Something seems broken when a group is paid relatively fair wages (https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/...), works 35 hours a week before overtime, and is talking about going on a strike. I don't think that fits with the original purpose of unions.

And, cynically, is anyone even going to notice that they are striking? Seems unlikely, to be honest.

The seniority based structure is effectively a penalty on high achievers. Why should a union member be paid more just because they've worked there longer?

Big tech is a fantastic example of employment working without unions.

Companies choose what they pay their employees (within the bounds of the law) and that might be influenced by what another company pays similar employees.

Imagine somebody at Google saying, “Sorry we won’t pay you more — just found out they pay less at the NYT.”

I think that is the worst of them, so maybe it impacted how I read the rest? And, again, if this is normal for union concerns, so be it.

Precisely why it's always under attack. Corps with simple technical objectives accrue thousands of developers into an org chart so dense it's a productivity black hole: anything to justify keeping wages down for the actual workers.

TLDR: I'm not telling anyone what to do.

Finally, if everyone just leaves their jobs without trying to improve them, won't everyone run out of places to jump to eventually?

It's difficult to parse, because it says that experience and occupational choice does pay a significant role in the gap. But then editorializes and claims that less experience and occupational choice are due to discriminatory issues in the broader culture.

Culture war issues like this are unfalsifiable in either direction and largely reflect the political persuasion of the person making the argument than anything quantifiable.

Here's another example from the American Progress article:

> Women of color disproportionately work in jobs within the service, care, and domestic work sectors—jobs with historically low pay.

This is an empirically verifiable claim.

> This is due to occupational segregation, which is the funneling of women and men into different jobs based on gender and racial norms and expectations

This is an unfalsifiable political claim. Some unknown force, by some unknown mechanism, forces people to make certain choices.

There is no need for a society that forces, top down, every possible occupation to be perfectly split 50/50 by sex. Just let individuals make their own decisions.

In this case, why do we "need" more women coding? Maybe they are doing other work that is just as important and fulfilling and useful to society?

"Half the staff is Jewish" made me laugh though, perhaps closer to true than false. It's funny how people call The New Yorker the pinnacle of privilege as a writer-type, and their staff writer team is more diverse than just about any other East Coast bigwig outlet.

What are you telling them to invest in?

Pretty sure limited liability exists in every 'totally free market' you are pointing to. That isnt really a free market, that's a government giving an enormous generous power to owners that is kind of a legal oddity.

Why does the owner of a corporation not have to pay for damages? Why is it limited to the assets of the corporation?

I wonder how careful companies would be if the owners and stockholders could lose their entire fortune and go into personal debt when they are caught poisoning the air that affects 500,000 people.

I conducted around 500 interviews at my last company at all stages: initial screen, technical, architectural, etc. There were simply far more white men applying. (And this is in Atlanta where we have a highly bimodal racial distribution.)

It wasn't like we weren't bending over backwards to attract diverse candidates. I personally went to HBCUs on outreach programs, and there were dozens of annual Girls / Women Who Code programs and partnerships that other folks on my team participated in.

I was once even told I couldn't recommend someone for a role because they weren't diverse.

Look to undergraduate enrollment.

lower tier productivity engineers are being filtered out continuously, and being replaced by higher productivity new grads with chatGPT types.

same as professional atheletes (like olympic athletes) retire rather quickly and do something else (coaching, brand advertising, etc).

it only limits as a Cartel to limit the supply of new doctors (and keep foreign licensed doctors away from the market) - this is typical cartel behavior, not union

You don't make money, but the union can always cave, and then you are right back at your old job.

Its not like quitting your job, where if it doesn't work out you are screwed.

Does the NYT newsroom generally report from a perspective that unions are good and we ought to have more of them? I don't see how you could argue otherwise.

Editorial Review: Sep 2018

The NYT's slant has shifted post 2020.

They broadly support capitalism, broadly support imperial military power, broadly do not support single payer health care, broadly do not support nationalization of industry, oppose criminal justice reform, oppose upzoning, oppose transit, oppose large tax hikes, and are active in the eradication of minorities.

Biden shut down a major labor strike, he expanded drilling for oil, he made it easier for states to medically and socially discriminate against trans people, he's pumped up the police, and he's continuously armed a state accused of genocide. Biden has put forth one of the most restrictive border policies we've ever had, and kept many trump era policies. The democrats also had the opportunity, years ago, to permanently secure abortion access and chose not to. They have by and large expanded the carceral state (and coined the concept of super predators to ensure Black people remained incarcerated.)

