Hello and welcome to The Table, a new zine produced by members of the Times Guild, the Wirecutter Union and the Times Tech Guild. Have a seat.
BARGAINING IS HEATING UP!
A note from Times Guild members
Every few years, New York Times employees meet with New York Times management to hash out the terms of our employment and advocate for all the rights and benefits we deserve. It is a spicy and wonderful thing. Our contract is up this year, and our bargaining committee — a group of 14 colleagues from across the newsroom — have been fighting for all of us for several months.
So far, we have introduced proposals for protecting our intellectual property rights (so we are fairly compensated when our ideas are sold off to Hollywood), advocating for truly flexible remote work (so we can all do our jobs from a place that is suited to our lives), pushing for better leave policies (for parents, people with health conditions, and anyone who could use a sabbatical), fighting the unfair review process (so we will never have our careers held hostage by an arbitrary ranking), ending the misclassification of casual employees (who have been taken advantage of for too long), improving the company’s DEI practices (so every employee can have a voice and a future here) and much more.
Now we are preparing to introduce our biggest proposal yet: We are asking for more money, for all of us.
SHOW US THE MONEY!
Help us, help you
We are living through an incredibly lucrative time for The New York Times! And the paper’s employees — its reporters, copy editors, security guards, administrative assistants, fellows, design directors, community managers and more — have created this huge amount of value for the company. We create so much value that, in just three years, we helped The Times triple its stock, double its subscribers, pay off all its debts and amass hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.
Our business reporter, Ed Lee, has crunched the numbers. In the time since we bargained our last contract, The Times paid $122 million in dividends to its stockholders. It also paid its top five officers — including A.G. Sulzberger, Mark Thompson and Meredith Kopit Levien — handsomely. They have received an average compensation bump of 17 percent a year since 2018.
And yet many of our own salaries are not even keeping up with inflation. As Ed puts it: “If the paper can afford to honor shareholders with such generosity, couldn’t it also award workers with the same level of tribute?” Indeed! We, too, deserve a handsome annual compensation bump!
So we will be delivering our wage proposals to the company at 9 a.m. on Thursday, June 24, and we need your help. It’s time to show management that we are prepared to fight for what we all deserve. Please fill out this Google Form to RSVP for the Zoom meeting where it will all go down. Wirecutter Union and Times Tech Guild employees are also welcome to join as a show of solidarity. The more, the merrier!
(Note that we’ll break at 11 a.m. for the Newsroom All-Hands, but we’ll resume bargaining from 12 to 1 p.m. Join us at timesguild.slack.com in the #bargaining-observation channel for live updates.)
CHANGE YOUR AVATAR, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
New contract, new you?
Show your solidarity! On Wednesday, June 23, the day before bargaining, we will be changing our online avatars and Zoom backgrounds en masse to show management we mean business.
Click here for a handy step-by-step guide to changing your avatar.
And click here to download the Zoom background you can use on the 24th while observing bargaining.
TELL THE NEW YORK TIMES TO STOP UNION BUSTING
A note from Times Tech Guild members
Two months ago, tech workers at The Times came together to announce our union. We started as a small group talking about how we could improve our workplace. Now, a supermajority of tech workers have voted to unionize and we’re calling on The Times to recognize us. Unfortunately, top management has refused to do so. Instead, they have engaged in illegal union busting behavior. People who work with interns, like Organizing Committee member Bon Champion, were told that they cannot publicly support the union, in violation of the National Labor Relations Act. Managers further crossed legal lines by directing union members to take down their union avatars and interrogating their direct reports about their support.
Enough is enough. We know our rights, and we have enforced them by filing an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charge against The New York Times. We’re asking you, our colleagues, to join us in calling on The Times to stop union busting and to recognize our union. We would be grateful if you signed the petition and shared it with supportive friends and family to bring visibility to our fight.
Meanwhile, we want to show solidarity with you, our fellow Guild members. The Times Tech Guild is circulating a petition for our members to back the DEI and Remote Work proposals that our Times Guild colleagues put forward in bargaining. If you are a member of the tech unit, add your name to stand with our colleagues as they seek to win a fair contract and set standards from which all of us benefit. Labor at The Times is stronger in solidarity!
WHAT WIRECUTTER UNION HAS WON
A note from Wirecutter Union members
Wirecutter Union’s bargaining unit has been hard at work in the two years since our union was voluntarily recognized. We’re now in the final stages of bargaining our first contract. Here are some of our biggest wins so far:
Just Cause: We had a hard fight against management’s attempt to erode Just Cause — the cornerstone of any union contract — with an editorial exception that would allow management to fire anyone for nebulous “editorial reasons.” Thanks to the actions of all Wirecutter Union members, the New Yorker Union’s impressive picket of the New Yorker Festival, and strong solidarity throughout the local, we won Just Cause in our contract!
DEI: After management struck nearly our entire first proposal, we asked them to try again. We won — among many other things — a Diversity Committee consisting of three union members and three management members. This committee will have access to self-identifying staff data (with employee consent), and will be able to discuss problems, make recommendations, and request funding for mutually agreed upon diversity initiatives. Wirecutter will also share year-over-year diversity data publicly, broken out from The Times’s diversity report, for accountability’s sake. This all went into effect 30 days from our tentative agreement with management, rather than having to wait on the full contract ratification.
Employee reviews: Self-evaluations — which have been mandatory for Wirecutter staff — will be optional. We also secured a brand new appeals process for employee reviews that are inaccurate.
Social media policy: Since the Wirecutter Union’s members are product reviewers and not politics reporters, we don’t agree with management that we should be subject to The Times newsroom’s social media policy. We were able to reach a compromise of “being mindful of expressing partisan opinions or promoting political views in public.”
Next up: economics! The Times’s “median employee compensation” reported in its 2020 filings is about $160,000, while the median pay of the Wirecutter Union’s members is currently $76,000. After the latest round of adjustments in May, our lowest paid members make around $50,000, and our biggest focus in economic bargaining is raising this floor. Our initial proposal includes a salary floor of $75,000 for these members, as well as a 6 percent yearly increase for all members. Based on how things have been going, this won’t be an easy fight, and we’ll need all the support we can get to make these salaries more equitable.
WANNA HANG OUT?
Join the picnic of unity
There are three NewsGuild locals based in New York City — the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees, the News Media Guild and the NewsGuild of New York — and we’re getting the whole gang together this Friday for the union-related social event of the season. Snacks, drinks and games will be afoot in Prospect Park this Friday, June 25 starting at 5 p.m. RSVP here to attend.
TAKE A SEAT AT THE TABLE
We seek your talents and expertise
The Table is a new collaborative zine made up of members from the Times Guild, the Wirecutter Union and the Times Tech Guild. It’s a bit of an experiment on how we can all talk to each other about what we’re doing to make our workplaces better. Please get in touch if you’d like to pitch in with writing, reporting, illustrating, Photoshopping a scene from “Jerry Maguire” into a Zoom screenshot, interviewing, programming, designing, printing or performing any other skill you have. (...Modeling?) We hope to create a cornucopia of solidarity content going forward. Have an idea? Email thetable.nyt@gmail.com.
THE TABLE CROSSWORD PUZZLE
We can’t resist a rebus
You had us at hello,
The Table