The NewsGuild is fighting the New York Times over a mixed job, ‘excluding jobs’ from union and health funds.
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FIRST ON FOX – The NewsGuild of New York is outraged by the leadership of the New York Times.
The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent a newsletter to workers Tuesday detailing recent labor negotiations. The Guild said it is making a “massive push to end the two-pronged plan The New York Times has created and perpetuates to unfairly outsource jobs to Times Guild employees” and received a revised proposal from the company to end all hybrid job guarantees by March 1, 2027.
“At that time, they will have the right to demand that we work in the office five days a week and complete our guaranteed three weeks of remote work per year. As we saw this fall: If the company can reduce our guaranteed remote work days, they will. But when asked for data on how office work improves our news product, advertising and business performance, Fox News management wrote an email to Digital News.
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The NewsGuild of New York and New York Times leadership held a brainstorming session on Tuesday. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“On our part, we have made a big push to end the two-tiered system The New York Times created and perpetuates by unfairly outsourcing the jobs and employees of the Times Guild. Today, we have asked the company to recognize the right place for more than 50 colleagues in our bargaining unit, people we work closely with as members of the Times Guild Committee,” the Times Guild Committee continued Bargain. “Maintaining the work of the unions is one of our priorities.”
The Guild believes that positions including sound engineers, puzzle editors, audience and SEO editors, office managers based in cities around the country and Newsroom Development and Support team editors deserve “the same important protections and benefits we have fought for under our union contract” and listed “annual raises, cause job protection, hourly overtime or comp time and minimum wages as important examples of each position”.
“One of the five priorities we have identified with this contract campaign is to keep union labor in our union. These unfairly outsourced jobs represent another way the company has disrupted our union by excluding our colleagues who do the same work as us, thus creating a two-tier pay and benefits system,” the Guild wrote.
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The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent a newsletter to workers Tuesday detailing recent labor negotiations. (Getty Images)
The Guild told members that it proposed that the Times should provide the Guild with 30 days’ notice when it creates a new job “that such job is under the authority of the Guild or the position is excluded,” and that any disputes regarding the newly created jobs should be “directed to prompt arbitration provisions using a panel of alternate parties.”
The Guild wants The Times to provide a description of the duties, responsibilities, proposed classification and effective date of the new job. The Guild also requests that it be clearly recognized that open jobs are Guild-represented positions if they are posted internally or externally, and 30 days’ notice when individuals currently not represented by the Guild are transferred to unlisted Guild positions.
“We received company responses to our requests for information related to several of our key issues in these discussions: badge-swipe surveillance used to enforce office expectations; the company’s existing and planned use of artificial intelligence; and creating a two-tiered plan to exclude The Athletic from our organization,” the Bargain Times Guild Committee wrote.
“Unfortunately, management has refused to respond — almost across the board — in detail to our requests, instead dismissing our questions as ‘overbroad,’ ‘speculative,’ ‘unnecessarily burdensome,’ and ‘irrelevant,'” they added.
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Members of the Times Tech Guild picket outside the New York Times headquarters in New York on Nov. 4, 2024. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Guild also told members that the Times “revised its proposal to fund our health fund,” but rejected the idea that it would “put money into the fund.”
“We understand that. It goes way back [cost] sharing and responsibility,” Times for Labor Relations Executive Director Chris Biegner told the Guild, according to a newsletter provided to members.
“In opposition to our performance evaluation proposal, management rejected several of our proposed changes, including exemption from the appraisal system for employees who take certain leave, specifying who (such as desk heads, head planners and HR) contributed to the performance evaluation, and changing the review period to cover the entire work year,” the organization said.
The next discussion session is scheduled for Feb. 18. The current contract expires at the end of the month.
The Guild told members it proposed that the Times should give the Guild 30 days’ notice when it creates a new job “regardless of whether that job is under the authority of the Guild or the position is being eliminated.”
When reached for comment, The New York Times provided Fox News Digital with a series of internal memos that managing editors Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan sent to members of the Times Guild unit.
In January, Lacey and Ryan said the talks had been “successful,” but felt the focus was on concerns about non-Guild workers. The Athletic, which is a separate organization whose leadership team is owned by the Times, has been in the doldrums.
“In the room, the Guild has indicated that it will not accept any terms of the contract that does not include Athletic joining the New York Times newsroom bargaining unit. We fear that setting this condition undermines the way to reach a good agreement anytime soon,” Lacey and Ryan wrote last month after the first negotiation session.
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“The company has repeatedly said that we will recognize the unionization of Athletic employees as a separate unit if they choose to continue with it,” they continued. “We also want to state up front that we do not think we should hold a new contract and higher wages for approximately 1,500 Times Guild workers because of the need to include workers from completely different households.”
Lacey and Ryan insisted they would like to reach an agreement.
The Athletic’s publisher David Perpich previously said he believed “the best way would be for The Athletic’s reporters to form a separate discussion unit within the NewsGuild, not to join the Times division.”
