On Thursday morning, a giant inflatable rat nicknamed Scabby sat outside an office tower in Midtown Manhattan. The biggest story in the news that day was happening on the doorstep of the biggest name in news.
Over 1,000 New York Times workers are on a one-day strike, accusing management of failing to deliver a new contract that would pay workers a sustainable wage and make the Gray Lady a more equitable place to work. It’s the first full-day labour stoppage at the paper since 1981.
More than just a labour dispute, the union battle touches on many of the biggest issues facing the media industry, at the most iconic paper in the world, and is a reminder of the increasing labour militancy across the United States in recent times.
“When I started at the New York Times less than a year ago, I did not think I would be standing on a picket line today,” sports reporter Jenny Vrentas told a crowd massed outside the Times offices.
“But I also did not think the company would refuse to agree to a $65,000 salary floor, which is necessary to ensure our workers don’t have to come from money, don’t have to work a second job to be part of the New York Times,” she added. “That is essential to having an equitable newsroom.”
The assembled reporters chanted, “We make the paper, we make the profits,” and rained boos on management when Ms Vrentas brought up the company’s decision earlier this year to spend $150m on stock buybacks, sending money to investors.
Negotiations between Times leadership and the union to replace the previous contract, which expired in March 2021, broke down on Wednesday evening.
The NewsGuild, which represents the Times union, said management walked away from the bargaining table with five hours to go before the previously announced strike deadline, while Times executives say they were still in negotiations when they learned the strike was already in motion, the Associated Press reports.
The Times union, which represents many of the company’s reporters, as well as advertising employees, digital staff, assistants and building personnel, has pressed the company to share more of its roughly $320m in 2022 operating profits with workers, as inflation and the high cost of living in New York City strain workers.
“The NYT is not just journalists,” star magazine writer and 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “We’re striking for our lower paid colleagues, those who put out the paper, our security guards, our news assistants. That is the point of COLLECTIVE actions. We fight together.”
The union has proposed a 10 per cent raise on ratification, along with a 5.5 per cent raise in 2023 and 2024. The company, meanwhile, has counted with a lower offer of a 5.5 per cent raise on ratification, as well as 3 per cent raises in 2023 and 2024.
To Times staffers participating in the walkout, the offer is far too low, given the paper’s robust financial health and explosion of digital subscribers during the Trump years, as well as its splashy acquisitions like paying over $1m for the puzzle game Worldle and $550m for sports news site The Athletic.
“This company pledged $150 million in stock buybacks this year, but it’s offering staff what amounts to a pay cut, during record inflation in the most expensive city in the world,” New York Times critic-at-large Amanda Hess wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “I love the Times and wish it loved me back.”
Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of the New York Times company, wrote in a Wednesday message to the newsroom it was “disappointing” that reporters were striking, “given the clear commitment we’ve shown to negotiate our way to a contract that provides Times journalists with substantial pay increases, market-leading benefits, and flexible working conditions.”
She added that “our ability to carry out our mission is inextricably linked to our financial success as a company,” and that the company’s proposals were guided by a plans to “continue to invest in the best newsroom in the world.”
Ms Levien, named CEO in 2020, has a $900,000-a-year salary, and was projected to earn as much as $5.9m in 2021 including incentive awards, according to the Times.
Jamaal Bowman, a Democratic congressman from New York, voiced his support for the strikers and encouraged readers to stay away from The New York Times for the duration of the action.
“Do not cross the digital picket line,” he said in a video message on Wednesday. “Let’s stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are walking off the job in protest to make sure they earn the wages they deserve.”
Pay isn’t the only issue driving the strike.
Union members say a new employee rating system, implemented in 2018, systematically undervalues employees of colour.
"Being Hispanic reduced the odds of receiving a high score by about 60%, and being Black cut the chances of high scores by nearly 50%," according to a NewsGuild report on the system, compiled with the assistance of Times reporters.
The paper told NPR after the release of the study it is “committed to a performance evaluation system that is fair and equitable, and we have been working to continuously improve it."
In 2016, a lawsuit accused Ms Levien of discriminating in favour of workers who were “younger employees without families, and who were white.”
The suit, which the paper said “had no merit,” was later settled.
Internally, the newsroom has faced repeated internal conflicts over its treatment of reporters of colour, with some arguing the paper selectively enforces a social media policy that stifles them from sharing their views.
The two sides in the labour dispute have reached agreement on some things, such as management allowing the union to choose between an adjustable pension plan and a 401(k) retirement scheme, and expanding coverage for employee fertility treatments.
The walkout comes as journalists are on strike from the newsrooms of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Fort Worth Star-Telegram are also on strike, and falls a summer and fall where reporters from Gannett-owned papers and Thomson Reuters staged strikes of their own.
Union activity is currently flourishing in the news business, as companies continually shed jobs amid a rapidly changing digital world, where social media increasingly replaces both the content and the delivery channels traditionally created by news outlets.
US newsroom employment has fallen by 26 per cent, or roughly 29,000 jobs lost, since 2008, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center report.
Last week, CNN announced mass layoffs, including high-profile figures like Chris Cillizza, and the end of live programming on sister network HLN.
And it’s not just the news business where people are striking.
Culture workers of all kinds are taking action, from over a 1,000, largely adjunct professors at the New School going on strike in November, to the massive labour organizing underway in the University of California system, where 48,000 academic workers went on strike last month.
Meanwhile, the White House had to directly intervene in negotiations that have been ongoing since 2020 between workers and the major US railway carriers, with Joe Biden delivering a deal that raised wages but didn’t provide any sick leave, in a move workers described as a “one-two punch.”
