[HN Gopher] New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize...
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New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
Author : ericnkatz
Score : 492 points
Date : 2024-09-10 18:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| gamepsys wrote:
| This could be a blueprint for how other tech departments
| unionize, but I suspect NYT is a unique case because of their
| politics. Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look
| anti-union inside their own house? This gives the workers more
| leverage than they would otherwise have in other companies.
|
| In any of the places I worked at in the past an anti-union
| consulting firm would have been called in to bust things up
| before it ever got this far.
| neaden wrote:
| "Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look anti-
| union inside their own house?" - The NYTimes isn't left wing
| and being anti-union is entirely within their wheelhouse. Now
| they won't come out and say "We don't like unions" all their
| issues will of course be why this specific union isn't a good
| idea at this specific time, but they'd never willingly accept a
| union unless they really don't think they have a choice.
| nickff wrote:
| Perhaps the NYT isn't left-wing in a global context, and it
| is likely centrist in New York City, but it is definitely to
| the left of the median US voter. They're probably anti-union
| in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing,
| and unions in New York have a history of squeezing their
| employers out of business.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-
| times...
| uoaei wrote:
| Public opinion has little bearing on the decisions that NYT
| makes, until a critical threshold is passed. The aim of the
| union is to bring that critical threshold of displeasure
| into focus and to approach it until NYT relents.
|
| The politics of the median voter in the US is not relevant
| for this discussion.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The NYT isn't left-wing in any context, other than one a
| segment of the US inherited from Glenn Beck some time in
| the 90s. It is an establishment paper, and energetically
| capitalist and interventionist.
|
| > 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.
| nickff wrote:
| They've suffered a massive contraction in revenue and
| already had to cut back hugely; you're ignoring that, and
| focusing on the bounce-back.
| pessimizer wrote:
| So what you're saying is that the NYT was doing badly,
| then had a massive bounce-back. I am supposed to ignore
| the bounce-back, and accept the contraction that ended at
| least a half decade ago as an explanation for what is
| happening today. Why would I do this?
| Hasu wrote:
| > Perhaps the NYT isn't left-wing in a global context, and
| it is likely centrist in New York City, but it is
| definitely to the left of the median US voter.
|
| 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".
| nickff wrote:
| According to this source, NYT Opinion is "Left", and NYT
| News is "Lean Left", and I think their ratings seem
| relatively well-calibrated:
| https://www.allsides.com/blog/see-our-updated-bias-
| rating-ab...
|
| You can't just look at results over the last four years
| when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old.
| They've had massive declines in recent years, which
| caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to
| try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.
| Hasu wrote:
| Their methodology is literally, "We didn't like the
| results we got so we assumed they were wrong and ignored
| them."
|
| > Surprisingly, ABC News was rated Lean Right (1.18) in
| the July 2024 Blind Bias Survey. A total of 478
| respondents rated ABC. This rating differed from
| AllSides' current rating of Lean Left (-2.40) at the
| time, and triggered the Aug. 2024 Editorial Review.
|
| > AllSides speculates this outlier response is because
| the survey content was collected on July 15 and 18, 2024,
| which were just days after the July 14 assassination
| attempt of Donald Trump.
|
| > The Lean Right rating was incorporated into the final
| rating for ABC News, but was weighted less to account for
| outlier conditions.
|
| This is literally just putting your foot on the numbers
| to make it show what you want - the network showed more
| right-leaning content and they said, "Well that doesn't
| count." Why doesn't it count?
|
| Look at the increasing number of criticisms of Times
| coverage from the Left. Look at their trajectory since
| the Cotton editorial. Look at how they're covering this
| election. It's not a left wing paper, under A.G.
| Sulzberger.
|
| > You can't just look at results over the last four years
| when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old.
| They've had massive declines in recent years, which
| caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to
| try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.
|
| They had massive declines from the mid-oughts to 2018 in
| line with the rest of the newspaper industry. They've
| reinvented themselves as a tech media company and are on
| a better track now, so it makes sense that the employees
| who made that happen want the same union protections as
| the rest of the employees of the newspaper!
|
| They also were never doing so badly that they weren't
| still making millions of dollars in profit, which I'm not
| willing to call "tenuous" for a newspaper that's 172
| years old.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| It's wild how few people in this thread are unaware of
| the massive blowback the NYT has faced from the left, but
| I guess most people are generally not in sync with the
| left to begin with :P
|
| 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?
| mandmandam wrote:
| > it is definitely to the left of the median US voter.
|
| 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__/
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| See also: the NYT's coverage of trans issues, which in
| recent years has tried to both-sides the topic in a way
| that gives fundamentalist hate groups equal oxygen as the
| fucking APA. No self-respecting leftist publication is
| handing the mic to Mumsnet users and conversion therapy
| advocates. (Contrast that to the New Yorker, which is
| hardly a commie rag and yet has been unambiguously
| progressive on that front, among others.)
|
| An apt quote from Pynchon's _Bleeding Edge_ , which was
| published in 2013 but set in 2001:
|
| > How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to
| be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing
| newspaper?
| hollerith wrote:
| And the main problem with Stalin was that he wasn't
| leftist enough, eh?
| mandmandam wrote:
| Thank you for exemplifying my point.
|
| There's _nothing_ particularly radical about wanting more
| fair healthcare, labor rights, education, housing etc.
|
| As I pointed out, the _majority_ of Americans want those
| things. It 's pretty basic human decency, empathy,
| efficiency, etc.
|
| And yet, when you raise these _majority_ viewpoints,
| someone pops up from behind a Bush to call you
| 'tankie'/'commie'/'literally Stalin'. That's not an
| accident. There are some people who like things the way
| thay are, and about 6 of those people own 90% of all
| media.
|
| We spent over 8 trillion dollars (!) in the Middle East,
| murdering millions, all based on lies; and now our
| Democrat candidate is overjoyed to get endorsements from
| the architects of those wars... At _every_ stage, from
| plotting to image rehabilitation, from Afghanistan to
| Iraq to Syria to Lebanon to Yemen, etc, to Gaza, the NYT
| was with those warmongers all the way.
|
| They're not left. Never were.
| seneca wrote:
| > The NYTimes isn't left wing
|
| Allsides media bias rating for NYT is lean left[1], a -2.2
| with -6 as the most extreme and 0 as neutral. Rating is left
| for their opinion section[2], a -4.
|
| 1. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times
|
| 2. https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times-
| opinion-...
| TylerE wrote:
| From that page:
|
| Editorial Review: Sep 2018
|
| The NYT's slant has shifted post 2020.
| norir wrote:
| I don't fully agree with how neutral is defined. The US has
| always been a right leaning country for better and worse. I
| might be able to agree with Allsides on a relative scale
| but I think all corporate media has a right leaning bias
| relative to what one would expect from non-profit media.
| Since very few people regularly consume non-profit media,
| it is not surprising to me that the NYTimes appears on the
| left even though I do not agree that it is on an absolute
| scale.
| mc32 wrote:
| The NYT has been liberal since I can remember; however, up
| until relatively recent decades, it was respected by
| conservatives as well as liberals. Now it reflects liberal
| and progressive povs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've always thought of NYT as pretty liberal too. Not
| leftist, those are two totally different philosophies. In
| the case of union organizing, they might be vaguely on the
| same side, but only after jumping through a couple hoops.
|
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| On the other hand I have recently seen George W. Bush being
| described as a _progressive_ because he wouldn 't say who
| he's voting for. Left/right determination seems to be made
| purely on loyalty to a single individual in today's US
| politics. So if that's where we're at, NYT is liberal
| because it won't endorse Trump. That's fine, but let's just
| say that.
|
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| The neocon thing is weird. Bernie and others used to
| compare Cheney with pretty unsavory characters in
| history, but now he's lauded by progressives. This shit
| is getting weird. Some weird realignment is happening
| where former enemies are bedfellows now with a new enemy.
| In very loose terms, Republicans are subverting previous
| Democratic issues and the Democrats are subverting
| previous neocon issues. The Dems now get most of "big
| money", new Republicans are now the populists. Broad
| strokes of course, but that's how it's shaping up.
|
| If anyone remembers, in the eighties the Repubs were into
| importing foreign labor (i.e. cheap; hence "no uvas") and
| Bernie used to protest against dumping refugees in his
| state. This has reversed!
| klyrs wrote:
| I haven't seen Cheney being lauded for anything other
| than maintaining his stand against somebody he has been
| calling a criminal, coward, and worse for years. I
| haven't seen a single democrat show excitement over
| policies supported by Cheney, except when he says that
| the law should apply to Trump as well as the rest of us.
| So, again, what you're calling weird is largely a result
| of loyalty to a person instead of actual policies.
|
| And, yes, the world remembers Bernie's about-face on
| policy -- there's been quite a lot (e.g., [1]) written on
| the topic. But it's pretty normal for politicians and
| even political parties to change their minds in issues
| over a span of time as long as Bernie's career. This
| should be _expected_ of politicians: they _should_ be
| willing to change their minds and adapt their policies to
| new facts gained over time. Moreover, they exist to
| represent We The People, so when we change _our_
| collective minds, politicians who fail to keep up are
| replaced! Bernie is still around despite his change of
| heart precisely because it followed that of his
| constituency.
|
| Do you remember when Theodore Roosevelt ran on the
| Progressive Party ticket? That party, founded by a
| lesbian, was eventually folded back into the mainstream
| Republican party back when Democrats were conservatives.
| There's nothing weird about parties and politicians
| changing their minds on stuff.
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
| politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b...
| mc32 wrote:
| Well, for one Kamala herself said she was proud to be
| endorsed by Dick, one previously deemed the be(s)te noir
| of the left.
| klyrs wrote:
| That's entirely in line with how I characterized the
| Democratic response to Cheney's endorsement. They still
| don't like him, but Democratic policy has been to reach
| across the aisle for most if not all of my lifetime -- so
| they'll accept that endorsement with aplomb.
| Clubber wrote:
| Politics makes strange bedfellows.
|
| >Cheney with pretty unsavory characters in history, but
| now he's lauded by progressives. This shit is getting
| weird.
|
| We've always been at war with Eurasia.
|
| Ok I'm done with the cliches.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Some weird realignment is happening where former
| enemies are bedfellows now with a new enemy. In very
| loose terms, Republicans are subverting previous
| Democratic issues and the Democrats are subverting
| previous neocon issues. The Dems now get most of "big
| money", new Republicans are now the populists. Broad
| strokes of course, but that's how it's shaping up.
|
| People underestimated how many Bernie Sanders supporters
| switched to Trump when he dropped out in the 2016
| election. Some of us have been seeing this realignment
| coming for that long.
| smaudet wrote:
| > an anti-union consulting firm
|
| Hmm. Maybe an anti-anti-union consulting firm is a business
| opportunity?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Who would be purchasing its services?
|
| The only obvious customer would be a union, and they already
| provide that service themselves.
| diggan wrote:
| Or, we can use what worked in the past without involving for-
| profit enterprises: grassroots movements
|
| Easier to align people when you remove the whole troublesome
| "money" part. Question is how to motivate Americans to work
| together if not for money?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Unions sometimes hire on third party organizations to help
| them organize, I don't think they are specifically
| specialized against anti-union consulting firms, but I bet
| that's part of it.
| dopylitty wrote:
| NYT is a pretty solidly right wing organization (eg [1] and
| [2]) like most for profit media outfits in the US. I suspect
| they'll react like any other for profit business. Previous
| leaks have shown this to be the case [0][3]
|
| 0:https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/leaked-
| message...
|
| 1: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-boudin-
| recall-...
|
| 2:https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-battle-
| ove...
|
| 3:https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-
| union-...
| hungie wrote:
| The NYT is not a left wing organization. It aligns, mostly,
| with a centrist Democrat politically. That position puts it
| pretty center right on the global scale.
|
| A left wing paper would typically be pretty anti capitalist,
| anti imperial, etc. which the NYT is definitely not.
|
| This is a global forum, it's important to remember that while
| the democrats in the US are called "the left" there, they
| really _really_ are not a left wing party.
| adw wrote:
| "Center right" is if anything underselling it. The NYT is to
| the right of, for example, the Financial Times.
| hungie wrote:
| And yet, downvotes. I feel like it's pretty objective that
| NYT isn't leftist in any meaningful way.
| walrushunter wrote:
| The Democrats are most definitely leftwing. What a
| preposterous thing to claim. Just because other countries are
| withering away under socialism, doesn't suddenly make the
| Dems right wing.
| slater wrote:
| No. By international political standards, the Democratic
| Party is at best centrist.
|
| > Just because other countries are withering away under
| socialism
|
| on the topic of preposterous things to claim...
| mint2 wrote:
| Regardless of what infographic makers declare, the NYT newsroom
| is not "left" leaning.
