Posts tagged New York Times
Déjà Vu All Over Again
April 14, 2025 // Reclassification attempts began with a media narrative, then blue-state legislation. The same thing is happening now with sectoral organizing.
The Washington Post’s Tech Workers Have Formed a Union
April 8, 2025 // Many employees in the Post‘s newsroom and business operations are eligible to unions, but the tech workers—product managers, system engineers, people who work on the company’s Arc XP content management system—are not, a quirky legacy from the days when the Post located its WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive business in the management-friendly commonwealth of Virginia. The Post began to integrate tech employees with its news operations in 2009, but the divide remains. The group organized with the Washington Baltimore News Guild as the Washington Post Tech Guild. In their announcement, they say their organization comprises more than 300 people, the majority of people who work on tech for the Post.
The Teamsters’ Imaginary Strike against Amazon
January 3, 2025 // The union doesn’t represent any Amazon employees, and it’s relying on its allies in the mainstream media to hype its supposed strike.
Failed negotiations resulted in union members walking out on the job at news outlets in 2024
January 2, 2025 // During election week, Times staffers dressed in red marched and chanted outside the paper’s Midtown Manhattan office with "Scabby," the giant, inflatable rat that is symbolic of New York City labor disputes, perched outside 620 Eighth Avenue. "We are not a joke, we are not playing," a Guild leader told the crowd on Nov. 4. A New York Times Company spokesperson previously told Fox News Digital that the newspaper was "disappointed" in the timing of the strike.
The New York Times Claimed D.C.’s Minimum Wage Hike Created Jobs. We Exposed Their Error.
November 24, 2024 // These numbers are false. It turns out that Krishna misunderstood the data she was looking at. The chart she linked to in the article presented numbers "in the thousands," meaning that the actual data were not 14,168 but 14,168,000, which also makes sense because Krishna didn't realize she was reading national BLS data—not local figures.
Could AI be used to replace striking workers?
November 19, 2024 // Some of the striking workers handle software and data analysis. It wasn’t clear if, without them, the paper’s website would be able to handle what was an expected influx of election-related traffic. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI company Perplexity, responded on X to Sulzberger’s statements, saying that his company was “on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election.” The tech workers’ strike ended after a week (though without a contract resolution), and there were no reported website outages. But the offer from Srinivas struck many as a way to undercut the union’s power and compromise workers’ ability to fight for better labor conditions. Replies to his comment called him a “scab” (a term for someone who crosses a picket line and replaces striking workers).
New York Times tech staff strikes, threatening Election Day coverage
November 4, 2024 //
NY Times tech union’s bizarre demands to avert strike include four-day work week, ban on scents in break rooms
September 19, 2024 // Tech union workers at the New York Times have threatened to strike on Election Day over a bizarre list of demands that include pet bereavement leave, a four-day work week — and even a ban on scented products in break rooms, according to a report. The Times Tech Guild’s laundry list of demands during its protracted two-year battle for a contract has also included a call for unlimited sick time, job security for non-citizens who are in the United States on work visas in the event of layoffs and mandatory trigger warnings when discussing news events, Semafor reported.
Commentary: The Media Are Doing Free PR for Big Labor
September 13, 2024 // According to a new report from the union watchdog Freedom Foundation (where I work), Big Labor’s return to the spotlight coincides with unionization efforts that have taken newsrooms by storm, securing one in six American journalists as dues-paying members. With journalists “more knowledgeable and sympathetic to labor issues” than ever before, recent union reporting insists that Big Labor is making a comeback; “that unions are good not only for individual workers but also for America itself”; and that legislation meant to ensure union accountability is a threat to democracy.
Journalists are hyping up a supposed golden age for unions while ignoring their corruption and declining popularity.
September 12, 2024 // The mainstream media’s coverage of Big Labor clearly misses the mark. Beyond recent labor reporting centering on hot-button events such as organization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon amid 2023’s “hot labor summer,” coverage of unions creates a false sense of reality. Headlines such as “Unions targeting Big Business: Disney, Mercedes-Benz, CVS face organizing campaigns,” for example, suggest sweeping unionization efforts across the private sector. But in the pharmacy industry, just 30 CVS pharmacists in Rhode Island and Las Vegas voted to join the Pharmacy Guild, a fraction of the 30,000 employed by the drugstore giant.