Also, and this might be a shock, democrats are anti gun, while many many leftists believe in gun ownership. (Karl Marx, Martin Luther king Jr., Malcom X, etc were all believers in individual ownership of firearms.)

Leftists generally believe in nationalization, limiting corporate and executive power (or eliminating it), social housing, socialized medicine, free food and water, elimination of oil drilling, trains, dense urban areas, mutual aid, "wellbeing for all", free education, free childcare, etc.

I've never once seen a Democrat say that we should abolish private property. If you think democrats are left wing you simply don't understand what left wing means.

> Just because other countries are withering away under socialism

on the topic of preposterous things to claim...

The only explanations I can rationalize is that management isnt aware of the pay difference, or they are aware but they're more sexist than they are greedy.

Last recession was 2008 and job prospects for a software dev are much worse now compared to then. Go back further and it was dotcom bust a little more than 20 years ago.

https://www.axios.com/2024/09/10/nyt-tech-union-strike-vote

> The New York Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 staffers, on Tuesday voted to authorize a strike in protest of stalled contract negotiations with The Times' management, sources confirmed to Axios.

I haven't found anything else. While stalled contract negotiations would be reasonable ("we're not going to work without a contract"), it appears that so far those negotiations aren't public for what it is that they want.

...

> I'd consider lowering executive compensation as well.

The CEO has a total compensation package of about $10M per year. Lets slash that to $4M (average for the size of the company of NYT is $8M - so half of what a CEO would get somewhere else) and divide that $6M up between 600 tech workers and they got a $10k pay raise. If this to be divided between all the workers for NYT, it's a $1k pay raise.

While we can bemoan the amounts that CEOs get, slashing the salaries will not often produce significant increases for the rest of the workers.

What harsh working conditions are they working under that makes their situation so untenable at NYT but aren't willing to go looking for better conditions elsewhere?

the best engineers I know have been coding since middle school and by the college graduation have 10+ experience coding at internationally competitive level.

this is comparable to medical profession.

if you ever meet an exceptionally good engineer - just ask him for how many years has he been coding? plenty will say at least high school if not earlier - all the way till their PhD that makes it two decades of learning+coding+improving.

as for model: I am anti union and anti-cartel. Just free market as it works in the silicon valley. The competition is actually good, even from offshore workers - because it forces productivity to increase and constantly filters out the bottom ranks of the profession - they leave coding to something they are more capable of: people management, product management, program management, etc etc

I presume you support free markets, so I'm surprised that supply and demand never crossed your mind as the reason for high tech salaries.

Professional athletes, actors, and screenwriters enjoy both high salaries and union protections.

> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary

It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.

If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.

Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.

Things like making sure that AI isn't used in certain capacities to reduce the staff size wouldn't be unreasonable.

As of yet, the contents of the negotiation aren't public - so we can only guess.

In the meantime, the idea that everyone should be able to make Big Tech wages ignores the reality that most companies aren't Big Tech and have a revenue per employee that is a small fraction of it... and are running on much slimmer profit margins.

In the world outside of petty dictatorships, though, left/right determination is made on the basis of alignment with various policies and philosophies -- so increasingly, people within the US are losing credibility when it comes to any conversation about left/right politics.

I think leftists are basically in favor of unions in the US because leftists are generally in favor of labor protections, and unions are the best we can get inside the capitalist system. More extreme leftists might prefer some kind of socialist system, but that’s not on the table in America really.

Liberals are, of course, typically market oriented (that’s what liberal economics are). A liberal point of view would be “of course people have a basic right to associate with people of their choosing, negotiate contracts, and a union is just a vehicle for doing that.”

A union is about as much collectivism as a liberal can stomach, more of a stop-gap for a leftist.

Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/eq...

If companies on average knew who the 'good engineers' were, they wouldn't be laid off in the first place. (Unless the layoffs are really big).

The recruitment pipe is so convoluted nowadays that connections and recommendations are way more important than they used to be. Skills not so much.

For two, if you have so settled your view that you won't take any criticism or advice, why bother engaging in discussion? You are actively harmful to the public discourse, at this point. No?

I'm sympathetic in thinking someone is stalling in bad faith. But bad faith denouncing of their seriousness is not good, either. :(

It's true playing companies off each other isn't possible anymore. Switching jobs use to be a formula for a high rate.