|
| Their coverage is much more complicated than left vs right, but
| one theme is they don't question the loudest narratives, and
| they hold grudges when they perceive someone to not give them
| enough access.
|
| The right tends to be louder and more uniform and persistent in
| messaging, so that coloring often gets unconsciously added to
| articles rather than the journalists taking a step back and
| analyzing the whole picture.
|
| It's the quick/lazy way to write stories after all, and
| journalists have deadlines. The author may be left leaning and
| some of that may even show, but a little left leaning flavor
| doesn't mask that it's based on the right's take.
|
| The choice of coverage also is very herd like, not left or
| right.
|
| The NYT also goes out of the way to appear fair and balanced,
| trying to find the "average" in stories. But as anyone but the
| NYT knows, averages are skewed easily.
| segasaturn wrote:
| It's not left vs. right, it's establishment vs. anti-
| establishment. New York Times was a major cheerleader for the
| illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and uncritically repeated
| falsehoods from George W. Bush, who is not exactly a leftist
| hero.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| It also was unquestioningly supportive of any and all covid
| NPI's. NYT was one of the major publications that would
| routinely report the "covid kill rate" at like 4% despite
| massive data suggesting it was at least one or two orders
| of magnitude off depending on the age bracket.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| Well here's a challenge for you, we can easily put your
| viewpoint to the test:
|
| Go on the NYT website right now and find me a single article
| currently on the front page that's negative about leftist
| policies or politicians, or a single article that's positive
| about rightist policies or politicians.
|
| I bet you can't find any.
|
| Repeat this experiment, any minute, any hour, any day, any
| year, for the last 10 years, and you will get the same exact
| results.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Just a quick look, here's one that plays into the
| mainstream narrative that Hamas is hiding out in hospitals
| and schools and therefore it's understandable to bomb them:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/world/middleeast/airstri
| k...
| ImJamal wrote:
| Was that on the front page? I just checked and couldn't
| find it there.
| consteval wrote:
| Does that make a difference or are y'all just constantly
| moving goalposts to fuel the narrative that media is
| inherently left-leaning?
|
| Because it's really not - especially not in the US. Go
| look through their articles. How many serve corporate
| interests? How many are fundamentally ultra-capitalists?
|
| You guys act like these are commies. No, they're right-
| leaning, just not far right insane wackos (Fox News).
| You're right, they're not out here questioning how black
| Kamala is. No, that absolutely does not make them left
| wing.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > ...to fuel the narrative that media is inherently left-
| leaning?
|
| 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?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| A big part of why Clinton won in the media while her
| rivals didn't is because she was the _least_ left-leaning
| Democrat president candidate since, well, Clinton.
| Clinton 's' vast corporate support is because she would
| lean to the right of the average American on most
| economic issues and was business as usual, in vast
| opposition to her rival.
|
| Compare for example media treatment of Sanders or even
| Warren when he opposed her and you can see that it's not
| her leftist tendencies that made her win in the media.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > Compare for example media treatment of Sanders or even
| Warren when he opposed her and you can see that it's not
| her leftist tendencies that made her win in the media.
|
| Respectfully I don't accept your premise here. You're
| saying she was center of left? But still "left", as it
| were? And you agree the media crowned her king months
| before the election?
|
| So the media ordained her the winner. You do agree or you
| do not?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I am saying that the media was enamored with her because
| she represented a shift rightwards compared to her
| predecessors, and that her campaign successfully shifted
| the leftmost acceptable economic policies to be to the
| right of the electorate.
|
| 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.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > ... her campaign successfully shifted the leftmost
| acceptable economic policies to be to the right of the
| electorate.
|
| Huh. If that were true she would have won. So it can't be
| true. Unless your claim is "the right was too far right"
| in which case your "right-of-the-electorate" cannot be
| mathematically true.
|
| Were you trying to make a different point? The current
| one doesn't hold water.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| It was, but it's fallen off at this point. Now most of
| the front page and editorial is about the US presidential
| debate that is about to happen, the coverage of which
| looks like any other mainstream establishment news
| publication in the US.
|
| Compare that to an actual leftist publication like The
| Nation, where the second most popular article is
| literally about the enduring legacy of Marx's Capital
| (lol): https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wendy-
| brown-marx-c...
|
| Or over at Jacobin where this is the top story:
| https://jacobin.com/2024/09/ruwa-romman-dnc-speech-
| palestine
| golergka wrote:
| That's just a fact, its not a matter of opinion or
| leaning.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Regardless of whether or not Hamas is hiding out amongst
| civilians, those civilians are still entitled to human
| rights protections under international law. The comment
| section on that article says it all; a bunch of people
| largely agreeing that it's the Palestinians fault they
| are getting killed in their shelters.
|
| But that is tangential to the discussion in this thread,
| which is that the NY Times is leftist. It's not. It,
| along with most of it's readership, is your typical
| establishment news organization in the US. Nothing
| status-quo shaking coming out of the NY Times.
|
| Here's a quick search on how a leftist publication
| covered something like the bombing of al-Shifa hospital:
| https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-gaza-
| propagan...
| aguaviva wrote:
| It's a fact that they've been using hospitals for non-
| medical purposes to some extent.
|
| However, it's also a fact that the Israeli government has
| been attempting to milk these finds for far more than
| they're worth, to an extent beyond embellishment and
| closer to outright fabrication (c.f. the alleged "command
| center" under al-Shifa, the Hamas "shift schedule" that
| was really just an ordinary Arabic calendar, and so on).
|
| In short: yes Hamas is bad, and all that. But for its own
| part, the Israeli government never seems to miss an
| opportunity to leverage available circumstances to
| undermine its own credibility.
| relaxing wrote:
| Ross Douthat is still employed so your assertion falls flat
| on its face.
|
| Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming Harris
| has flip-flopped on progressive policies.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > Ross Douthat is still employed so your assertion falls
| flat on its face.
|
| I have no idea who that is.
|
| > Aside from that, right now I see an item claiming
| Harris has flip-flopped on progressive policies.
|
| I have no idea if this is true. Has she? Who is the
| authority on that?
| relaxing wrote:
| Then go read the NYT front page and find out? He's always
| there because he's pure clickbait.
|
| Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. "Flip flop" is an
| insult in politics.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Uh, no? Why the hell does anyone read mainstream media
| anymore?
| sealeck wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/opinion/kamala-harris-
| dem...
|
| This was on the front page a couple of weeks ago
| squigz wrote:
| Let's just assume you're right, and this experiment is true
| a majority of the time... wouldn't another possible
| explanation be that that's a perfectly fair representation
| of things? Both sides aren't always equal. Weighing the
| coverage of both sides to be equal would be misleading.
| gamepsys wrote:
| If the unbiased view is leftist then an unbiased
| newspaper would be left leaning.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's what I just said, yes.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| find anything about gaza
| cess11 wrote:
| When I visit now the screen fills with headlines that are
| sympathetic to Harris and seems to support her candidacy.
|
| Obviously not a leftist bias.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _Find me a single article currently on the front page that
| 's negative about leftist policies or politicians,_
|
| 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
| DinoDad13 wrote:
| Any reasonably fair news coverage is considered left wing
| now-a-days.
| matrix87 wrote:
| They're about as left wing as hillary clinton. only when it's
| convenient for them
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Left wing?
|
| The NYT is corporate wing. There's no charitable way to look at
| their reporting on the current election cycle and make the
| claim that they've treated the candidates equally. Donald Trump
| hasn't uttered a consecutive set of coherent sentences where he
| starts with an idea and finishes with an actual conclusion that
| isn't "and it'll be better / worse than ever before" in at
| least 5 years.
| keybored wrote:
| The NYT is as Left Wing as the journalistic profession is Ant-
| Establishment: Not in the slightest but they themselves
| constantly claim to be.
| delichon wrote:
| How does one refrain from crossing the virtual picket line of
| such a strike? Is it to not do business with any company with
| this union's workers, for the duration?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > not do business with any company with this union's workers,
| for the duration? Anyone got a list?
|
| 1. The New York Times
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| Honestly this seems like good advice regardless of strikes.
| tptacek wrote:
| Continuing to do business with a company whose employees are
| striking isn't "crossing the picket line". Crossing the picket
| line means undermining a strike directly by supply labor when
| organized labor is using a labor embargo as leverage. To avoid
| crossing the NYT picket line, don't write for the NYT.
| paxys wrote:
| Yup in most cases striking employees don't want the end
| consumer to boycott the company, because ultimately it hurts
| them as well. Picketing is done to (1) raise awareness and
| (2) discourage non-union/temporary labor from replacing them
| during the strike.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think at least these days, usage of the term can include
| customers. For example, this from the University of Maine's
| Bureau of Labor Education: "Customers may refuse to cross a
| picket line and picketers have the right to ask customers to
| honor their picket but should not intimidate, block customer
| access, disparage a company's product, or say anything that
| is untrue or casts the product in a false or misleading
| light."
|
| Or this, from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee:
| "Lastly, customers also have the right to honor the picket
| line and arguably have the most important role in influencing
| employers' decisions, outside of the workers themselves."
|
| Or this, from NYT writer: "Having walked a picket line
| before, I try not to cross anyone else's. The W and its
| parent company, Marriott, know there are lots of people like
| me. So why hadn't they disclosed in advance what would greet
| me upon arrival?"
|
| [1] https://umaine.edu/ble/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/181/2014/11/...
|
| [2] https://workerorganizing.org/how-to-honor-the-picket-
| line-an...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/your-money/should-
| hotels-...
| tptacek wrote:
| Not transacting with a business in solidarity with an
| ongoing strike is a boycott. People can boycott the NYT in
| support of the strike. But crossing a picket line is a
| much, much bigger deal than not participating in a boycott.
| If you skip the NYT Mini Crossword for a week to support
| the strikers, I respect that, but I'm going to keep pushing
| for that sweet 15s finish this week and I'm going to sleep
| fine doing it.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree that a boycott is different, and for the NYT the
| terms are pretty distinct. But when employees are
| picketing a retail business, the two are much more
| entangled, so I think the common use of the phrase has
| shifted away from the precision you're expecting it to
| have.
| danaris wrote:
| ...To our detriment.
|
| In many cases (though not all!), when workers are
| striking against a retail business, they _want_ the
| customers to keep coming. Showing the strain that gets
| put on the system in such cases can be part of the
| leverage the union exerts.
|
| This is why we, on the outside, need to listen to what
| the union is asking of us, and not just loudly announce
| that we are boycotting in solidarity, or "refusing to
| cross the picket line", if that's the opposite of what
| they want.
| tptacek wrote:
| Or don't! It's fine to be pro-labor but for your
| interests not to intersect with every strike. One might
| have a different opinion about the moral weight of an NYT
| strike versus that of the Marriott hotel housekeeping
| staff, for instance. You might personally find yourself
| morally aligned with every strike, and in that case you
| should pay attention to what the strikers are asking. Or
| you might not. Things are complicated!
|
| Either way: it is not in fact a given that customers are
| obliged by solidarity to boycott businesses dealing with
| strikes.
| Cushman wrote:
| It's not a shift in usage, it's a term of art.
| _Informally_ it could mean just crossing the line to
| enter the business, but unless you live in a turn-of-the-
| century company town, no one in the union is expecting
| anything related to that by default.
|
| In _labor_ , "respecting the picket line" is a moral
| action for _union members_ (or scabs) which by definition
| couldn't apply to a spontaneous self-directed consumer
| boycott.
|
| Not to put to fine a point on it: if you show up to
| someone else's labor action claiming solidarity, and then
| independently decide to pivot the action to a totally
| different set of economic incentives, you are -- almost
| literally! -- a scab.
| tptacek wrote:
| A scab is someone who works in violation of a strike.
| It's not a generic term for anybody disfavored by labor
| activists.
| Cushman wrote:
| Ouch! Fair cop since we're nitpicking, but I was trying
| to be cute about that -- the joke started out more like
| "you're technically crossing the line to scab as a
| strikebreaker". I'm aware that it still doesn't make
| sense unless there's a sympathy action by the
| strikebreakers' union, unfunny and unhelpful in the first
| place, thanks for the correction :)
|
| Edit: Ah shoot not again. What I _meant_ to say was
| "scabbing as an agent provocateur". Sorry, I'll quit
| while I'm ahead!
| paperplatter wrote:
| It's not even a shift, it's the original meaning. There
| are/were physical picket lines that you would literally
| cross to enter a business.
| tedunangst wrote:
| And customers weren't crossing them because nobody buys a
| car by walking to the Ford factory.
| paperplatter wrote:
| There's no need to justify how you do business with the
| NYT, whether it's playing a crossword game or accepting a
| job. But either one is referred to as crossing the picket
| line.
| simonw wrote:
| Surely playing a crossword game is only "crossing the
| picket line" if the workers on strike have asked you not
| to play that crossword / called for a more general
| boycott?
