NewsGuild battles New York Times over hybrid work, ‘wrongly excluding jobs’ from union and health fund
FIRST ON FOX — The NewsGuild of New York is irked at The New York Times leadership.
The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent staffers a newsletter on Tuesday detailing the latest labor negotiations. The Guild said it made a "big push to end the two-tier system The New York Times created and perpetuates by wrongly excluding jobs and workers from the Times Guild" and received a revised proposal from the company to end all hybrid work guarantees on 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 in-office work makes our news product, advertising and business operations better, the management side of the table was silent," the Guild wrote in the email obtained by Fox News Digital.
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"On our side, we made a big push to end the two-tier system The New York Times created and perpetuates by wrongly excluding jobs and workers from the Times Guild. Today, we asked the company to recognize more than 50 of our colleagues’ proper place in our bargaining unit, people with whom we work side by side 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 positions including audio engineers, puzzle editors, audience and SEO editors, bureau chiefs based in cities across the country and editors on the Newsroom Development and Support team deserve "the same critical protections and benefits we have fought for under our union contract" and listed "annual raises, just cause job protections, hour-for-hour overtime or comp time and minimum salaries for each position" as key examples.
"One of the five core priorities we all identified for this contract campaign is keeping union work in our union. These wrongly excluded jobs represent another way the company has undercut our union by arbitrarily excluding colleagues who are doing the same work as us, thus creating a two-tier system of pay and benefits," the Guild wrote.
The Guild told members it proposed that the Times should give the Guild 30 days notice when it creates a new job "whether such job falls within the jurisdiction of the Guild or the position is excluded," and that any disputes over newly created jobs should be "referred to the expedited arbitration provisions utilizing the parties’ Jurisdiction panel of arbitrators on a rotational basis."
The Guild wants the Times to supply it with a description of the duties, responsibilities, proposed classification and effective date of a new job. The Guild is also asking it to be clearly noted that open jobs are Guild-represented positions when posted internally or externally, and for 30-days’ notice when individuals currently represented by the Guild are transferred to Guild-excluded positions.
"We received the company’s responses to our requests for information related to several of our core issues in these negotiations: badge-swipe surveillance being used to enforce in-office expectations; the company’s existing and planned uses of artificial intelligence; and the creation of a two-tier system by excluding The Athletic from our union," the Times Guild Bargaining Committee wrote.
"Unfortunately, management declined to respond — nearly across the board — in detail to our requests, instead dismissing our questions as ‘overly broad,’ ‘speculative,’ ‘unduly burdensome,’ and ‘not relevant,’" they added.
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The Guild also told members that the Times "updated its proposal for financing our health fund," but dismissed the notion it would "bankrupt the fund."
"We understand that. It still goes back to [cost] sharing and responsibility," Times Executive Director for Labor Relations Chris Biegner told the Guild, according to the newsletter distributed to members.
"In their counter 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, masthead editors and H.R.) contributed to an employee’s evaluation, and shifting the review period so that it covers a full year of work," the Guild wrote.
The next bargaining session is scheduled for Feb. 18. The current contract expires at the end of the month.
When reached for comment, The New York Times provided Fox News Digital with a series of internal notes that managing editors Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan have sent to Times Guild unit members.
In January, Lacey and Ryan said conversations have been "productive," but feel too much focus is being spent worrying about staffers who are not members of the Guild. The Athletic, a separate entity with its own leadership team that is owned by the Times, has been a sticking point.
"In the room, the Guild indicated that they would not accept any contract terms that don't cover The Athletic joining The New York Times newsroom bargaining unit. We fear that setting this condition undermines the path to getting to a good deal any time soon," Lacey and Ryan wrote last month after the first negotiating session.
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"The company has said many times that we would recognize unionization for Athletic employees as a separate unit if they choose to pursue it," they continued. "We also want to state up front that we don’t think we should hold up a new contract and higher salaries for some 1,500 Times Guild employees because of a demand to incorporate employees from an entirely separate newsroom."
Lacey and Ryan have insisted they would like to reach a deal.
The Athletic publisher David Perpich previously stated that he believes "the best approach is to have The Athletic’s journalists form a separate bargaining unit within the NewsGuild, not to have them absorbed into the Times unit."