But switching roles allowed people to grow and work on new and different tech. Leaving toxic situations was possible. Under the New York times union model you need to suck up the toxic environment.

The other issue is skills rot. The longer you stay in the same role the more the rot grows. At some point you can't find another role so you have to setup silos and protect the system you are working under from change. If someone tries to move your crystal report to power bi you've got to out politically muscle the request or you will be fired. The union may step in and protect you but can't forever.

I think that's a really weak claim. Journalism has had significantly reduced revenues in the late 2000s through today due to the rise of tech platforms that let people learn about what's happening in the world for free online. Both print and online newspaper combined revenue has been wiped back to the 1950s [1], for example. Journalists covering, say, election politics have no more conflict of interest than any other American. But they definitely have more of a conflict of interest covering tech than other Americans! For most Americans, tech has largely contributed to economic improvements: you can buy more advanced products for less inflation-adjusted money, pretty much every year. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and you can talk to your lights and tell them to turn off while you're lying in bed. For journalists, though, tech has been devastating.

You might try to claim that because journalists don't set their own salaries, somehow this removes the conflict of interest. But that implies journalists are incredibly stupid. You can't work in a vastly diminishing field and not realize that it's going to depress your salary and job opportunities over time, regardless of whether you set the salary or not: there's just vastly less money to go around. And that's what tech has done to traditional journalism.

And the NYT is not immune. While it's doing better than its peers (many of whom have gone out of business), it's not doing well: it's experienced approximately zero market growth since its peak in 2002 over twenty years ago, when shares traded for about $48. Today, they trade for $52. And working at the only institution in your field that hasn't experienced total collapse, but has achieved no growth in 20+ years, is obviously going to color your views on the sector that did that to your field.

1: https://www.statista.com/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-rev...

The thing I think that is highly ironic is that a huge reason you are "enamored with big tech pay packages" is that they're enormous, and a huge reason they're enormous is they sucked up a ton of the revenue that used to go to newspapers.

I think fair equity grants are a great idea, but as another commenter said I don't see why this should in any way be specific to the tech team. What I think is just darn right silly is to compare compensation packages at any newspaper with big tech. It's simply unrealistic to think that there is enough money at other companies to pay those extremely high salaries.

Here's a very easy exercise for you: I haven't looked it up, but I'd be definitely willing to bet per-employee average compensation at, say, Google or Facebook is higher than per-employee revenue at the NYT.

If workers fear mass layoffs, going on strike is a bad idea. Instead, in such a situation the union should attempt to make an agreement with the employer of the kind "no salary increase (as it would be appropriate in consideration of the inflation), but job security for the next years".

The pay gap as a systemic issue (for equal work for equal hours with equal qualifications) has been debunked a thousand times over. But while it's certainly possible (likely?) that some individual companies have a racially or gender-driven pay gap, it's a far stretch to assume that the NYT is one of them.

Equality of opportunity is good, giving people a leg up early in their lives when they've been disadvantaged, regardless of their race or gender, is good. "Equity" for the sake of it is racist.

- african americans are statistically more likely to originate from lower on socio economic ladder than, say, asian americans

Thus when you get a bunch of job applicants, you might get an asian american with a Yale degree (James) and an african american with a community college degree (John). Affirmative action or other DEI pressures might force you to hire both James and John, but James will probably be able to outperform John due to higher initial degree of education. Furthermore, James may have had parents who networked and ensured he got good internships and experience growing up while John didn't have that opportunity.

So it's not that the company is offering John a "dog job", it's just, James's capacity to perform in current role and take on new responsibilities is at a higher initial state than John's, so it's not unthinkable he would climb corporate ladder faster than John given those initial advantages. Pay gap is a natural consequence that follows.

if above demographics aren't getting CS majors (or whatever other educational equivalent), there isn't much prospective employers can do about it

Among the people who are qualified for the position, they are prohibited by law from considering race or gender or other protected characteristics when making a hiring decision.

Everybody has their perspective.

I'd be curious to see an analysis of downvoted comments in political threads and what their general ideological bent was.

Either way: it is not in fact a given that customers are obliged by solidarity to boycott businesses dealing with strikes.

Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.

my primary observation is that the world NY Times was formed or floated shares in didn't have the same shareholder tolerances that exist now

tech companies are controlled by one or two key founders, which wouldn't fly at one point, with rampant dilution

they rely on the appetite of the market, and in some other risk on stock markets around the world, even more extremes are seen to fit the appetite of the market

nobody is suggesting its a free lunch, if the market tolerates it then its available to attract talent competitively, or for talent to collectively bargain to extract that value

with the dilution not occurring all at once, I bet you’d be surprised what shareholders would tolerate

https://www.nytco.com/2023-new-york-times-diversity-and-incl...