| tptacek wrote:
| I think there's a deeper and more important subtlety
| here: there's a sort of moral obligation not to break a
| strike, but except in some specific circumstances, there
| really isn't an obligation to support a boycott, any more
| than there's an obligation to put a pro-labor bumper
| sticker on your car. Breaking a streak and ignoring a
| boycott are not equally weighted.
|
| (My kid brother is a labor person, so really I'm just
| venting some stuff here to keep it from coming up at
| Thanksgiving).
| mandmandam wrote:
| > "a labor person"
|
| ... Are we supposed to know what that means?
|
| The way you're using it, it sounds like a pejorative...
| Which puts something of a spin on your particular
| pedantry here.
|
| > there really isn't an obligation to support a boycott
|
| I think the Irish - who invented the term - would
| disagree with you on that point.
|
| Not every boycott is worth supporting, sure. But if a
| boycott _is_ worth supporting (say, divesting from
| genocide supporters) then yes there 's a bit of an
| obligation there.
| paperplatter wrote:
| Probably means someone who thinks there's a moral
| obligation to follow a union-requested boycott.
| tptacek wrote:
| He's in a union and pays attention to this stuff. That's
| all it meant.
| tptacek wrote:
| No, it isn't. You can see why people online would want it
| to be! But boycotts and strikes are different things.
| noobermin wrote:
| My honest opinion, asking customers not to do business
| doesn't really make sense as customer demand can add to the
| pressure on management when their workers are not to be
| found and all they have are temps who are, actually,
| crossing the picket line. I never understood this stance.
| It sounds much more like a morality stance than one based
| on strategy to get management to the table.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| tbh consumer boycotts can be very effective for
| organizing. not having workers to serve your customers is
| a lot less scary to a business than potentially losing
| your customers
| janalsncm wrote:
| This is the tech guild, so it's even more narrow. PMs, POs,
| and SWEs.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| crossing the picket line is not the same thing as scabbing
| and as a phrase often can apply to consumers.
|
| I believe the NYT guild has asked ppl to pause reading NYT in
| the past, however in many many cases the unions do not want a
| consumer boycott. so it really depends
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Sometimes unions will call for a consumer boycott during a
| strike, but sometimes they won't. Unsure what the NYT tech
| union is asking for (or not asking for) at the moment.
|
| And I can see why it can make sense to _not_ call for a
| boycott. If workers are on strike, but consumer demand remains
| strong and their needs aren 't being met, it puts pressure on
| management. Like if mail drivers go on strike, everyone stops
| getting deliveries, and suddenly it's obvious how critical
| those drivers are.
| hungie wrote:
| I don't know why you are being down voted, this is a fair
| question.
|
| The answer is: don't make assumptions, listen to what the
| workers want. If they call for a boycott, boycott in support.
| If they say, "don't boycott", please don't encourage others to
| boycott.
|
| Plenty in the media industry make money from engagement, and
| they might not want you to stop engaging! The writers strike,
| for instance, said keep watching but consider not producing
| content that builds off our content. Plenty of podcasts
| switched to other media for the duration.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| They're not actually on strike yet, and they haven't requested
| any action from customers. Sometimes a union actually wants
| customers to behave as normal, because typical customer
| behavior in concert with a work stoppage will apply the most
| pressure to management. Sometimes they ask customers to
| boycott, to apply financial pressure. Sometimes, though rarely,
| a union will ask customers to threaten to divest or cancel
| accounts.
|
| The best way to make sure you're in step with what the union is
| asking for from customers is to keep an eye on whatever they
| seem to be using to communicate the most - in this case, it
| seems to be their twitter: https://x.com/NYTGuildTech. I think
| it's fair to assume that if they have any requests for
| customers of NYT, they'll put them there.
| jamamp wrote:
| I remember during the screenwriters guild strikes in the Movie
| and TV industry, many writers were advocating _not_ to boycott
| movies/TV. Mainly in order to show that the people still wanted
| to watch the media that these people were writing for and
| creating, so that the strike held more legitimacy: we are
| needed to produce more content for your business.
|
| I suppose sometimes it makes sense to boycott, but not all the
| time.
| mattdotc wrote:
| Watch for public statements from the union. A striking unit
| will generally inform the general public if they are looking
| for any show of support. No need to assume that a boycott is
| desired!
| gaws wrote:
| You may have to skip a few days, maybe a few weeks, of
| Wordle/Connections/Crossword gameplay.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Actual announcement/source:
| https://x.com/NYTGuildTech/status/1833568353379905562
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| News release here: https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-
| tech-guild-votes...
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This is a great time for it, with the election on and the
| millions running into the pocket of mass media.
|
| NYT should be highly motivated to negotiate a deal as soon as
| possible.
| strict9 wrote:
| Absolutely. This is the worst job market for tech workers in
| probably 20 years. Many employed in tech are hoping to keep
| their job, let alone bargain for higher wages and remote work.
|
| Hard to imagine this effort having as much leverage if it were
| to happen after the election.
| paxys wrote:
| In fact I'd wager that one of the reasons for the urgency on
| the workers' part is to lock up contracts before the election
| in order to prevent mass layoffs right after.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > urgency on the workers' part is to lock up contracts
| before the election in order to prevent mass layoffs right
| after.
|
| 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".
| brianwawok wrote:
| Which is a great way to have a company full of people who
| can't be fired with no motivation, harming the parent
| organization
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| This is trade-off that a company (and thee employee, too)
| has to make:
|
| - does the company want to be able to easily get rid of
| "undesired"/"lazy" employees? For this option, it will
| likely have to pay bigger salaries.
|
| - on the other hand, for the option to have job security,
| an employee will have to accept that the expected salary
| is lower, i.e. the company can save money on salaries,
| but cannot easily fire the employee.
|
| Both are economically sensible solutions.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Unless the company needs us more than we need it and we
| can have both better security and higher salary?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Unless the company needs us more than we need it and we
| can have both better security and higher salary?
|
| Employees typically only have such a strong negotiation
| lever in good economic times, which I guess is currently
| not the case.
| slt2021 wrote:
| this only applies to the very senior and experienced
| people, like staff+ engineers who are not easily
| replaceable + have so much knowledge that company will
| suffer if they leave.
|
| the rest of your average tech worker who pushes jsons
| from front-end to backend does not have much leverage and
| is easily replaceable with new college grad with chatGPT
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Presumably striking isn't a great sign of motivation
| already. If you think you're so unimpactful that your job
| is at risk, you probably aren't very motivated.
| berdario wrote:
| Layoffs at big companies have nothing to do with
| individual impact.
|
| 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
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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
|
| This seems really simplistic. It's certainly happened
| before, but it seems ludicrous to just assume that
| executive whim is always the cause. Another reason is if
| a company is doing badly financially, something needs to
| change.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's not an either-or. When the company's doing badly
| financially and something needs to change, the mechanics
| of figuring out _what_ needs to change involve a lot of
| executive judgment, which is not necessarily correlated
| with facts on the ground as the members of specific orgs
| or projects might see them.
| morgante wrote:
| Exactly why I would run far away from any workplace that
| unionized.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Because you get paid less and have to strike for a small
| raise.
| pydry wrote:
| Hanging the threat of layoffs over employees certainly
| motivates employees, in much the same way stack ranking
| does, but it does it in such a way that is ultimately
| destructive to the organization.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Your strawman is on fire.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Usually people can still be fired if they aren't
| performing their contractual obligations. That might get
| tricky for stuff like code, but the same can be said of
| the current performance structure.
| paxys wrote:
| > the union should attempt to make an agreement
|
| They are literally striking because the company is
| refusing to negotiate with them.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > more than two years of bargaining
|
| How is this a refusal to negotiate?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Saying "no" for two years is not a negotiation.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Saying "no" for two years is not a negotiation.
|
| What does the other side offer? If you want something
| from the other side, you better have something to offer
| which the other side wants:
|
| "Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
|
| "Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
|
| "Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
|
| "Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."
| siffin wrote:
| What you say is very true, but you're still missing the
| definition of a negotiation. The example you gave isn't
| negotiation. This is:
|
| "Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No. That's
| unreasonable, I'll give you 100,000, and you'll dance
| each time you see me.".
|
| "Make it 300,000,and I'll fake that I like you." ...etc
|
| Negotiating goes both ways.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Blocking off the other side is also a negotiation
| strategy; one that one applies for example if one
| considers the demands of the other side to be nutjob
| insane.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Both sides have been saying no for two years. Not just
| one.
| bawolff wrote:
| Well that depends - are the layoffs because there is no
| money left, or is it because the company wants to
| allocate resources differently?
|
| In the former case, you can't get blood from a stone.
| However in the latter, strikes can still be effective.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Sure, but every time I see 'It has been a very lean year
| for us' from executives, I immediately see Simpsons Burns
| cash fight. It is annoying how well they captured some US
| time transcending rituals of the upper class.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm not entirely clear that going into a potentially rough
| storm is a great time to rock the boat? Curious if you have
| any studies that show this is a good time?
|
| Agreed that getting a contract sooner than later has to be a
| good idea. I'm actually surprised they have gone as long as
| they have with no contract.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Do you actually delegate your thinking to studies like
| this? If someone linked a study covering strike timing
| would you read it and make your opinion? this almost reads
| like a parody
| taeric wrote:
| If I was in a position where a decision impacted me
| directly, I would, of course, be willing to act on what
| information I have. As a non-impacted person, I'm
| afforded the luxury of seeking more information.
|
| I am not, despite the tone from this discussion,
| specifically anti-union.
|
| In the spirit of your post, though; I have grown rather
| suspicious of any cause that is so against getting more
| information. Putting the question back to you, if you saw
| data showing that going into a potential bad market was
| not the time to play extra hardball when you already lack
| a contract, would you consider it? I would hope the
| answer in both directions would be yes. (That is, if it
| shows this is a great time to do so, then they, of
| course, should!)
| ruraljuror wrote:
| > Absolutely. This is the worst job market for tech workers
| in probably 20 years.
|
| Any sources for this? Asking out of curiosity--not
| disagreement.
| strict9 wrote:
| Nope, hence the word probably. 100% anecdotal.
|
| 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.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I think that's highly dependant how many years of
| experience you had. 2008 was definitely worse for
| inexperienced new grads than today, but today is probably
| worse for people in their peak earning years as companies
| are trimming the fat.
|
| There are plenty of jobs out there right now, you just
| have to be willing to move and take a lower salary, which
| is much easier for young people than mid-career folks.
| The same definitely wasn't true in 2008.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| There are still plenty of great high-paying jobs, they
| are just more competitive.
|
| If you are a good engineer you won't have a problem aside
| from having to play the numbers game a bit more. There
| are still new grads being hired but it's definitely not
| as easy as it was.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > If you are a good engineer you won't have a problem
|
| 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.
| f6v wrote:
| I've been hearing the complete opposite on EU CS jobs
| Reddit. People say it's impossible to get hired with no
| experience and just hard for seniors.
|
| There's so much of reporting and selection bias though.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The juniors say that juniors are most affected. The
| experienced developers and engineers say that it is the
| experienced developers and engineers most affected.
|
| Everybody has their perspective.
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| In case of a recession, fresh grads are usually affected
| the worst. Really it makes sense, because work experience
| tends to be valued more than a degree.
|
| https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-
| brief/recessi...
| whatevaa wrote:
| I'm a senior and I would say juniors have it way harder.
| I could find a new job, new grads - yeah, gonna be hard.
| Money is tighter, and new grads are oftenly money sinks,
| thus no hiring.
|
| I'm in EU but in the eastern part of it.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > 2008 was definitely worse for inexperienced new grads
| than today, but today is probably worse for people in
| their peak earning years as companies are trimming the
| fat.
|
| So same people affected both times?
| oconnore wrote:
| As I understand it, the earliest they could actually strike would
| be 80 days from today, as per the Taft-Hartley act, putting the
| strike on November 29 (after the election).
|
| 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.
| addicted wrote:
| > The guild, which was formed in 2022, has yet to secure a
| contract after more than two years of bargaining.
|
| This seems like a pretty reasonable reason to strike. Arguably
| it's the most justifiable reason to strike.
| xvector wrote:
| Those wages are absolutely not fair in the era of modern tech
| comp. But IMHO people should just find a different job, there
| are plenty available that pay better.
| arunabha wrote:
| > But IMHO people should just find a different job, there are
| plenty available that pay better.
|
| Genuine question, why is that better? There are plenty of
| reasons why employees might be overall ok with the job and
| prefer to work out improvements in specific areas. The
| generally accepted implicit rationale of all of the
| accommodation needing to be done by the employees(including
| finding another job) is honestly puzzling. I'm wondering if
| that is the consequence of employers having vastly more power
| over employees(esp in the US, with healthcare being tied to
| employment)
|
| Should the default be a reasonable compromise between the two
| sides, vs the only recourse being employees leaving?
| xvector wrote:
| Unions are not effective at getting you to high comps. They
| will only get you to a middle of the road comp.
|
| 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.
| arunabha wrote:
| But unions don't automatically imply seniority based
| wages, or even uniform wages. The SAG and the NFL players
| unions are the most obvious examples.
|
| Also the last two years _should_ have taught the tech
| rank and file that the good times don 't always last. As
| much as we'd like to believer we all are 10x rockstar
| devs, the reality is that an overwhelming majority are
| not. Further, even being the 'best of the best' engineer
| is no guarantee that you won't be screwed over by
| management. Woz is a highly visible example and I
| guarantee you that the odds of anyone on HN(let alone the
| overall tech industry) being a better engineer are
| essentially zero.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Or they could unionize and then not have to do a bunch of
| annoying interviews and possibly move.
| javagram wrote:
| NYT is the premier digital news outlet. Why should a principal
| SWE there get paid less than a senior SWE working on Google
| News, for instance?
|
| If NYT has the money it makes sense to me for the employees to
| ask for higher pay. What else is the original purpose of unions
| than to give workers power to bargain with the company?
| hyperpape wrote:
| > Why should a principal SWE there get paid less than a
| senior SWE working on Google News, for instance?
