New York Times Union Holds One-Day Strike
Negotiators for the company and the union, which
represents most of the newsroom, have failed to come to an agreement on
salaries, health and retirement benefits, and other issues.
By The New
York Times
Published
Dec. 7, 2022
Updated
Dec. 8, 2022, 7:00 a.m. ET
Reporters
and editors at The New York Times began a one-day strike on Thursday, saying
talks between their union and the company had dragged on and showed limited
progress.
The
contract between The Times and The New York Times Guild expired in March 2021,
and about 40 bargaining sessions have been held since. Negotiators have failed
to come to an agreement on salaries, health and retirement benefits, and other
issues.
More than
1,100 employees signed a pledge to strike for 24 hours. The union negotiating
the contract, which is part of the NewsGuild of New York, represents about
1,450 employees in the newsroom, advertising and other areas of the company.
More than 1,800 people work in The Times’s newsroom.
In a
statement on Wednesday evening, the union accused The Times of bargaining in
bad faith.
“Their wage
proposal still fails to meet the economic moment, lagging far behind both
inflation and the average rate of wage gains in the U.S.,” the union said in
its announcement that it would strike.
In a note
to the newsroom, Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The Times, said he was
disappointed with the union’s decision.
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“Strikes
typically happen when talks deadlock. That is not where we are today,” Mr. Kahn
said. “While the company and the NewsGuild remain apart on a number of issues,
we continue to trade proposals and make progress toward an agreement.”
Compensation
remains the most contentious aspect of the negotiations. The Times has offered
union members a 5.5 percent raise upon ratification of the contract, 3 percent
raises in 2023 and 2024, and a 4 percent retroactive bonus to compensate for a
lack of raises since the contract expired. The union has proposed a 10 percent
raise upon ratification, 5.5 percent raises in 2023 and 2024, and an 8.5
percent retroactive bonus.
Other
issues discussed during talks include return-to-work policies and the company’s
performance rating system for employees. In a study it released in August, the
union said the system was discriminatory.
“White Guild
members were more likely to get the top ratings,” the study stated, “while
Black and Hispanic members were more likely to get the lowest two ratings.”
After the
union released that report, a team of senior managers at The Times studied ways
to improve the rating process. In October, Marc Lacey, a managing editor,
announced plans to update it.
“Our
ultimate aim is to have a simpler system that everyone applies fairly and
consistently, and to focus more on thoughtful feedback than ratings,” Mr. Lacey
wrote.
During the
walkout, nonunion newsroom employees will largely be responsible for producing
the news report.
“We will
produce a robust report on Thursday,” Mr. Kahn wrote in his email to the
newsroom. “But it will be harder than usual.”
Facing a
slowdown in advertising and an uncertain economic outlook, some media
organizations have cut staff in recent weeks, including CNN, BuzzFeed and the
Gannett newspaper chain. During its negotiations with The Times, union
negotiators have argued that reporters and editors are struggling with
inflation as the company produces healthy operating profits.
Meredith
Kopit Levien, chief executive of The Times, wrote in a companywide email that
investments in the news report had resulted in high-paying, secure jobs for
many journalists. She said that profits had not caught up to where they were
decades ago.
“Those
investments are possible because of the great care we’ve taken as a company
over the last decade to work our way back to economic growth in a radically
transforming industry,” Ms. Levien said. “We’ve done so by making financial
decisions that are sustainable not just in the moment, but for years to come.”
Times
journalists have rarely gone on strike. They did so for less than a day in
1981, and there was a brief walkout in 2017 to protest the elimination of the
copy desk. No labor action has stopped publication of The Times since a strike
of pressmen and others in 1978, which lasted 88 days.
The union
has planned a demonstration outside The Times’s headquarters in New York on
Thursday afternoon
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