> 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.
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.