NY Times staffers walk out — but two key reporters cross picket line
More than 1,100 New York Times staffers walked off the job on Thursday after talks for a new labor contract broke down – but several prominent reporters still had their bylines published as the Gray Lady was hit with its first work stoppage in decades.
Hundreds of members of the New York NewsGuild — including reporters, editors and photographers — turned up at a midday rally outside the company’s Midtown headquarters for the one-day protest.
However, two prominent Times reporters declined to join their striking brethren and contributed a dual byline. Peter Baker, the paper’s chief White House correspondent, and Michael Shear, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who also covers the White House, covered the breaking news of WNBA star Brittney Griner being freed from a Russian jail in a prisoner exchange.
“They are union members who elected not to participate,” one union member told The Post.
Baker and Shear declined to comment when reached by The Post.
Last year, Shear signed a letter written by scores of Times journalists — including award-winning reporters such as Maggie Haberman, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey — protesting the NewsGuild of New York’s decision to raise union dues for members earning more than $140,000 per year, according to The Daily Beast.
Another Times reporter, Annie Karni, also had a byline about Griner but she quickly tweeted that she had written the article in advance of the basketball star’s release. She tweeted that she was honoring the Guild walkout.
Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin put out his financial newsletter on the Times website, but he is not a Guild member.
Other reporters, like Maggie Astor, took to Twitter to plead with users to refrain from opening any Times apps during the day.
Outside the Times building, NYC comptroller Brad Lander led the crowd in rousing pro-union cheers and said he was not even playing the popular Wordle game during the one-day strike. More ominously to Times management, he threatened to pull city pension funds from New York Times Company stock if the company “does not treat its workers fairly.”
The five New York City Retirement Systems have 265,025 shares with the New York Times Company, valued at $7.62M as of Sept 30, according to the Comptroller’s office.
Shares of The New York Times Company fell less than 1% on Thursday.
In anticipation of the walkout, some Times editors scrambled this past week to learn the basics of the web and print edition operations, according to Semafor.
In an email to the newsroom, Times executive editor Joe Kahn said Thursday’s report would be “robust” but that producing it “will be harder than usual,” the newspaper reported in its own story on the strike.
Unionized workers walked off the job — the first work stoppage at the paper since 1978 — after negotiations with management for a new collective bargaining agreement failed to produce a deal. The key sticking points revolve around annual raises, as well as health and pension benefits.
For the first time, one of the leaders behind the one-day strike raised the possibility of taking a strike vote that could lead to a more serious job action in the future.
“More than 80 percent of our members supported this,” Stacy Cowley, a business reporter who was active in the union negotiations, told the Post. “We will do everything we can to reach a fair deal, but if management continues to dig on unacceptable core issues — though we seriously hope not to reach this point — we may be forced to call for a strike authorization vote.”
She added it “does not mean we would be going out on strike immediately.” But it would arm the bargaining committee a stronger hand in the event that talks breakdown completely and it became necessary to strike.
No new negotiating sessions have been scheduled.
Bill Baker, the unit chair of the Times Guild said management had broken off talks at 6:47 pm on Wednesday. The union, citing burgeoning subscription numbers, is demanding that management grant workers an 8% annual raise over the life of a new contract.
The company claimed the union broke off talks and said the wage proposal on the table would amount to an 11% increase, or nearly $33,000 for Guild members making the median salary of $120,000 over the course of a new three-year contract.
But union organizers said that is a deceptive number since it meant half the union members – which includes journalists, photographers as well as some ad business people and security guards – could be making considerably below the median.
They said the real-time wage hike the company is proposing amounts to only 2.75% a year over the last contract, which expired at the end of March 2021. The last pay increase went into effect in March 2020.
The union is pushing for among other things a cost of living increase on top of a real-wage hike, including a minimum base pay of at least $65,000, which it says the company is opposing.
“I didn’t think they would object to a $65,000 floor salary,” reporter Jenny Vrentas told the crowd. “A work stoppage is not what we want. But we’re struggling for all workers and all journalism.”
The sides are also far apart on issues such as remote work policies and the company’s employee evaluation system.
The pressmen and other trade unions did not walk out of the Times’s College Point plant in support of the Guild.
“We are printing,” said John Heffernan, head of the pressmen’s union and the Allied Trade Council – which meant the Times as well as other papers printed at the College Point plant including the Post, Newsday, the WSJ and USA Today would be on the trucks.
The Times, which has grown its subscriber base in recent years, projected an adjusted operating profit of between $320 million and $330 million for 2022 in its most recent earnings report.
However, Times Chief Executive Meredith Kopit Levien said in a companywide email that profits are still not what they were a decade ago, the Times reported.
With Post Wires