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-
| b-d&q=google+ma...
| cvwright wrote:
| I think the uncomfortable question for many here is, why
| should the SWE at Google get paid any more than the SWE at
| the NY Times?
| ynx wrote:
| That's not an uncomfortable question at all. SWE (and all
| employees) should be paid to the point that the owners of
| their company, while well-rewarded, are not sucking up a
| large percentage of global wealth personally...and that's
| the less adventurous answer.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| ... right, because people start companies out of their
| philanthropic desires.
|
| It is funny here how all the people are pro-union don't
| start their own companies to compete with the ones that
| exploit people and offer employees all the perks they
| ever dreamed of.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's even funnier when they do start their own company
| and immediately crank up the back-pedaling.
| paulcole wrote:
| Why is that an uncomfortable question?
|
| 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."
| shagie wrote:
| > Why should a principal SWE there get paid less than a
| senior SWE working on Google News, for instance?
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28GOOGL%2C+NYT%29+reve.
| .. (GOOGL, NYT) revenue per employee
| Alphabet Class A Shares | $1.815 million (US dollars)
| New York Times Company | $422656.27 (US dollars)
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > If NYT has the money it makes sense to me for the employees
| to ask for higher pay.
|
| Nothing is stopping an employee from asking. Can they get
| more money? It depends on NYT if they want to pay more or
| find another employee who settles for less and fires the
| demanding employee. Win/Win for the company. Greed is good if
| it is within bounds.
| paulcole wrote:
| > NYT is the premier digital news outlet. Why should a
| principal SWE there get paid less than a senior SWE working
| on Google News, for instance?
|
| Because it's a different job at a different company?
|
| I get that if you have leverage you may want to exert it
| (either individually or through a union) to get higher pay,
| but the argument that 2 different companies should pay the
| same amount seems ridiculous. Go get the job at the higher
| paying company if that's what you want.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I think the contention point is over remote work rights. I
| would gladly accept these salaries, but not if I have to
| commute into NYC almost every day.
| hungie wrote:
| Good for them. More workers need to be understanding just how
| much they are being exploited by their leadership and demand a
| more equitable piece of the pie.
| seneca wrote:
| The word "exploit" has no meaning at all if you can stretch it
| so far as to cover NYC tech employees.
| hungie wrote:
| Absolute hogwash. The existence of people being exploited
| more does not mean that people being exploited less are not
| being exploited.
|
| Like, yes, these workers are probably in _better_ conditions
| than many global workers. But that doesn 't mean the NYT
| isn't exploiting them.
|
| Also, consider showing some solidarity -- these people are
| workers, and have more in common with other workers than they
| have different. Support their strike, and expect them to
| support yours. Or at the very least support them advocating
| for better working conditions and expect they will support
| you in improving your workplace.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| As long as they're not forced to work, I don't see how NYT
| is exploiting them.
|
| 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?
| vundercind wrote:
| This is the beginning of an argument that ends in "US workers
| aren't exploited--all of them are better off than nearly any
| worker in Sierra Leone!"
|
| You can always (in a country like the US) find a group
| somewhere so much worse off that you can use them to paint US
| workers as greedy or spoiled.
|
| The connection of these facts to exploitation is _tenuous_ in
| this context, but it does make for good rhetoric.
| shagie wrote:
| What would be more equitable?
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=New+York+Times&assumpti...
| puts the revenue per employee at $422,656.
|
| They've got 5900 employees and
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t...
| says a quarterly profit of $104.7 million. $400M / 5900 gives
| about $68,000 profit per employee.
|
| So, what's reasonable? Would giving everyone a $65k pay raise
| and zeroing out the profit for the company be correct? Would
| that put them close to what they'd get if they worked in big
| tech? (
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Apple%2C+Meta%2C+GOO...
| ). We're dealing with very different numbers there.
| Clubber wrote:
| Union negotiation isn't always about money, though it is
| usually part of it. It's also about working conditions and
| benefits.
|
| Also you can get a raise without "costing" anything extra in
| the expense column, such as fewer working hours for the same
| pay/benefits.
| shagie wrote:
| There are potentially many reasonable things to negotiate
| for. So far, all the information I can find is "stalled
| contract negotiations". Working without a contract is a
| perfectly valid reason to strike.
|
| 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.
| morgante wrote:
| > Things like making sure that AI isn't used in certain
| capacities to reduce the staff size wouldn't be
| unreasonable.
|
| Yes it would. _Explicitly_ demanding inefficiency is
| exactly why unions are terrible for innovation and
| progress.
| rincebrain wrote:
| There's likely always going to be tension between how
| many people management thinks are necessary to do the
| work and the reality of people not working like machines.
|
| If the union workers think that management would like to
| cut things so much that it will cause the quality of the
| resulting work to suffer drastically, to say nothing of
| their health, then they're not arguing for inefficiency.
|
| And if they don't trust that any sort of metric for "good
| enough" wouldn't be gameable since the management has
| more expensive lawyers to write contracts than them, a
| blanket rule makes more logical sense than trying to bet
| you didn't leave a loophole.
|
| (All opinions my own, obviously.)
| cess11 wrote:
| That's a strawman. The demand you're quoting is to not
| fire people.
| paperplatter wrote:
| Keeping employees they don't need/want is an
| inefficiency.
| paperplatter wrote:
| This is a distinction without difference.
| hungie wrote:
| If you want the Union's opinion, their strike demands are the
| place to look.
|
| If you want my opinion, what you've described would be a
| start. Or at least the workers there should be parties to a
| decision on whether that's the right decision. I'd consider
| lowering executive compensation as well. But there's many
| ways to achieve a balance within an organization that
| benefits the product and the workers.
| shagie wrote:
| > If you want the Union's opinion, their strike demands are
| the place to look.
|
| 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.
| remram wrote:
| https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-
| votes...
| jawerty wrote:
| As someone who worked here seems odd they'd need a strike pretty
| good pay/benefits
| mountainriver wrote:
| Hrm I interviewed there and the pay was definitely sub par
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Many media companies do not have particularly good pay, nor
| interesting work, for their developers. I spoke with someone
| who worked as a dev at Bloomberg, and he described his job as
| "hooking up javascript listeners all day".
| gaws wrote:
| I've heard developers for Bloomberg News, specifically, are
| some of the highest paid among their media peers.
| matrix87 wrote:
| for nyc the pay is pretty weak
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think all we need to see is a compensation package equivalent
| to big tech or even greater, amplified by shares and the
| trendiest cliff for vesting, and tech unions will take off
| nationwide
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. There is a huge
| reason big tech can afford those compensation packages for
| employees, and the _vast_ majority of companies can simply not
| afford that.
|
| As someone who's been both a union member and on the management
| side, it's frustrating when all sides don't realize that unions
| don't magically make money available to distribute to
| employees. There is certainly the argument that money needs to
| be distributed more equitably, but in a lot of cases (having
| seen this directly) there is simply not much money to move
| around.
|
| Certainly, I'd love it if Google's never-ending money spigot
| was available to all.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I wasn't being sarcastic, NY Times is publicly traded too and
| is fully capable of the model where annual share grants are
| equal to the base salary, as opposed to a tiny sprinkle
| you're supposed to be grateful for in leu of none at all.
|
| Their tech team isn't that big, their $8bn marketcap could
| handle the share grants.
|
| I had been critical of how wages haven't kept up with
| expenses for 30 years, while enamored by big tech
| compensation packages. In my analysis, big tech compensation
| packages are only reaching parity with the model of what
| wages would look like if they kept up with expenses, in which
| case I still shouldn't be impressed or worry about a
| comparison to what other fields are making. If value can be
| rationalized, and collective bargaining can extract it, then
| do that, I'm into it now since we're close.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| According to Google, the NY Times has a profit margin of
| 6-10% in most quarters. They're not exactly rolling in
| cash. Not to mention, there's a bunch of other teams at the
| NY Times that presumably want raises too. What's the
| justification for giving a raise to developers, but not to
| the writers that produce the company's main product?
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| I'm sure the tech guild would be happy for the writers'
| union to win contract raises too. I don't know why you
| think they wouldn't be.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Is there enough money to afford the proposed pay raises?
| 6% profit margin isn't much. Granting the proposed pay
| raises to both groups could easily put the company in the
| red.
| mattdotc wrote:
| Not sure where your 6% figure comes from, but you can
| easily find the 2023 Annual Report which states the
| following:
|
| > 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| There are a host of other real expenses that need to be
| paid that "adjusted operating profit" doesn't account
| for. I'd be really surprised if total net profit was more
| than 50-65% of that.
| mattdotc wrote:
| Point taken. I'd still maintain that the stock buybacks
| are egregious and need to stop.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To emphasize: _that_ point I can totally agree with.
| While I don 't know the details of all the reasons this
| union is striking, I can certainly imagine lots of good,
| plausible reasons, and stock buybacks (if they are
| egregious) would be at the top of the list.
|
| 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.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=ny+times+profit+margin
|
| In June it was 10.6%, in March it was 6.9%
| yieldcrv wrote:
| share compensation doesn't use cash
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It does use cash unless the company dilutes the stock by
| adding more shares. And if they dilute stock, they're
| effectively taking money from the existing shareholders.
| There's no free lunch.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| being a public company with a liquid market is a license
| to print shares and the market can decide if it wants to
| stick around at a similar company valuation
|
| 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
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The board of the directors represents the shareholders,
| and they would likely not approve of any significant
| dilution. Again, the money has to come from _somewhere_.
| Either from revenues, or from the existing shareholders.
| The latter would just tell the union to pound sand,
| unless the Times is genuinely struggling to recruit
| talent (not likely).
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > while enamored by big tech compensation packages.
|
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yes, that used to go to newspaper and overhead costs that
| don't scale like newspaper
|
| the current structure mandates that other teams have to
| advocate for themselves, and we'll find out whats worth
| what
| taeric wrote:
| What are their demands?
|
| And, cynically, is anyone even going to notice that they are
| striking? Seems unlikely, to be honest.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| One of their key demands is to continue to allow remote work:
| https://www.axios.com/2023/10/30/nyt-tech-workers-walk-out
| taeric wrote:
| I saw that mentioned. Was hoping someone had a link that was
| a bit more informative.
|
| Edit: This is also an older link?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It looks like this is the union's platform:
| https://nytimesguild.org/contract-campaign/
| taeric wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Hate that a lot of their demands
| seem to be to leverage things they want over positions
| not covered by their guild.
|
| Is that actually a common thing that I just didn't know?
| I'd not expect a union to impact interviewing practices
| for all entry-level jobs somewhere.
| smoores wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but most non-
| managerial employees at the Times are now unionized. It
| is no one's goal to improve the labor standards of the
| union members at the expense of non-union employees. It
| is nearly impossible to obtain contract language covering
| anything other than workplace and employment conditions
| for union members, as the company isn't legally required
| to negotiate over any other topics, which is why you're
| seeing reference to requests "for members". That said, it
| is very often the case that wins for unionized employees
| benefit non-union workers as well, because it's almost
| always not worth the administrative overhead for the
| company to have multiple separate policies for similar
| jobs.
| taeric wrote:
| Many of the concerns listed seem to call out jobs that
| are not part of this union. Stuff like, "Women and people
| of color are significantly underrepresented in the most
| highly compensated reporting and editing roles in the
| newsroom." I agree that is a concern, I'm not clear that
| "reporting and editing roles" are part of this union's
| leverage, though.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that people will notice
| when the New York Times website stops working.
| kingnothing wrote:
| If the Times goes down because the engineers are on strike
| for a few weeks or months, the engineers were not very good
| at their jobs.
| taeric wrote:
| I honestly wouldn't expect many to notice, all told. If
| Google can't index them so that headlines can be shown on
| searches, I'd expect larger losses.
|
| That said, if the state of the tech there is such that a
| strike will cause it to immediately stop working... that
| doesn't exactly speak well for the work they have done.
|
| Unless they are allowed to shut that stuff down as part of
| their strike? That feels very unlikely to me; but I don't
| know.
| tqi wrote:
| > Kathy Zhang, a senior analytics manager with The Times and the
| guild's unit chair, said, "Management has really dragged its feet
| when it comes to bargaining," between the union formation and
| now.
|
| Maybe tangential, but I would have guessed people managers were
| not eligible to be a member of the union. Does anyone know how
| eligibility is determined?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Maybe the title is for an IC role, as for a "customer success
| manager."
