itstargetnews
Former Education Department Press Secretary Angela Morabito criticizes the National Education Associations’ commitment to fight ICE and more in The Bottom Line.
FIRST ON FOX – The New York NewsGuild is upset The New York Times leadership
The Times Guild Bargaining Committee on Tuesday sent employees a newsletter detailing the latest labor negotiations. The Guild said it made a “big push to end the two-tier system created and perpetuated by The New York Times that wrongly excluded Times Guild jobs and workers” and received a revised proposal from the company to end all hybrid job guarantees by March 1, 2027.
“At that point, they would have the right to require us to work in the office five days a week and to eliminate our contractually 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 working in the office makes our news product, advertising and business operations better, management quietly wrote,” the email obtained on the table of the Guild fell silent. Fox News Digital.
JONATHAN TURLEY: NY TIMES COLUMNIST Dives Into JD VANCE’S NEW MOM, who mocks him from below.
The NewsGuild of New York and management of the New York Times held a bargaining session on Tuesday. (Photo via Getty Images)
“On our side, we made a big push to end the two-tier system created and perpetuated by the New York Times by wrongfully excluding Times Guild jobs and workers. Today, we asked the company to recognize the rightful place of our colleagues in our bargaining unit, people we work side by side with as members of the Times Guild,” the Times Guild Bargaining Committee continued. “Keeping union work in the union is one of our core priorities.”
The Guild believes that positions that include audio engineers, puzzle editors, audience and SEO editors, bureau chiefs based in cities around the country and newsroom development and support team editors deserve “the same critical protections and benefits we’ve fought for in our union contract” and include “annual raises, cause only job protections, hourly overtime or wages minimums for each position and minimum wages”.
“One of the five core priorities we all identified for this contract campaign is to keep union labor in our union. These improperly excluded jobs represent another way the company has undermined our union by arbitrarily excluding colleagues who are doing the same work as us, thereby creating a two-tier system of pay and benefits,” the Guild wrote.
The Times Guild bargaining committee sent staff a bulletin Tuesday detailing the latest labor negotiations. (Getty Images)
The Guild told members it proposed that the Times must give the Guild 30 days’ notice when it creates a new job “whether that job falls within the Guild’s jurisdiction or the position is excluded,” and that any disputes over newly created jobs should be “referred to the provisions for expedited arbitration using the parties’ panel of jurisdictional arbitrators on a rotating basis.”
The Guild wants the Times to provide a description of the duties, responsibilities, proposed classification and effective date of a new job. The Guild also requests that job openings be clearly marked as Guild-represented positions when posted internally or externally, and with 30 days’ notice when currently Guild-represented individuals are transferred to non-Guild positions.
“We received the company’s responses to our requests for information related to several of our core issues in these negotiations: the badge surveillance used to enforce expectations in the office; the company’s existing and planned uses of artificial intelligence; and the creation of a two-tier system excluding The Athletic from our union,” the Times Guild Bargaining Committee wrote.
“Unfortunately, management refused to respond, in almost every way, in detail to our requests, instead dismissing our questions as ‘overbroad,’ ‘speculative,’ ‘overwhelming,’ and ‘irrelevant,'” they added.
DHS confronts Nova Hora after reports pregnant Minneapolis women ‘hide from ice’
Members of the Times Tech Guild picket outside the New York Times headquarters in New York on November 4, 2024. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Guild also told members that the Times had “updated its funding proposal for our health fund”, but rejected the idea that it would “fail the fund”.
“We understand that. It still comes down to (cost) sharing and accountability,” Times Executive Director of Labor Relations Chris Biegner told the Guild, according to the newsletter distributed to members.
“In contrast to our performance evaluation proposal, management rejected several of our proposed changes, including exemptions from the rating system for employees who take a certain amount of leave, transparency about who (such as desk heads, master editors, and human resources) contributed to an employee’s evaluation, and changing the review period to cover a full year of work,” the Gui wrote.
The next negotiation session is scheduled for February 18. The current contract expires at the end of the month.
The Guild told members it proposed that the Times must give the Guild 30 days’ notice when it creates a new job “whether that job is within the Guild’s jurisdiction or the job is excluded.”
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 have sent to members of the Times Guild unit.
In January, Lacey and Ryan said the talks had been “productive” but felt too much focus was being placed on worrying about non-Guild employees. The Athletic, a separate entity with its own management team that is owned by the Times, has been a sticking point.
“In court, the Guild indicated that it would not accept any contract condition that does not cover The Athletic’s membership in the New York Times newsroom bargaining unit. It fears that setting such a condition would undermine the path to a good deal soon,” Lacey and Ryan wrote last month after the first session of negotiations.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX BUSINESS APP
“The company has said many times that we would recognize the unionization of Athletic employees as a separate unit if they choose to go through with it,” they continued. “We also want to state at the outset that we do not believe we should maintain a new contract and higher wages for about 1,500 Times Guild employees because of a demand to bring in employees from an entirely separate newsroom.”
Lacey and Ryan have insisted they would like to reach an agreement.
The Athletic editor David Perpich previously indicated that he believes “the best approach is for the Athletic reporters to form a separate bargaining unit within the NewsGuild, not to absorb them into the Times unit.”
