More than 1,000 New York Times newsroom workers plan to walk out and stop work for 24 hours if company management does not agree to new contract terms by Dec. 8, the union said Friday.
The two parties have been at loggerheads for more than a year over a number of issues. Those tensions have reached a boiling point as the holiday season gets underway.
The main sticking points for workers are wages that keep pace with inflation, as well as healthcare and retirement benefits.
According to a press release from the union, The NewsGuild of New York, management is offering 2.75% average annual guaranteed base-pay raises, despite annual compensation increases of 32.3% for the company's top three executives from 2020-21.
"Times Guild members have been diligently working every day, through a global pandemic and record inflation, while not receiving raises since 2020," said Bill Baker, telecommunications coordinator for The New York Times and unit chair of The New York Times Guild. "We have been bargaining in good faith for 20 months while management's goal has been to slow-walk us to an inferior contract. This has to stop now. It's time for the company to get serious about making a fair deal."
In June, more than 900 Times union employees sent a letter to new executive editor Joe Kahn urging him for a substantive response to the union's wage proposals.
"We're looking for wages that keep up with inflation and the preservation of our healthcare and pension benefits," Times sports reporter Ken Belson said. "This isn't rocket science."
In a letter sent Friday to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, the Guild listed key demands, including a new raise structure, keeping pension plan policies intact and changes to performance evaluations.
A large part of the union's complaint has to do with management's failure to bring adequate wage increase proposals to the negotiating table despite the company doing better financially than it has in years.
"In 2022, the @nytimes spent millions of dollars to purchase Wordle and The Athletic and allocated $150 million in stock buybacks to its investors," a tweet from the Guild read. "And yet it is still offering wage 'increases' that amount to pay cuts during record-high inflation."
Each of the 1,036 union members represented by the Guild has signed a pledge that gives the union's bargaining committee the authority "to call for and schedule a 24-hour work stoppage" if the two sides don't make progress on a new contract by the Dec. 8 deadline.
The Times Guild's last contract expired in March 2021 and the two parties have been meeting regularly to discuss new terms with little progress.
According to the union release, the walkout next week would be the first full-day work stoppage from newsroom employees since the late 1970s, with a brief hour-long and lunch time walkouts in 2011 and 2017.
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