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Generally anyone below director level makes sense imho.
|
| The biggest advocate of pay rises and improvements to
| conditions is often the line level managers and those one step
| up from the line level managers. If this is a typical corporate
| job title this is a manager of line level managers. He probably
| has quarterly 1:1s or at least office hours supporting those at
| the lowest levels. It's not like you become a line level
| manager, accept the 20% pay rises and suddenly change your
| outlook on everything. You're never that far removed. Advocacy
| is important for management so I have no issues with this.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| There's been a sucessful corporate ruse to make line level
| managers seem above line level workers and make line level
| works side against line level mamagers, while both sides are
| of the same labor class.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I consider anyone who doesn't have the power to spend money
| a supervisor (or someone whose role is to cover in the
| event of short staffing) instead of a manager. What are you
| even managing if you can't spend a little more to ensure
| you have the people you need?
| benpacker wrote:
| If they don't have firing / hiring power, they aren't
| management according to US labor law.
|
| Most tech "* manager" roles where the object of management is
| not a person or team likely qualify.
| smoores wrote:
| Kathy isn't a people manager, the Times just has confusing
| titles for its data folks. Product managers and project
| managers likewise often have "manager" in their titles without
| being people managers. No one with direct reports is allowed to
| be a member of the union!
| intelVISA wrote:
| If you don't have significant ownership of the company you're a
| worker, no?
| advisedwang wrote:
| The NLRA doesn't protect "supervisors", which is mostly
| anyone who can hire/fire/discipline/etc. They technically are
| still able to unionize, but there is literally nothing
| stopping a company firing them for it.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| It is not clear to me whether going on a strike is a good idea
| for the New York Times tech workers:
|
| Since media is not a sector that has high margins, when a company
| gets under pressure to have to increase the salaries (e.g. by
| strikes), the management better starts to analyze how you can
| reduce the number of, in this case, tech workers because with
| thin margins, budging in these negotiations is much more
| dangerous for the mere existence of the business than if the
| margins are high.
|
| Instead of going on strike, it would in my opinion be a better
| idea for the tech workers to look for a better paid job in an
| industry with higher margins.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Maybe they want to stay in news media. When I worked at The
| Atlantic, a lot of my coworkers were highly motivated by the
| subject matter of their work and perceived quality of their
| newsroom.
| debacle wrote:
| Then, like gaming or Hollywood, their salaries will be lower.
| dymk wrote:
| And they're protected by a union
| lacker wrote:
| Maybe the New York Times will end up both with a unionized
| tech workforce, and a lower-paid one. Personally, I would
| never want to join a union or work as management at a
| company with a union, but I am still kind of curious to see
| what the result of a tech workforce unionizing would be.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Lower salaries and treating everyone like a cog.
| twojobsoneboss wrote:
| Tech salaries have ALREADY fallen and tech workers have
| already been largely treated as cogs. Yes it could get
| even worse but I get why they're taking their chances
| ipaddr wrote:
| It would codify this even further. Salaries have fallen
| but under a union any raises will be slow and require
| strikes and other job action and not be based on
| individual performance but on time served. Once time
| served is in play it doesn't make sense to switch jobs
| because you start the bottom.
|
| 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.
| sensanaty wrote:
| You think _joining_ a union makes you a cog?
|
| Have the mass layoffs every single year taught people
| nothing? Newsflash, every company treats every single one
| of their employees as another replaceable cog in the
| machine. Even if you're the supreme grand wizard of space
| time and SQL at your FAANG job, you are still fully
| replaceable and will be if the business sees it as
| profitable to do so.
|
| For now SWEs have it good, but this is quickly changing
| and techies are letting them do it because many of them
| have superiority complexes and naively think of
| themselves as indispensable to the business, as if there
| isn't an ocean of Eastern Europeans who'd happily take
| their place in the rat race to the botto.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| If you do not like working for a business, remember you
| have an option to start a business
| sensanaty wrote:
| And if you don't like treating employees with a modicum
| of respect, then you deserve a union to put you in your
| place. Good luck with the business when people refuse to
| be taken advantage of.
|
| It's a two-way street, and the companies spend a _lot_ of
| money and resources to make sure people don 't realize it
| is.
| dymk wrote:
| Presumably, the tech workers at NYT have a better idea of if
| striking is a good idea, as they're employed there and have
| better visibility into motives and margins
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > the management better starts to analyze how you can reduce
| the number of, in this case, tech workers because with thin
| margins
|
| This happens anyway, regardless of how well a company is doing.
| Tech has been laying off workers with record profits and very
| high margins. But I trust the workers to have better insight
| than you (or me) of whether the strike is beneficial for them
| or not in the long run.
| lacker wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a purely economical strike. It's not a
| coincidence that the most unionized tech workforce in the
| country is the New York Times, an organization that is
| fundamentally pro-union in its politics. When the organization
| as a whole is consistently delivering a pro-union message,
| doesn't it just make sense that the employees would tend to be
| ideologically pro-union?
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > the New York Times, an organization that is fundamentally
| pro-union in its politics
|
| No, it is definitely not. NYT is neoliberal. Don't confuse
| the cultural left with the economic/social/fiscal left. NYT
| is not at all pro-labor. Other people have discussed this
| extensively in the comments below.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Labor organizations often use a deliberately over-the-top
| definition of "pro-labor", where you ought to support most
| labor actions without interrogation or criticism out of
| solidarity. Is the NYT there? No, of course not, that's not
| really a practical position for a news organization to
| take.
|
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| nyt is the most pro labor major print news i can think of
| bawolff wrote:
| > Instead of going on strike, it would in my opinion be a
| better idea for the tech workers to look for a better paid job
| in an industry with higher margins.
|
| If they alternative is quiting, than they don't have very much
| to lose by going on strike.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That's only true if you are guaranteed to find another job
| that pays at least as much as that one you are striking
| against before running out of savings money, otherwise it's
| always best to look for career movements while still
| employed.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| If I were looking for jobs, I wouldn't want it on my resume
| that I came from a company whose workers just voted to strike
| - even if I wasn't a member of the union. I would not want it
| to be assumed that I might be a troublemaker in a not great
| job market.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I am trying to justify 622 Tech workers with the 700mm visits
| noted.
|
| _Can someone explain it to me?_
|
| 622 * $124,584 [0] * 1.25 = $96,864,060/year
|
| Their CPM and CPC would need to be seriously fine tuned to
| sustain this.
|
| $5 per 1,000 visitors (CPM): they would need 19.37 billion ad
| impressions.
|
| Similar problem when calculating CPC with $0.10 to $2 range.
|
| I cannot see how they are still in business.
|
| [0] https://www.roberthalf.com/us/en/insights/career-
| development...
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Don't forget to include subscription revenue, also their extra
| offerings of games, cooking, etc
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I was not aware of those.
| emeril wrote:
| it's been a while since I worked in adtech so unsure best where
| to source/verify those impressions but much of NYT views are by
| paid subscribers so I'd imagine that funds at least a good
| chunk of those workers salaries?
|
| further, I also don't know much of of NYT's tech but it doesn't
| seem especially difficult or cutting edge so 622 tech workers
| does seem a bit bloated though I guess they might need a little
| staff for IT in various locations worldwide so that adds up
| maybe?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The NY Times is mostly subscription funded now:
|
| > Subscription revenue in the quarter grew 7.3 percent, to
| $439.3 million, compared with the previous year. Total
| advertising revenue was up 1.2 percent, at $119.2 million.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-
| york-t....
| janalsncm wrote:
| It should tell you something that 95% of the union voted to
| strike. I found more information from them here:
|
| https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes...
|
| I wonder how other news outlets will cover this, if at all.
| They're probably afraid others will get the same idea.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| That lists the pay discrepancy but doesn't mention if there are
| literally any factors for the disparity such as role,
| responsibilities, performance, etc. It just mentions race,
| which gives me absolutely no usable information to give
| credibility.
|
| If we are to assume black and women workers have historically
| been missing entirely from tech then the efforts of recent
| initiatives would bring fresh people in? Those newer people
| wouldn't have the same length of professional experience but
| the expectation is to be paid equal?
|
| Put another way if the CEO is white and they make 50m and you
| have two employees, one black and one white who each make 50k,
| the average for white workers would be skewed higher? Before
| anyone replies "um actually, it's only workers within the
| guild, the CEO isn't included", okay, but does everyone in the
| guild have the same job title, experience, and
| responsibilities?
|
| As an aside, they've structured that website like trash. Yes,
| I'd love to click a link to see the pay study which is just
| duplicated below the link without any additional information.
| It's like they purposely are trying to say nothing but be loud.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Isn't it a little ironic that NY Times, and most east coast
| media, is very anti big tech and pro union while their own
| employees are protesting because of low wages?
|
| Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when
| they pay their own so poorly?
| ljlolel wrote:
| They're also incredibly non-diverse and complain about big
| tech being non-diverse.
| gwervc wrote:
| Always the same story... A few years ago a big left French
| newspaper (Liberation) always pushing for "diversity"
| published a photo of their staff, which was like 98- 100%
| white.
| ekianjo wrote:
| thats called projection
| donohoe wrote:
| "Incredibly non-diverse"? No. They are in a better position
| than most
|
| 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.
| klooney wrote:
| 60% white is much whiter than a tech company
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Why is the color important here?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Because dei and the nyt focus on that being important.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If you read some of the linked articles off of the one
| posted a few comments back, then you will see that the
| recent cuts have disproportionately affected minorities,
| minorities are making less, and that minorities are
| receiving lower evaluation scores. So it seems they do
| have a diversity problem.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| perhaps diversity has a performance problem.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I want to see the actual studies that the guild has used
| to generate the numbers for their claims so I can see
| what possible mechanisms might be at play and what sort
| of level setting they've done for the data.
| Unfortunately, I didn't see any of the studies released.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's "true" only according to a custom definition of
| diversity common in newsrooms and universities - but not,
| apparently, the Times's own diversity report - where some
| groups which become _too_ included no longer count as
| diverse. I think this standard, whereby I've had a non-
| white yet non-diverse manager for 95% of my career,
| deserves an extraordinary amount of scrutiny.
| kettlepot1337 wrote:
| >> "Incredibly non-diverse"? No. They are in a better
| position than most
|
| Absolutely not. This is typical trickery of stats. They
| have diversity at lower levels. But unlike SV almost no
| diversity at senior ranks. I think its past time that we
| consider janitorial and admin jobs as a win. If we have
| legions of educated minorities, why aren't they making it
| into executive roles at the NY Times?
|
| Here is the exec staff:
| https://www.nytco.com/company/people/ "Filter by
| executive"
|
| There are >64 million Hispanics living in the United
| States, yet not a single one on the NYT exec team.
|
| They have 1 token asian,
|
| 1 token black person.
|
| That is not "Better position than most." That seems like
| 3x worse than your average tech firm.
| gosub100 wrote:
| A citizen journalist I follow on YouTube pointed out that
| for having 5900 employees, they have fewer than 10 who
| are veterans. It explains why they get so much wrong when
| reporting on the military.
| dario_od wrote:
| I opened the link and filtered by executive. Thirteen
| people there: - 5 white men - 4 white women - 1 black man
| - 2 black women - 1 asian woman
|
| Pretending that a sample size of 12 should exactly
| reflect the diversity of the whole population of the
| country is just weird to me.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| I'm sure that both of those people would feel very
| vindicated in their career knowing that the person
| advocating for further affirmative action calls them
| "tokens".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| in terms of binary black-white thinking, NYT is definitely
| more diverse than tech
| grumple wrote:
| Is big tech non-diverse? It seems to have a higher non-
| white population than the US itself according the numbers
| I've been able to find. If we count contractors and off-
| shore, it will become even less white. I'd bet tech has a
| higher proportion of LGBT+ people as well (without looking
| at numbers, admittedly, but I'd be surprised if I was
| wrong). Gender diversity is an issue; but not for lack of
| trying. Cis women are probably 5% of the resumes I see.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In my SV teams over the years, I'd say that the straight
| white male US born people were ~20% of the engineers.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Projection is a thing (assuming the opinions they print are
| their own)
| ETH_start wrote:
| The NY Times is pro-union and anti-big-tech in large part
| because its journalists are unionized and tech platforms
| disintermediate unions. The workers that produce articles and
| create the newsroom culture have a conflict of interest that
| affects its editorial slant. There is also the factor that
| tech threatens the ad revenue of traditional news media.