The my don’t complain about tech being non-diverse, they report that it is non-diverse - which is true.

> Adjusted operating profit margin (adjusted operating profit expressed as a percentage of revenues) increased to 16.1% in 2023, compared with 15.1% in 2022.

You might also look into the NYT's recent history of stock buybacks while denying raises to their lowest-paid employees. The money is there.

It's not straightforward as that. In Europe, or at least in countries that are relevant "subsistence agriculture" had stopped being a significant thing centuries before the industrial revolution (outside of relatively rare periods of very bad weather).

By the 1800s there were generally too many people and not enough land (the real problem short term was that land being very unequally distributed and landhorders preferring to use it for less labor intense and more profitable purposes and significantly reducing the amount of "common land" available). Productivity was also increasing meaning there was a lower demand for labor. But that's the opposite of subsistence agriculture.

However it's not really that obvious that conditions for factory workers were meaningfully better than they would have been 50-100 years earlier until at least the mid 19th century or so when the labor market became more balanced and workers permitted to organize to some extent without the fear of extreme repression).

In most extreme cases like the Great Famine in Ireland the outcome was the opposite. There was enough food (or at least enough to significantly reduce the death toll) it's just that local people couldn't afford it and it was shipped off to feed the workers in the more industrialized parts of UK. That period probably marked the heyday of 'free market' and laissez-faire ideologies.

Particularly entertaining is when apologists for the British Empire justify starvation events in Ireland and India. Particularly in Ireland when one of the peak famine years was a year of record exports of meat and wheat. The British government was of course, helpless to do much - they were concerned about the moral hazard of handing out food to dying people.

The government has intricate voting protections for organized capital: oversight of the voting process with minority shareholder rights, stringent rules for the board and corporate governance, allowed cross-company collusion through mergers with very little checks, especially if the merger crosses industry lines. And they get extreme protection from liabilities for damages they cause.

For organized labor there is little in right-to-work states: "minority" voter rights that say anyone can defect from the majority, in many right to work states the majority can't even freely negotiate a contract that says new hires will be bound to the voting process (each new hire can defect), most of the voting rules there just make things almost impossible to organize as a whole rather than protecting the equivalent minority stakeholders, and collusion between unions isn't possible in the same way due to federal laws making secondary strikes illegal.

Organized capital gets a great structure to collaborate together that would be illegal if they were owners of separate businesses, workers get forcefully atomized even if they try and set up the organization through a freely negotiated contract (due to freely negotiated contracts not being able to set terms for new hires, through the outlawing of "Union Security Agreements" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_security_agreement). So things like dues don't have to be paid by new hires but the get the protections, then the collective action free-rider problem takes over and eventually dues for funding things like support during strikes dries up.

Imagine if new shareholders who bought some shares through an existing holder didn't have to be bound by the share-majority vote and could just sandbag mergers etc. by not agreeing to go through with it for their portion of the shares and they couldn't be forced to through the normal state collective action enforcement mechanisms that shareholders today all enjoy.

it was not the industrial revolution that ended either starvation or slavery

> Unions are not similar to companies because they don't compete on the free market. For this reason, much like all state-funded institutions, unions are much more prone to corruption.

Firstly, unions are not state-funded institutions, and secondly, it seems you don't understand how unions function.

i get why people have this kneejerk reaction about "union good" because it is good... for the union members... and having a middle class in society is definitely good. aesthetically, at least-- i couldn't really tell you why from first principles, but it does just seem better, intuitively. but just because we all hate "capitalism" now doesn't mean we should forget that shit being so cheap on amazon is actually a good we all can enjoy, including guild-i-mean-union members!

it's sad that i feel the need to point out that i am pro-labor (whatever that means), pro-the-little-guys, fuck billionaires, etc. because i dared say anything negative about a protected class... that's just a fact of life in the 2020s i guess... i just think this stuff is all WAY more subtle than people give it credit for, and that is part of what gives bad actors carte blanche to... act badly... and that is something everyone should be against, no matter how red their favorite book is.

Found on the front page of the NYT website, just now, after a few seconds of skimming:

  Kathleen Kingsbury
  The Question Kamala Harris Couldn’t Answer

Obviously not a leftist bias.

