The Weird New York Times Walkout
Did you even notice?
News junkies of the kind likely to be reading this are probably aware that the New York Times guild staged a one-day walkout yesterday in protest over long-unresolved labor talks. But, absent reporting that it was going to happen and that it did happen, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have noticed.
New York magazine’s Shawn McCreesh wonders, “Just What Did the Times Walkout Change?“
As they have been threatening to do for months now, the New York Times newsroom went on a one-day strike today.
As a reader, you might not have noticed. The paper got its Brittney Griner–is-free scoop out on a push notification before the Washington Post did. The homepage was well stocked, even if some of the features (“20 Cookie Videos That Will Put You in the Holiday Spirit”) seemed not so urgent. News items, including the paper’s own account of the walkout, appeared mysteriously bylined “By The New York Times.” Unlike the era when a newspaper strike meant there was no physical newspaper, which meant no news, now publishing a story is just a click on the CMS away. And management is trained to click these days. No pressman required.
The website is what matters, and it’s pretty easy to program a Potemkin homepage. Editors can resurface stories from earlier in the week, play them front and center, and readers will click. All week long, editors have instructed their reporters to pre-write stories for today. The bosses are also getting by with help from foreign correspondents and bureau chiefs who aren’t in the union, plus a couple of scabs. The staff is splenetic that two White House reporters, Peter Baker and Michael Shear, never stopped filing. (Tomorrow night’s holiday party for the Washington bureau is shaping up to be an awkward one.) And according to a source familiar with audience numbers, Wordle use did not dip, despite calls from the unionized staff for Wordlers to lay off it for a day in solidarity with the stoppage.
And everyone will be back to work tomorrow. At least for now.
As far as I can tell, everything is back to normal today. Then again, it seemed pretty normal yesterday, too.
Still, what a spectacle: The management of the nation’s most elite, center-left news organization, which, in its opinion pages, supports unionization at places like Amazon and endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president in part because she would “give workers more ability to bargain collectively,” is now telling its impecunious staff to quit clanking their tin cups. The workers want raises that keep up with inflation, and the company is on track for an annual operating profit of more than $300 million.
Management hasn’t been totally inflexible. They’ve agreed not to axe the company pension plan (yes, they still have a pension plan, not just a 401(k)), dispensed with a longtime byzantine pay scheme that would have unfairly reduced raises for certain employees based on certain salary floors, and proposed meaningful benefits on fertility treatment. Last night, executive editor Joe Kahn sent a note to the newsroom saying, “Strikes typically happen when talks deadlock. That is not where we are today.” But they are far enough apart, and the staff riled up enough, for that not to matter.
The union has, oddly, done quite a poor job publicizing its grievances so I have no strong opinion as to their merit. One presumes Times staffers are highly paid by newspaper standards and that they still have an old-fashioned pension plan is unusual. Certainly, given that and the prestige the masthead holds, management could fire every single employee and replace them with competent professionals—so much so that the readership wouldn’t notice a dropoff. At the same time, given that the paper is (surprisingly, given general industry trends) profitable, raises that keep up with inflation hardly seems an insane ask.
Then again, McCreesh notes, an old-fashioned strike is simply harder now that the Times is mostly a digital enterprise with the paper itself something of a vestige of a bygone era.
Given the recessionary headwinds seen coming towards the industry, with many other newsrooms like CNN having already announced layoffs and others expected to, management’s perspective is that giving out what they see as imprudently large raises is not only bad planning for an uncertain future, but also out of step with the rest of the news business’s current norms. Yes, the Times is unusually, even uniquely, well positioned among its peers right now, but they feel like keeping a lid on costs will help them remain so.
So far, the NewsGuild and members of the bargaining committee have refused to negotiate in person. They’ve been doing this all over Zoom with hundreds of colleagues watching. “That dramatically changes how things are done,” says one Times executive. “They are playing to this audience, the whole thing becomes so performative and theatrical in ways that make it hard to get things done.”
Many reporters quietly admitted to me this week that they think it’s lame how their representatives won’t just get in a room to hash it out. “The Guild is sort of like the Democratic Party,” says one reporter who is a member. “There are a bunch of moderates who are like, Yeah, this seems fair, everybody needs a fair contract. And then there are a bunch of Bernie and AOC types who are just like, Let’s burn the goddamn building down. I get those vibes every time I log onto one of those calls.” (Management has said that if the Guild agrees to negotiate in person, they’ll allow a hybrid bargaining session in which members can still beam in to observe the proceedings, and that anyone concerned about COVID can also participate virtually.)
I asked more active Guild members about why their representatives shouldn’t go face the Times lawyers IRL. Their answers basically boil down to, This is how we’ve done it this whole time; why should we change now?
Surely there’s more to it than that. But quasi-public negotiations are, frankly, simply bizarre. It’s much easier to deal when no one is incentivized to perform for an audience.
In the old days, strike negotiations at the Times were always smoothed out by the classy hand of Theodore Kheel, the famed labor mediator who was variously described as “the most influential peacemaker in New York City in the last half-century” and “the master locksmith of deadlock bargaining.” Kheel once said, “The essence of mediation is getting information. The dirtiest question you can ask in bargaining is ‘What will you settle for?’ If you ask that question, you ought to resign, but that’s the question you must have an answer to. You get it by asking every question except that. What’s left over is the answer.”
Ultimately, the staff just wants more money, and management has budged very little on that. I went on Brian Lehrer’s radio show earlier this week to discuss this subject and a bunch of them began jamming up the phone lines, calling in to give union talking points. Their rage is metastasizing to find new targets beyond the usual suspects of Sulzberger and his CEO. This week, everyone was fuming at Jacqueline Welch, the human-resources boss who joined the paper last year and was compensated with nearly $1.5 million. It was Welch who notified them all that anyone participating in today’s strike would be docked a day’s pay, as opposed to the company counting it as a sick or vacation day.
I mean, obviously. Management isn’t going to pay workers to strike.
Just as obviously, reporters seen themselves as the core of the enterprise and are going to be outraged when bureaucrats are making way more than them. $1.5 million seems like an absurd amount to pay an HR manager but, then again, I don’t know that field, let alone as it pertains to New York City. Presumably, that’s the going rate.
I don’t know anything specific, but I would guess it’s a C-level position and as such her compensation is less heavily dependent on salary and more on performance and profitability. If that is correct the fact that they were highly profitable last year would imply a large compensation outside of salary.
Sort of reminds one of high school students walking out of a mandatory assembly, but being back for lunch.
Given the employment carnage that is sweeping the news industry, unions, at even profitable outlets like the Times, have reduced leverage to gain concessions. Some of the rank & file don’t understand this and others won’t.
Except for the headlines on aggregation sites, I wouldn’t have noticed the walkout.
While I will agree with you that it’s unusual to have public observers, I suspect that had negotiations at the school I was teaching at been public, the president of the college would not have come to the meeting to tell us (and I quote), “you’re simply not getting any more of MY MONEY [emphasis by speaker],” but we would have rooted for her to.
I didn’t visit the Times website yesterday in solidarity with the workers and no one in my Wordle group played. Instead we played alternates (Worldle and Tradel for me, but others included a Harry Potter one and a Taylor Swift one) and also played mentally and all had fantastic scores.