| donohoe wrote:
| I worked at NYT for seven years and I can say from direct
| personal experience that your many points are not true.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Kelsey Piper, a journalist at Vox, leaked two years ago
| that the NYT has had a years-long top-down directive to
| only write negative stories about tech [1]. Plenty of
| journalists have confirmed this since. Since you worked
| at the NYT for seven years, want to explain that
| particular policy in light of your rebuttal that the NYT
| had no conflict of interest and wasn't trying to smear
| tech companies?
|
| 1: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
| donohoe wrote:
| You are making a very different claim here. The parent
| comment says:
|
| >> The NY Times is pro-union and anti-big-tech [...]
|
| That is the claim. These are the reasons it sues, and my
| notes on each:
|
| * journalists are unionized and tech platforms
| disintermediate unions
|
| Thats a broad generalization based on the authors opinion
| and not necessarily true. The attitude was not reflective
| of my interactions with journalists either. I would
| dispute this from personal experience. We can
| agree/disagree forever, I'm just giving my IRL
| experience.
|
| * workers that produce articles and create the newsroom
| culture have a conflict of interest
|
| It could be said that any journalist who covers any
| subject has a conflict of interest by covering that
| subject. Thats a bit weak.
|
| * tech threatens the ad revenue of traditional news
| media.
|
| Yeah. Rising costs of paper also threaten traditional
| news media. The NYT is profitable and not reliant on ad
| revenue streams for survival. They have a health revenue
| stream in number of other areas. In addition, for better
| or for worse, most journalists don't actually know/care
| that much about ad revenue given the tradition divides
| between business and editorial sides (I see that at many
| media orgs I have worked for - its not just the NYT)
|
| So.. that was what I was talking about ("workers", not a
| "top-down directive").
|
| In regards to your point: Thats a new and different claim
| so hard for me to speak to that.
|
| I would note that the claim came from Matthew Yglesias.
| He since deleted the tweet. I would note that he never
| worked at the NYT as far as I can tell.
|
| I don't know much of Kelsey Piper, but she "heard it from
| NYT reporters at the time" so not quite first-hand
| account either. Her tweet is not a "leak" (thats very
| different) and I see nothing to prove or substantiate it
| - just she "heard" it.
|
| I'll keep an open mind but I'm skeptical.
| Retric wrote:
| > Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees
| when they pay their own so poorly?
|
| Being anti tech has nothing to do with salary, it's centered
| on what big tech is doing.
|
| The people actually writing articles tend to be in Unions
| which may help explain their pro Union stances. Both from
| below and management being concerned with union relations.
| gsky wrote:
| Easier said than done, right. Who would dare to criticize
| them afterall
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Yeah, therefore big tech should get to treat their workers
| however.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| > _Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees
| when they pay their own so poorly?_
|
| The journalists (and tech workers) don't decide their own
| salary.
|
| You conflated "they" as both management and the people being
| managed, to make it "ironic."
| lupusreal wrote:
| I wonder if the NYTimes journalists will sympathy strike.
| (They won't.)
| matrix87 wrote:
| Are you saying that management doesn't have input on
| editorial direction? sounds pretty hard to believe
| nemo44x wrote:
| A lot of the East Coast media, like the Times, has a lot of
| downwardly mobile people in them from wealthy or upper middle
| class families. And they aren't any longer in many cases and
| they are full of resent and bitterness that their turn has
| been looked over. That they aren't getting what "they
| deserve" as they did "everything right" like join a bunch of
| clubs in high school or w/e and go to college and get a
| degree that shows the world they are the continuation of
| their family legacy. But it's not there any longer and
| there's jealousy of of the new middle class that tech has
| built.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| When the bloody hell has the New York Times been pro-union?
| kettlepot1337 wrote:
| >> Isn't it a little ironic that NY Times, and most east
| coast media, is very anti big tech and pro union while their
| own employees are protesting because of low wages?
|
| It is more than a little ironic that the NY Times complains
| about a "lack of diversity" in silicon valley, when
| practically the entire NY Times senior staff are
| generationally rich white people who live in Manhattan and
| Brooklyn.
|
| Here is the exec staff: https://www.nytco.com/company/people/
| "Filter by executive"
|
| There are >64 million Hispanics living in the United States,
| yet not a single one on the NYT exec team. They have 1 token
| asian, 1 token black person. Half the staff is Jewish. Yet
| they are complaining about diversity in Silicon valley.
|
| As a person of asian origin, there is probably no way I can
| get a non-crappy role at the NY Times, yet silicon valley
| offers enough of a meritocracy that I can get a job there
| without having a rich uncle.
|
| Remember, when the establishment complains about diversity,
| they are actually complaining about themselves losing control
| to the general population. That is why colored people in
| executive roles in SV is so scary to newspapers.
| vrosas wrote:
| Their current CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, is about as let-
| them-eat-cake as they come. She was doing a town hall years
| back when they were forcing everyone to "hotel" desks so they
| could lease out more floors of their HQ in Times Square, when
| she mentioned she's giving up one of her two offices in the
| building but it's ok because one was "mostly for shoes,
| anyway".
| salawat wrote:
| ...Just because you're being payed absurdly doesn't
| legitimize your work any either. There's a lot of work that's
| aimed at getting done where the big fat paycheck is
| considered "STFU and do what you're told. with what we're
| paying you, we own you."
|
| Just because you're potentially paid 500k to essentially
| implement the basis of metadata leakage and privacy
| compromise on scales that previous century actual dictators
| couldn't even reasonably dream of does not make the work of
| implementing it more "legitimate". It just makes it easier to
| attract people who value naterial comforts right now over
| safety from systemic abuse later. It's all tradeoffs.
|
| Someone'll pay you well to do ultimately horrible things, and
| make it sound like you're doing everyone a favor.
|
| Juniors, take note. You set the bar on the hell you'll be
| trapped in down the road. Always, always, be suspect.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it's not ironic at all, usually ostensibly left organizations
| are most vulnerable to union pressure because of their
| customer base.
|
| almost all modern places that unionize have a liberal/left-
| leaning customer base the company is afraid of losing
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I wonder how other news outlets will cover this, if at all.
|
| You are reading this on another news outlet!
|
| Last year, NYT tech workers also had a strike over return -to-
| office, as covered by Reuters:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-times-tech-workers...
| busterarm wrote:
| Tbf, I wouldn't want to go back to that office. That area of
| NY is always swarmed with NYPDESU and is kind of a shithole.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I wanted to look at the pay study, but all it did was link me
| to another page with the same pay blurbs, but no actual study.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| The source says that 89% of members voted and it passed by 95%,
| which is about 85% of the union, not 95% of the union.
| julesqs wrote:
| the editorial bias from management of NYT has always been
| skeptical of Google and Facebook and perhaps all of big tech
| because big tech was a threat to their business. Most
| newspapers in the US have been hollowed out because of social
| media and the tech industry, NYT ironically has not because
| they hired a real in house tech team that has kept their paper
| relevant.
|
| But that doesn't mean they like paying their tech workers any
| more than any other management. It's just about money. Big tech
| is a threat to management's profits, just like workers
| demanding better salaries is a threat to management's profits.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Most newspapers in the US have been hollowed out because
| of social media and the tech industry,_
|
| They've been declining ever since radio and TV started doing
| news broadcasts, early to mid 20th century. Internet tech has
| played a role too, but the whole newspaper industry should
| have seen the writing on the wall several generations ago.
| julesqs wrote:
| sure. Not making excuses for any business decisions by
| newspaper management, just pointing out that that their
| criticism of the tech industry isn't out of character with
| a company that also is hostile their own workers' union.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > * Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on
| average than men
|
| > * Black women and Hispanic or Latina women, who make up just
| over 6 percent of the Tech Guild, make 33% less than white men
| in the unit
|
| > * Black workers, who make up 7 percent of the union, earn 26%
| less than white workers
|
| Do they work equivalent jobs with equivalent experience?
| ryandrake wrote:
| If not, then that's also an equity problem. If the "dog jobs"
| are mostly offered to women and minorities, that should also
| be called out as a problem for employers to solve.
| pc86 wrote:
| This presupposes a lot of pretty nasty things. It reads
| like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job
| based on your gender or race which is obviously not the
| case. That lack of equity (which is equality of outcome,
| not opportunity) is itself a problem and not simply a
| byproduct of different people being different. That when
| your entire sample size is 622, you can make broad
| generalizations based on the pay of ~37 of them. Even if
| you can, it also assumes that your salary in your job is
| based on objective set criteria and not a) whether you
| negotiate, b) how hard you negotiate, c) whether you have a
| BATNA that makes you need the job less, d) whether you had
| breakfast that morning or were more tired than normal or
| were coming down with a cold or any number of a myriad of
| other things that could affect a high-stakes negotiation.
|
| 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.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get
| offered a job based on your gender or race which is
| obviously not the case.
|
| Obviously? A newspaper is _exactly_ the kind of business
| to hire based on your personal narrative (including 100%
| of protected class intersections). That 's the entire
| point of the opinion column. Granted, I don't think that
| the folks being discussed here are publishing any
| personal opinions, and I doubt the times is doing
| anything legally actionable or we would have heard about
| it, but the idea that they _don 't_ consider these
| factors just because it's illegal is laughable.
| pc86 wrote:
| Yeah I didn't phrase it very well, what I meant was that
| you're not applying for any old job on the tech team. You
| apply for a specific job, presumably one you're qualified
| for that would be a step up in your career.
|
| If you look at a very small sample of people and one
| racial minority or gender has all the "lower" jobs, that
| doesn't tell you what jobs they were "offered" it just
| tells you what jobs they applied for.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| man the downvotes on this thread are all over the place--
| people need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about
| what discourse they _actually_ tolerate, vs what they
| tell themselves... it 's absurd. at best this comment is
| mildly combative, but it doesn't seem like OP took it
| personally, as they shouldn't have, but yet... downvote
| city. it's especially bizarre because i couldn't even
| tell you what ideological trigger shibboleth is being
| triggered here, even...
| matrix87 wrote:
| how do you know the problem originates with the employer
| and isn't supply side?
|
| if above demographics aren't getting CS majors (or whatever
| other educational equivalent), there isn't much prospective
| employers can do about it
| umvi wrote:
| I think it's more like:
|
| - 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.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| I don't really think a Yale degree makes you better than
| someone with a community college degree. There's no magic
| at Yale. The education you get everywhere is pretty good
| now because of all the resources universally available to
| all students.
|
| But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts
| the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus
| some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you
| hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not
| the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter
| function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high
| school graduates via that filter function.
|
| And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of
| their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter
| functions to get high performers who others don't know
| about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the
| first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products
| of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high
| school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian
| high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those
| engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though,
| the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as
| getting any other high performing grads.
|
| There was also a brief period of time when Google had an
| edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who
| were good at programming competitions online and via
| contributors to projects in Google's open source
| projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
|
| So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John
| is an elite performer.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| As someone who has studied at both kinds of schools I can
| tell you there is a WORLD of difference. In a middling
| school the professor was constantly providing remedial
| education to the students and had to cut down the
| curriculum breadth and depth.
| smabie wrote:
| Your entire comment basically talks about how a Yale
| degree means you probably better tho?
| codr7 wrote:
| Better at playing the Yale game, which is obviously
| useful in this society but says little else about the
| person.
| smabie wrote:
| Useful in society says a lot?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Not really. Imagine if it takes 20 years to acquire some
| senior status, and the world was 100%
| sexist/racist/whatever 20 years ago(so only white men were
| allowed) but 0% now, you would have a bunch of white men as
| senior rank even though the world isn't
| sexist/racist/whatever any more.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I don't know if employers can solve the issue of not
| finding qualified candidates coming from minorities if
| there are very few such candidates.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Employers are not responsible for forcing people to do the
| work required to be qualified for a position the employers
| are trying to fill.