This was on the front page a couple of weeks ago

Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming Harris has flip-flopped on progressive policies.

No, it isn't, and it's not remotely close.

The median US voter is far more left wing than you would know from politics and media. Most voters actually support an arms embargo vs Israel, support universal healthcare, support action on climate change, want an end to the prison industrial complex, want minimum wage increases, gun control, an end to predatory college costs and loans, stronger worker's rights, reproductive rights, cannabis legalization, reduction in militarism, affordable housing, etc.

The NYT is central to fooling these "median voters" into supporting politicians and parties that have absolutely no intention of supporting genuine left wing action.

To say the NYT supports unions in general is to ignore very recent history, such as their coverage of Amazon and Starbucks union efforts. You also need to ignore a very very long and well described slant against left wing causes in general. Here, have a nice digestible Chomsky piece from nearly 30 years ago: https://chomsky.info/199710__/

That isn't true at all. You're probably thinking of the NYT 20 years ago, under the Bush administration. Do you read the newspaper, or are you parroting talking points? I used to subscribe until the blatantly conservative bias became overwhelming.

> They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing

Didn't they just report a 13.3% increase in YoY profits on their most recent financial quarter? Your chart shows a company with healthy growth for several years running. A billion dollars in profit last year and on track to do it again this year isn't "tenuous".

> They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing

Why does your link say that their profit is up 60%(!) since 2020?

-----

edit: tbh, I think people think the NYT is left-wing only because they associate NYC with Jewish people, and they're still steeped in conspiracy theories of "Judeobolshevism." So I guess that's on the Dreyfus affair (through Ezra Pound, Eustace Mullins and the Birchers.)

The NYT is a paper owned by a rich family that has always praised every dictator the CIA has praised, and passed on any lie they were asked to.

The politics of the median voter in the US is not relevant for this discussion.

There might be exceptions, and with companies that are cash-strapped (or smaller companies in general) the situation might be different.

But for big companies, it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck.

But presumably NYTimes doesn't employ that many people, and even fewer tech workers

(My kid brother is a labor person, so really I'm just venting some stuff here to keep it from coming up at Thanksgiving).

I was just pushing back against using "big tech comp packages" as some sort of baseline for what unions should be pushing for. It is completely unrealistic and people who say stuff like this hurt their own cause by not living in reality.

Really telling that the NYT's attempt to please everyone has pleased almost no one, though. Progressives are angry that hate groups get airtime in the name of "objectivity". Conservatives still think it's a left-wing paper and won't read it. Liberal centrists are playing Wordle?

Drug addicts and alcoholics often are malnourished - not because food is withheld from them, but because they are more interested in drugs and alcohol than food. The same goes for seriously ill people.

Edit: The parent appears to have committed the cardinal sin of believing CNN, which made this claim here[0], but cited a CDC report[1] does not support the assertion. I went looking for the underlying NCHS data, but couldn't find it.

[0]https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/health/nutritional-deficiency... [1]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr031.pdf

"Corporate greed" is a fun slogan, but means nothing in reality. In the few areas where the government is exploiting its own natural resources (instead of outsiders), the working and living conditions are not inherently better. If it worked that way, all of the middle east and large areas of Africa wouldn't be so destitute.

Also, Washington State is completely controlled by the Democrats - all three branches of the state government. Where are the charging stations? What about the other Democrat run states?

Do you know of any private company that moves that slowly?

I don't think it took years and $45 billion for Musk to install a national network of charging stations. Heck, even the local supermarket put in their own charging station.

Right around this time 8 years ago, the election was over... in the media. Clinton won, trump didn't, in like September of 2016. Like, the world was collectively shocked. Because, according to the media, trump was cooked.

How does that square?

These are as a category unstable political situations and it is vanishingly few who manage to develop their way out of it. More common is descent into further chaos, with major powers standing by to ensure that it does not disrupt resource extraction.

I'm not saying there's no corruption in the public sector. I'm saying it's not a given that it's greater than in the private sector, and asking for comparative data.

In that the media vastly prefered her over Trump, it was because she was pro-establishment and better aligned with corporate interests, not because she was economically to his left. The case of Warren and Sanders (where famously the media was happy to compare Sanders to Trump, reinforcing the idea that their opposition to Trump is not due to his right-wing economic policies) as well as the comparison to previous Democratic candidates is evidence I think is much more compelling than the assumption of leftwing/rightwing partisanship.