The 1,100 union staffers at the New York Times have staged a walkout that began at midnight on Thursday in a long-running dispute over pay.
The union’s last contract expired in March 2021 and negotiations have been fruitless since then. “We had hoped to reach a fair deal before our deadline, but more than 1,100 of us are ready to take a stand together, for each other and for journalists everywhere,” reporter Jenny Vrentas said in a statement.
CNN Business reports that some departments at the Times could lose up to 90% of their staff.
At 1 p.m. on Thursday, some noted Times columnists will join the picket line, including the author of the 1619 Project Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is scheduled to address the strikers.
The threatened strike comes as the gray lady and the NewsGuild remain at odds over a number of issues, particularly wages. The Times says it has offered the guild “significant increases,” but the union counters that the paper has “frequently misrepresented its own proposals.” The two parties have been bargaining since the last contract expired in March 2021. After a year-and-a-half, unionized workers have had enough and so, last Friday, the NewsGuild informed The Times about its plans to stage a walkout.
Both sides have been working to reach a deal and avert the 24-hour strike. Bargaining persisted into the evening on Tuesday, continuing beyond the planned 9am-5pm window. And it is possible an agreement will somehow be struck before the work stoppage goes into effect.
But it’s not looking great.
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I can’t help but think the two sides are fighting for the scraps leftover from a nuclear holocaust. Newspapers — the dead tree variety especially but the online versions of the mainstream press aren’t much better off — have been dead for 25 years and just don’t know it. They’ve tried to reinvent themselves dozens of times — paywalls, reducing the size of the product, slashing staff — nothing has worked to make newspapers profitable.
Today they are the playgrounds of the ultra-rich, indulging in the fantasy that more than a fraction of the American people believe or care what they publish.
Management at The NYT, while initially “blindsided” by the walkout threat, according to a source, has started preparing for the scenario. The NYT’s human resources chief, Jacqueline Welch, stressed to staffers Tuesday morning, in a memo that CNN obtained, that employees who participate in the work stoppage “will not be paid by the company for the duration of the strike.” Welch added that employees “cannot use vacation or personal days to account for this time” unless it was approved prior to last Friday.
And as Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein reported Tuesday, management is also working to find content to fill the paper during the day of work stoppage. Klein reported that managers are exploring a range of options to keep the news flowing, including pulling from wires and asking reporters to file stories early, as if they were readying for a major holiday. And much of the paper’s international staff is also not in the guild, meaning they are expected to continue their reporting.
Someday, reporters, editors, unions, and management will all come to the same conclusion reached by wheelwrights, carriage makers, blacksmiths, and mom-and-pop grocery stores a hundred years ago.
Learn to code.
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