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If we look at past times these things are brought up; almost
| certainly not. Often things like part-time vs. full time
| aren't considered or amount of overtime hours worked (for
| hourly jobs).
| andai wrote:
| The reasoning I heard is that it's explained by differences
| in personality across the two populations. One group is, on
| average, more assertive, and as a result more likely to
| negotiate higher salary.
| bbatha wrote:
| Which is reasoning that's difficult to prove. To the
| contrary women and underprivileged minorities also feel
| like they can't be assertive without being labeled as
| shrill.
|
| The wage gap, at firms without a history of
| discrimination, is almost entirely determined by women
| having their first child and the support structures
| around it (subsidized childcare, paternity leave,
| flexible hours).[1][2] This suggests the assertiveness is
| probably not the issue.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaconn/2023/11/08/nobel-
| winne... [2]
| https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-
| economist/j...
| darby_nine wrote:
| This explanation hold less and less water as corporations
| switch more firmly to tiered compensation tied directly
| to title.
| jimbokun wrote:
| New employees vs more experienced employees, and
| different job descriptions are even more likely to
| explain the differences.
|
| I don't know if that's the case here. But it would be
| good to investigate all the possible factors before
| coming to any conclusions.
| darby_nine wrote:
| This kind of thing is impossible to control for, though.
| How can you tell whether someone's success or lackthereof
| (including via degree of responsibility) comes from earnest
| evaluation of merit or social bias? I have a difficulty
| imagining trusting _any_ kind of confident assessment of
| the bias at hand.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's really difficult, but that doesn't mean you
| should just give up and take the average.
|
| There was a case recently in the UK where Next (high
| street clothing chain) were paying their warehouse staff
| more than their shop staff for (apparently) similar work.
| The shop workers had a higher proportion of female
| workers than the warehouse workers (something like 70% vs
| 50%).
|
| Next claimed this was because the market rate was higher
| for warehouse workers. They got sued by the female shop
| workers for discrimination.
|
| They lost and have to pay back pay. Now... you might
| think 70% vs 50% is barely a difference - did the Next
| bosses really discriminate? Surely not. Well, that's what
| the court thought too. Apparently even though they
| accepted that there was no conscious or unconscious
| discrimination, the _effect of the pay difference was in
| itself discriminatory_.
|
| I dunno how that makes any sense. The shop workers should
| have sued the IT department and then they'd be in for a
| serious pay day!
| superb_dev wrote:
| The IT department isn't doing comparable work, so of
| course that wouldn't work.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > Yeah it's really difficult, but that doesn't mean you
| should just give up and take the average.
|
| Presumably the rational approach would be mild skepticism
| about confidence, not specifically accepting or rejecting
| any claim. Which leaves this well within the grounds of
| "plausible".
| dwallin wrote:
| It's notable that you completely skipped over the following
| point:
|
| > Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times
| management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from
| underrepresented groups.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| this seems like it could easily be a symptom of aff action
| policies. Making it so firings have to be perfectly
| representative will discourage companies like these from
| taking a chance on an underrepresented candidate who might
| have a slightly weaker resume if they are stuck with the
| decision
| bushbaba wrote:
| Affirmative action at the companies I've worked at was hard
| to hire less qualified individuals into roles. Those folks
| were often under performing but marked as "meets" at
| request of hr. Now with economy and other factors, they are
| being performance managed out given a worse output/impact
| than peers at same level.
| loeg wrote:
| The statistic, just like the other ones, doesn't tell you
| whether these firings were reasonable or not.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Our labor laws are so weak in this country this is nearly
| impossible to determine unless someone fucked up.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Note that a majority of the employees can easily be from
| underrepresented groups.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's worthy of further investigation to understand if
| there's bias in these decisions or some other explanatory
| factor.
| deepsun wrote:
| It's averages. It could take as little as one ultra-high-
| paying worker (like CEO) to skew the statistics of averages.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| There's not enough information to derive this. Mean is a
| subset of things we call average, not a synonym of it.
| not_wyoming wrote:
| This line of questioning is often brought up in response to
| pay gap conversations. Universal trends do not explain
| individual data points, but in general, studies do seem to
| indicate that pay gaps are real.
|
| https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-
| gap-a...
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/07/01/racial-
| ge...
|
| https://www.americanprogress.org/article/women-of-color-
| and-...
| jimbokun wrote:
| I scanned the first article.
|
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| It's funny, every hedge fund and tech startup I've ever
| worked at since roughly 2001 very proudly boasts about how
| they pay women more than the men.
|
| But as my career goes on into the years I find that I'm
| working with less women and less minorities and not more.
| Despite the best of efforts...
|
| If I were to look for evidence though, I would point things
| squarely at the interview process... In the past if you could
| operate a computer you were hired and assumed you would
| figure it out. Nowadays it's much more about fitting a
| certain narrative that's largely down to socioeconomic
| factors... I don't think I've ever worked with someone in
| tech who went to an HBCU, but lots of people who were token
| at NYU, Yale, etc...
| echelon wrote:
| It isn't the interviewing.
|
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on
| average than men
|
| Such statistics are meaningless without more context. For
| example, are women over-represented in entry level positions?
| Do they work the same hours? the same overtime? And so forth.
|
| Articles that present such statistics are pushing propaganda.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Your sea-lioning is making HN worse. Can you please refrain
| from it and follow the guidelines?
| salmonfamine wrote:
| How is this sea-lioning? The evidence being requested is
| highly pertinent to the discussion.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| did they commit thought crime or something? any even
| semi-competent statistician would have these questions,
| and any semi-competent journalist would question numbers
| being produced by an organization that are being used to
| promulgate that organization's agenda. and, moreover, we
| both know that the likelihood that these numbers actually
| properly control for these things is essentially 0. the
| sad thing is that if they did actually do the right
| thing, the numbers would be not as fair, but much more
| heinous and actionable. as it is there is absolutely no
| conclusion to draw for anyone involved-- how is the NYT
| supposed to fix the policy when they cannot even divine
| whether it's an underpromotion problem vs a recruiting
| problem vs an outright racism problem? isn't the goal to
| get them to fix things? the fixes for those three things
| are DRAMATICALLY different from one another.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The above commenter is asking for relevant facts. If Job
| A pays more than Job B and there's a larger proportion of
| men in Job A then men's average pay will be higher, but
| both genders are receiving equal pay for equal work.
|
| If anything, your allegations of sealioning are violating
| HN's guideline "Assume good faith."
| missedthecue wrote:
| I've always wondered why companies don't overhire women to
| save on labor costs.
|
| 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.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Because the reality is that when you adjust for type of
| job, experience, and hours worked the wage disparity
| effectively disappears:
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/08/01/are-
| wome...
| darthrupert wrote:
| What percentage of workers are in the union?
| sensanaty wrote:
| Always love seeing the temporarily-embarassed-billionaire-CEO
| type on HN espousing anti-union views. Such a fascinating
| indoctrination happening there every time.
| azemetre wrote:
| It's not hard to understand, this is a site where people
| champion working overtime hours for the chance at a lottery
| ticket or prefer working for companies that are destructive to
| society and anticompetitive.
| skapadia wrote:
| Highly talented software engineers are still hard to find. If you
| find one, pay them well and do everything you can to retain them.
| devwastaken wrote:
| This is because software dev is a volatile market. It doesn't
| matter how "talented" you are, it's about your rank in the
| social circles and it shows in the product.
|
| There is now far more devs than there is work for them. This is
| a planned strategy to reduce salaries.
|
| If you're "talented". Make your money and get out asap.
| goosejuice wrote:
| Planned by whom?
| zingababba wrote:
| Them >_<
| datavirtue wrote:
| This is what I preach to my kids. Get to work, live at home,
| save everything and invest. There is a huge difference
| between kids attitudes these days and those of the gen-x
| crowd. I loved my first jobs, they were so fun and people
| treated me very well. My children have dipped into the work
| force a bit and found it very nasty and hostile across
| various industries. My son trained as a machinist. A job that
| is very well suited to him. He asked for PPE (respirator,
| gloves) at his first job and was educating himself on the
| chemicals used in his area. After incurring chemical burns
| and respuratory issues he had them put the labels back on the
| barrels and again requested PPE. They threw him out on his
| ass, but not before attempting to humiliate and denigrate
| him. He is traumatized now and seeking disability benefits
| from the government. I don't have much to stand on when
| trying to convince him to keep trying.
| gaws wrote:
| > This is what I preach to my kids. Get to work, live at
| home, save everything and invest.
|
| What are you telling them to invest in?
| wnolens wrote:
| Strange to read, not my experience at all.
|
| > it's about your rank in the social circles
|
| It's among the most meritocratic I have a view into (from
| conversations with friends in.. mechanical engineering,
| entrepreneurship, academia, nonprofit, sales, education, ..)
| gaws wrote:
| > it's about your rank in the social circles
|
| How is this relevant to programming?
| ncr100 wrote:
| Some people care about highly talented software engineers.
|
| But not all corporations do. Many just want somebody to make
| the app go boop. Or the website show a bigger picture.
|
| Rhetorically, Wouldn't it be nice for those people if there
| were Fair rules that protected against abusive hiring, abusive
| firing, abusive management, which can wreck a person's career
| trajectory.
|
| We technology people invest our brains into specialties. We
| solve the specific problems of a business. There is no one size
| fits all solution in our industry. So as we specialize for each
| job, if that job terminated us unfairly, that would just suck.
| So Unions may help balance the scales when working for the
| powerful corporation.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| How much of a comp boost would an average NYT tech worker get if
| the union succeeded? Let's say 10% for the sake of the argument.
| Please correct me if I'm way off.
|
| Wouldn't they be able to get a much higher comp by interviewing
| with other local tech firms? If so, why don't they? Seems more
| effective than waiting and hoping for a small increase through
| the union.
| xingped wrote:
| This is such a weird response. Do you collectively interview
| for other jobs? No. Would you tell any other union this? No.
| Collectively bargain for your current job and raise the
| standards for everyone now and in the future. I don't know why
| tech is so hyper-individualist.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It doesn't raise standards. It squishes them at both ends,
| particularly the top. That might be what you want, but tech
| salaries have bloomed massively because there isn't a union.
| You might say "that's over; now let's lock in our massive
| salaries", but I doubt it'll work that way.
|
| Tech isn't hyper-individualist. It just leans slightly to the
| individual, because any half-decent tech worker is worth a
| lot to an organisation, and they don't need a union rep to
| negotiate on their (and hundreds of other people's) behalf.
| triceratops wrote:
| > tech salaries have bloomed massively because there isn't
| a union
|
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I'm surprised that supply and demand never crossed your
| mind as the reason for high tech salaries
|
| No need to be surprised - it more than crossed my mind.
|
| > Professional athletes, actors, and screenwriters enjoy
| both high salaries and union protections
|
| Well, screenwriters aren't in the same ballpark as the
| other two, but the highly paid athletes and actors are
| not having their wages negotiated by a union rep. They
| have agents. Most actors are barely paid anything, and
| have union membership.
| charlesabarnes wrote:
| Base pay is absolutely negotiated by sport union reps. It
| sets a quality of life standard for participants in their
| respective leagues
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Jeez why do people think I'm against the union? This is a
| forum for asking questions and understanding the world. I
| truly didn't mean to discourage unionization, I was curious
| about the thinking behind joining the union. It's sad that
| even on a tech forum people assume things about each other's
| political opnions instead of discussing.
|
| TLDR: I'm not _telling_ anyone what to do.
| discmonkey wrote:
| Humans tend to like to stay at there they are, in the tech
| context especially. It takes a long time relative to the length
| of a career to learn new systems, make new connections, and
| achieve some level of independence at a new job. There's also
| relatively few jobs that at least pretend to be somewhat
| beneficial to the world while paying somewhat competitive
| salaries (I can't think of any that I've worked at). Then
| there's relationships you may have developed with your
| colleagues.
|
| Finally, if everyone just leaves their jobs without trying to
| improve them, won't everyone run out of places to jump to
| eventually?
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Let's all remember that the vast majority of programmers are not
| mathematicians, nor logicians, nor authors, we are tradespeople.
| And you'll notice that tradespeople in almost every other
| industry unionize.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't understand - how are programmers different to logicians
| in a way that's relevant to this?
