![]() ![]() It’s the sort of stunt that precedes an actual sustained strike. But the walkout threat is a marked escalation from an ordinarily fissiparous newsroom. (“There will be plenty of photo-ops,” muses one.) Sure, masthead myrmidons will have enough copy in the hopper to keep that homepage humming for a little while, and it’s not as though the app on your phone will suddenly go blank. ![]() Reporters tell me they’re ready to picket outside the building, too. (You’d be shocked at how many people it takes to produce one of those things.) Even logging into Oak (that’s their CMS) will be seen as scabby. From midnight to midnight, no reporting, no filing stories, no podcasting, no comment moderating, and definitely no responding to editors’ queries. No one covering the tumult in Guangzhou or inside Buckingham Palace or what our president is saying. Picture it: a full day without the New York Times. What the employees are preparing to do next week would be something not seen at the paper of record since 1978. But those were mostly shows of solidarity. There was a one-hour walkout over a lapsed contract in 2011, and another quick afternoon walkout in 2017 over copy editors being eliminated. If they don’t get enough of a salary bump, they’re going to stop working for 24 hours next Thursday.Ī walkout is technically a strike, though one with an end date. But what the employees really want is permanent increases in base pay. The letter demands a weeklong marathon bargaining session over health-care funds and return-to-office policies and their pension plan. So now they’ve decided to give the boss a hard deadline. For months, the newsroom has been pressing its publisher for a bigger share of the Times’ profits, but it turns out the guy whose predecessors were nicknamed Punch and Pinch is no pushover. 8, we are walking out.”īack in September, I wrote about how the unionized staff and management hadn’t come to terms on a new labor contract and were threatening to do something like, well, what this letter has finally threatened to do. ![]() Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien received a letter from Bill Baker, unit chair of the Times guild, that was signed by more than 1,000 employees. This morning at 8 a.m., New York Times publisher A.G. ![]()
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