's not like someone make a bad configuration file that went unnoticed and pushed to the core routers to bring down the network as a mistake. This was a consciously made act to disrupt the company's services out of spite because employee didn't get something they wanted.
This is also Tech in NYC. The average salary ($190k) is low for that market, so they're asking for an easier work-life balance.
Why they have 600 people is a question for management, no?
Kafka's not exactly hard to set up, especially for simple configs for low event rates. The justification from the link you posted:
> On the other side we have a wide range of services and applications that need
> access to this published content — there are search engines, personalization
> services, feed generators, as well as all the different front-end applications,
> like the website and the native apps. Whenever an asset is published, it should
> be made available to all these systems with very low latency — this is news,
> after all — and without data loss.
If it's low for the market why choose to work at the NYT?
Being a tech worker isn't like being a steelworker where you're kinda screwed if the plant shuts down. You're fully capable of moving job if you're dissatisfied.
> Why they have 600 people is a question for management, no?
It's a question for everyone at the organisation. If you're joining a firm with a massively bloated headcount you need to think if you're going to be there in a year's time when someone in management finally gathers the political capital to slim your department down to sane levels.
It's certainly not a position to start bargaining even more concessions from the hand that's feeding you.
Well let's get into what NYT does: apps and widgets for several platforms, a separate paid "games" product, advertising backend, podcasts on separate apps, visualizations for key stories.. the list goes on. And at a very large scale.
NYT isn't comparable to The Guardian. It's subscription based so the news isn't enough. They have to add cooking, games, The Athletic, etc, across a ton of different apps, feeds, and presentations.
Games is solely a software product sold as a separate add-on subscription. It's almost certainly a profit center at the rates they charge.
I know they have a larger range of services, but are they 20x the breadth of services? Think of what other companies do with 600 tech people and compare what the profitability per employee should be at an tech organisation of such a scale.
Plenty of companies have more engineers for fewer products. Take any game studio, or the Photoshop team. What's your point? Do you have any comparable basis for comparison? The Guardian isn't one.
600 people on a median 200k salary in New York, when including taxes and obligatory benefits is about $150 million dollars a year just in payroll. This is an enormous spend. Unlike a game studio or a software company like Adobe, these people are all operational cost centres, they're not the bread and butter of the firm.
In a true software firm, more capital invested in headcount loosely means more features which is what drives sales. Here you can attribute a per employee profitability. When you hire more employees at a tech firm, the expectation is that you become more profitable.
At a non-tech company like a newspaper, technologists are a cost centre, you invest in technology in order to be more efficient, and hire as few people as possible.
Of course some technologists at the NYT will be profit centres. like those who work on advertising operations and games. But the NYT at its core is a news firm, it makes money on its influence and prestige which is driven by its journalism. Writers and content creators are the profit centres, everything else is a cost of doing business.
"true software firm" this outlook is 20 years out of date. Software is everywhere, and a major part of strategic advantage for companies in almost every industry.
NYT annual revenue is $2.47B (https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nyt/revenue/) with 5,900 employees. $150M/yr, 600 employees for their Tech headcount doesn't seem like a huge proportion.
They have a union. They don't have to "move on." They get to negotiate. That's why they have a union. If more companies had unions, then more companies would be forced to treat their employees like people.
There's no data to support the idea that they have a massively bloated headcount. Just because you don't know the extent of what they do doesn't mean that they aren't doing it anyway.
They have at least 600 employees, get some perspective on just how much that is. It's least $150 million dollars a year in technology payroll alone. They have more technology workers than some major newspapers have in staff alone.
Why do you think that people on 200k should have a union? How does it benefit anyone besides people looking for sinecure jobs?
Unions were needed to combat the powers of corporations where you are in some ways trapped by the relationship; like miners in appalachia who had to fight cartels of mining companies who suppressed their wages; or teachers who have one state employer.
If you're a competent tech worker, you're at the other end of the spectrum. So much so you're generally advised to switch jobs every few years in order to maximise your salary. There's nothing binding you to a particular employer, particularly in New York!
To be honest, if you're a good technologist, you should be looking at making 400k a year in at a trading firm. If you're working for the NYT you're doing it because you're weirdly attracted to the prestige of working there, or you're looking for a cushy job.
If the job is no longer as cushy as you want, have the dignity to leave and find other employment rather than trying to hold your employer hostage.
I wish i was part of a union that could strike in solidarity. Wishing them the best and hoping my colleagues see how effective this is. Under late stage capitalism, wages are going to keep dropping and rent is going to keep climbing: The only solution is direct collective action. Talk unions, talk mutual aid, talk about working together.
I totally support their demand for remote work. NY Times should hire more remote! They could save a lot by hiring offshore without hassle of providing benefits or fighting unions.
Can't get this fetish with on premise work when the code you write is on your machine, the systems you deploy to are in a data centre you don't know the exact location of.
If Linux kernel can be developed remotely spanning over several architectures and huge number of mission critical subsystems, surely your systems having blog posts, comments and such can work as well and if not, you have failed to articulate exactly what needs to be done and by when and under what constraints.
Have you ever done knowledge work with offshore contributors?
It’s challenging to say the least. Even when working between first-world countries speaking English, there’s a host of serious problems. Cultural differences; different expectations; time zone differences.
The New York Times is a glorified blogging platform. Not to long ago it was a Wordpress site.
I'm fully aware of how jaring it is for the median HN reader to hear this, but maintenance of a news website isn't the kind of skilled labour that commands a 250k a year paycheck anymore.
If this was such an easy proposition and there was actually arbitrage available, why haven't they already done it. If the market is to be believed, this would only be a temporary boost if it were even achievable. Demand goes up for offshore workers, their prices start to rise, and the delta closes.
"Management says that the Guild has bogged down negotiations with what the paper sees as outlandish, even illegal, proposals. As Semafor previously reported, the Guild proposed a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news."
"The union, which covers the newsroom's software engineers, product managers, designers and other tech workers, has also put forward language about journalistic integrity and issues around bylines, catch-and-kill, and letters to the editor - which management rejected out-of-hand."
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-new-york-times...