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Very few programmers I know spend their time devising logical
| theorems. They spend their time plumbing and engineering
| systems.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| But how's that relevant to this?
| enriquec wrote:
| hes a marxist. they speak in platitudes with no meaning
| to provoke baseless emotional responses
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Programmers are white collar engineers, I think you are
| confused here.
|
| Doesn't mean they can't create/join a union, but they are not
| really in the tradesman category. White collar unions are much
| tinier.
| slt2021 wrote:
| programmers are close to doctors than plumbers: high comp, high
| knowledge industry, constant learning
|
| Doctors have cartel though, instead of union that protects
| their jobs by limiting number of residency slots that limits
| number of new licensed doctors
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Not even close to comparable. Becoming a doctor takes many
| more years than becoming a programmer. They have legal
| ramifications if they make mistakes instead of "teehee oopsie
| all our data leaked sorry". The vast majority of programmers
| have a bachelor's degree or lower. It is actually laughable
| to me that you would compare programmers to doctors.
|
| In any case, we should aspire to follow the model of unions
| and not cartels.
| slt2021 wrote:
| becoming a good engineer takes a lot of years too. your
| average 4 year college degree does not guarantee you become
| an engineer, plenty of new grads are without jobs.
|
| 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
| marxisttemp wrote:
| The best tradespeople I know have worked their trade
| since high school.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Has anyone studied career satisfaction among licensed
| doctors versus unlicensed software developers? It seems
| very common for doctors to feel locked into a choice they
| now regret. In equilibrium a barrier to entry benefits
| the marginal successful entrant not at all.
| slt2021 wrote:
| these are people who go to medical profession for money
| and prestige.
|
| same regrets exists among engineers who go to CS for
| money and faang jobs, and then realize how miserable they
| have become in the process of chasing the gold
| loeg wrote:
| The AMA is functionally similar to a union for Doctors.
| slt2021 wrote:
| AMA does not negotiate paying wage though.
|
| 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
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Not all programmers have high comp, and high comp are
| extremely dependent on market conditions and skills. And a
| programmer career can be rather short too due to ageism.
| Doctors have a much more stable and predictable compensation.
| slt2021 wrote:
| this is due to increasing productivity of the market.
|
| 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).
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Dependent on skills is a good thing.
| ssklash wrote:
| I've always thought that if a union is good enough for LeBron
| James and Tom Brady and Mike Trout, it's good enough for
| anyone. The same reason professional athletes have a union and
| would not dream of doing without one still fully applies to
| everyone else.
| morgante wrote:
| Yet professional athletes don't negotiate the same contract
| for everyone ( _precisely_ why I hate unions and what this
| union is demanding).
| matrix87 wrote:
| Are traditional engineers considered tradespeople by your
| definition?
|
| I kind of doubt actual tradespeople would be fond of us
| referring to ourselves as one of them
| gosub100 wrote:
| A lot (not prepared to say majority) of tech workers aren't
| programmers. If you spend your day plugging services together
| through standard interfaces, that's very much akin to plumbing,
| just without the occupational hazards.
| gaws wrote:
| > we are tradespeople
|
| Programmers are not "tradespeople." What an insane claim.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Most tradespeople are not unionized. Even the most highly
| unionzed trade - electricians - are only 1/3rd unionized. The
| most unionized jobs are not tradespeople, they're teachers and
| police officers. https://smartestdollar.com/research/the-most-
| unionized-occup...
| farceSpherule wrote:
| JFC... Let's just unionize every job...
| ncr100 wrote:
| Awesome news.
|
| In my experience, Mismanagement, both in personnel and
| compensation, seems to be commonplace, as corporations seek to
| lower costs in response to our changing economy. Corporations
| looking to find an advantage may shortchange employees, overwork
| them, and not train managers but rather expect everybody to "just
| work well together", deflecting responsibility.
|
| Unionizing provides a relief valve where unions can strongly
| argue for better working environments. The individual no longer
| has to have a half-baked idea and be afraid to raise it, for fear
| of retribution or simply for fear of being proven to be an
| impotent cog mating to a very large wheel.
| umvi wrote:
| If you read books from the early 1900s (Radium Girls, Rocket
| Boys, Seabiscuit), it's painfully obvious to see how incredibly
| exploitative industries can become (literally working people to
| death) without something like a union to check corporate greed
| against worker well-being.
|
| It's a fine balance though. Unions are organizations very
| similar to companies and can fall victim to the same sins as
| exploitative companies (or worse, like in the 60s when the
| Teamsters Union became controlled by the mafia and was used to
| further organized crime goals)
| bad_user wrote:
| It should also be painfully obvious that, during those times,
| the alternative -- subsistence agriculture -- was much worse,
| and people working in factories no longer starved. The
| industrial revolution, AKA "greed", has ended starvation and
| slavery, so when socialists of late 1800s or early 1900s talk
| of exploitation, that should raise an eyebrow.
|
| 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.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Just fyi the UN estimates 25,000 people die from hunger
| everyday and there are currently 50 million slaves around
| the world. Easy to forget but these things still exist.
| bad_user wrote:
| Yes, in the parts of the world that are still not
| industrialized, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.
|
| It's also easy to forget that during 19th century, 90%+
| of the population suffered from hunger and malnutrition.
| Right now that's around 10%, but it's less than 2.5% in
| the highly industrialized countries.
|
| IMO, the parts of the world still suffering from hunger
| could use more "corporate greed" and industrial
| exploitation.
| mplewis wrote:
| They are dying of hunger _because_ of corporate greed.
| Africa has many of the world's most resource-rich areas,
| but they don't realize the profits: Western corporations
| that extract the resources using local slave labor do.
| Alupis wrote:
| So what's been stopping African companies/government from
| exploiting their own natural resources for all of these
| years?
|
| "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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Colonial and post-colonial intervention.
|
| Control of the resources or territory wasn't magically
| delivered to the people with equity. The colonial
| infrastructure of control was turned over to local
| friendly interests and their successors. (Through
| revolutions, coups, etc)
| Alupis wrote:
| So what's stopping these countries _today_?
| berniedurfee wrote:
| | post-colonial intervention
| Alupis wrote:
| I'll ask again. What is stopping these countries _today_?
|
| Handwavy, vague "post-colonial" whatever isn't a reason,
| it's an excuse.
| antifa wrote:
| The CIA prefers puppet states over independent states.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| That's worldwide and vastly represented by countries that
| missed out on the industrial revolution or have corrupt
| and/or authoritarian governments, no?
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/starvatio...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes, in countries that are not free market countries.
| mplewis wrote:
| 20,500 Americans died of hunger in 2022.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Malnutrition is not the same thing.
|
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| As far as alcohol goes, it's also because it's toxic as
| hell and actively stopping your body from absorbing what
| it needs from food.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Compare that to 1922 when population was much lower.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require a citation.
|
| 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
| dfedbeef wrote:
| "Nobody starved to death in the 1800s or early 1900s" is an
| interesting take.
| dantheman wrote:
| Yep for instance: 1932-1933
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
| fatbird wrote:
| Whether state-funded institutions and unions are more
| corrupt than private enterprise is an empirical question.
| Do you have empirical data to back this up?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Biden's $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only
| produced 7 stations in two years.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-
| solutions/2024/03/28/...
|
| I've never heard of a private company that inept and
| corrupt.
| htek wrote:
| You know the White House isn't personally building these
| charging stations, yes? The money is available and
| awarded to state entities that have to approve and bid
| out contracts, which come with their own set of local
| legislation that slow down the process. The Biden
| administration claims the process will advance faster now
| that states are enacting their own legislation and rules
| regarding charging stations. And you can guess that some
| states, operating on partisan lines, might not want to do
| anything that benefits the Biden administration--why care
| about their constituents' interest in the future when you
| can deny the opposition a win now?
| WalterBright wrote:
| You're describing inefficiency and corruption.
|
| 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.
| fatbird wrote:
| Honeywell, for one, with whom I worked for eight years.
| It's incomprehensible, the wasted money I saw, easily
| reaching to billions over the same time frame. The
| difference is that you hear about large gov't spending
| initiatives, but not about those from Fortune 100s, whose
| incentives are to hide such inefficiencies and waste in
| their required reporting.
|
| Enron. Boeing Starliner. Coke wasting $2B on a failed
| rollout of SAP. There are endless examples of huge piles
| of money pissed away in the private sector through
| inefficiency and incompetence, or outright theft.
|
| However, we were discussing corruption, not inefficiency,
| and your example of Biden's EV program included no
| evidence of actual corruption. Can you think of a
| concrete example?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The pandemic relief funds come to mind.
|
| https://www.gao.gov/blog/more-fraud-has-been-found-
| federal-c...
|
| Googling for "corruption us government" provides endless
| examples. I remember reading about the disappearance of
| vast sums of government money sent to help the Middle
| East and Afghanistan.
| fatbird wrote:
| Your example is fraud, not corruption, meaning parties
| external to the gov't are the guilty parties, not gov't
| employees. Corruption is carried out by insiders.
|
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| You're talking about <1% of a massive piece of
| legislation. If you've never seen a sprawling corporate
| project where the worst 1% of the budget turned out
| poorly you've led a much more charmed professional life
| than I have.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The Biden Admin didn't spend the money, it made the money
| __available to the States__ to fund proposals and
| contracts which the __States__ are responsible to manage.
|
| The money is __allocated__, but it's not __spent__ until
| the States finish viable proposals, and with a completely
| new technology, that takes the States time.
|
| > "State transportation agencies are the recipients of
| the money," ... "Nearly all of them had no experience
| deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this
| law was enacted." ... the process -- states have to
| submit plans to the Biden administration for approval,
| solicit bids on the work, and then award funds -- has
| taken much of the first two years since the funding was
| approved.
|
| > 17 states have not yet issued proposals
|
| If anyone's at fault, it's the States.
| cma wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| qwytw wrote:
| > the alternative -- subsistence agriculture -- was much
| worse, and people working in factories no longer starved.
|
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| A sure sign of a really bad argument is when the
| protagonist uses "not dying" as a justification for
| horrible actions.
|
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > The industrial revolution, AKA "greed", has ended
| starvation and slavery,
|
| 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.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| i'm guessing this comment won't be popular, but i defy any
| downvoter to explain what part of it is wrong, much less
| downvote worthy. are we really gonna stick our heads in the
| sand and pretend like unions aren't (1) famous hotbeds of
| corruption (not the only one in society by any stretch, but
| let's be honest) (2) artificial scarcity of labor supply--
| guess who that benefits? those specific workers... at the
| expense of literally everyone else in society! is that ok?
| probably / it depends / who knows. but it is true. why do
| you think going to the doctor is so expensive? well, lots
| of reason, but artificial scarcity is a huuuge one (3) the
| source of all kinds of asinine rules and regulations that
| are actually really annoying to deal with if you're trying
| to do stuff. like having to pay a "union guy" if you want
| to have any sort of nontrivially elaborate display at a
| convention, etc.
|
| 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.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > it's painfully obvious to see how incredibly exploitative
| industries can become (literally working people to death)
| without something like a union to check corporate greed
| against worker well-being.
|
| I don't think the missing mechanism is unions, I think it's
| an aggressive monopoly-busting government. What we're talking
| about is an industry outstrippinng it's competition and
| harming people - basically the definition of a monopoly.
|
| Totally free markets are self destructive. Well regulated
| free markets are the greatest driving force for human quality
| of life we've found.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >Totally free markets are self destructive. Well regulated
| free markets are the greatest driving force for human
| quality of life we've found.
|
| 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.
| 20after4 wrote:
| You say this as if it's something in the past, like the
| teamsters are not still controlled by the mafia.
| AngryData wrote:
| Part of the problem with unions is still due to anti-union
| laws which effectively locks existing unions into place and
| not allowing members to be like "Nah fuck yall, ill make my
| own union without you corrupt cats in charge."
| nox101 wrote:
| If that was really all unions did that would be great.
|
| Unfortunately, unions also do things like
|
| * keep bad police in their jobs
|
| * keep bad teachers in schools
|
| * add massive costs by protecting positions by forcing specific
| rolls. "You're not allowed to carry monitor into a trade show
| for your indie game booth - only union members and specifically
| union members who's title includes -equipment carrier- are
| allowed to carry equipment". "You're not allowed to plugin your
| monitor for your indie game booth - only union electricians
| area allowed to plugin equipment". Those are actual examples
| I've run into. I've heard of many many others for different
| industries. You can't write a unit test, only a unit-tester can
| write a unit test (made up example)
| pgodzin wrote:
| Is it not possible for "proper" management, rather than
| mismanagement, to result in downsizing a bloated org that over-
| hired, or lowering compensation in an employee-friendly hiring
| environment where a bunch of senior employees where laid off
| across the industry?
|
| Both of those goals seek to lower costs, and goes counter to
| the interests of the union without being considered
| "mismanagement"
| Yawrehto wrote:
| I wonder how long it'll stay. The poor strikers at the Pittsburgh
| Post-Gazette have been going for 22 months[1] (!) so far. It's
| impressive. Until then, they've set up the Pittsburgh Union-
| Progress.[2]
|
| What's weird is how no one seems to mention it, even in
| Pittsburgh. How can a strike go on for 22 months with (almost) no
| one noticing/caring?
|
| [1] https://www.unionprogress.com/2024/08/24/a-22-month-
| strike-j...
|
| [2] Which is somehow only one of several nonprofit news outlets
| covering Pittsburgh? Aside from the Union-Progress there's
| Publicsource, the Allegheny Front, WQED, WESA, the Pittsburgh
| Jewish Chronicle, and the semi-local 100 Days in Appalachia, Belt
| Magazine, Spotlight PA. (As well as the just-closed Pittsburgh
| Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.) It feels weirdly
| disproportionate to its population. Is there any data on the
| cities most overrepresented in nonprofit news outlets covering
| them? Or just news outlets?
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