John Lamparski/Sipa USA via AP Images
New York Times employees and journalists participate in a 24-hour contract walkout, the first such strike in more than 40 years, December 8, 2022, in New York City.
The business side of The New York Times has a lot to crow about. Consider the following and forgive me for throwing all these numbers at you, dear reader.
- After having an operating profit of $176 million in 2020, the Times estimates that its operating profit will jump to around $325 million this year, a very impressive 84 percent increase.
- Digital subscriptions have soared to eight million (not including The Athletic), five times as many as the 1.6 million in 2016.
- The Times has increased its dividend per share by 33 percent from two years ago and more than doubled its dividend from four years ago.
- In February, the Times announced a $150 million stock buyback plan for this year, a move designed to please investors by boosting the company’s stock price.
Beyond that, total compensation for the Times’ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, jumped by 49 percent last year, to $3.6 million, while compensation for the company’s CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, climbed by 31.6 percent to $5.75 million, a nearly $1.4 million increase over 2020.
As Larry David would say, that’s pretty, pretty good.
But at the same time, Times management has told the 1,100-plus unionized journalists in its newsroom—the journalists who make the Times the world’s greatest newspaper—that it won’t give them raises that come close to keeping up with inflation. Not only that, until last week, 21 months after the newsroom’s union contract expired, Times management was insisting on eliminating its journalists’ pension plan and cutting its overall contributions to their health and retirement plans, notwithstanding the company’s vastly improved operating profits. (I should note that the newsroom’s 1,400-person bargaining unit also includes advertising salespeople, security guards, and some other Times employees.)
In the 21 months since the newsroom’s contract expired on March 30, 2021, inflation in the U.S. has risen by 12.4 percent, yet the Times is offering slightly less than that amount for the entire four-year length of the contract (ending in March 2025). Even if inflation subsides substantially, dropping to, say, 3 percent annually, Times journalists would see their pay drop by 7 percent by 2025 after factoring in inflation.
And if inflation averages 4 percent a year between now and March 2025, the value of a Times journalist’s paycheck would decline by around 10 percent after inflation over the life of the contract.
All this raises an obvious question of fairness: Why should Times management shower money gained from improved performance on investors and executives but not on the journalists who have risked their lives covering the war in Ukraine and other wars, the journalists who often work until midnight on big projects, the journalists who have won 122 Pulitzer Prizes, far more than any other news organization? Why shower money from the Times’ increased profits on investors who might have bought Times stock two months ago instead of on loyal, hardworking employees who have worked at the Times for two decades?
No wonder Times employees are angry. No wonder they went on strike for 24 hours last Thursday—the newsroom’s first walkout since their 88-day strike in 1978. No wonder Times employees are on the verge of voting to authorize an open-ended strike unless the two sides soon reach a settlement.
I was a reporter for the Times for 31 years, and covered labor and workplace issues during my last 19 years there, before retiring in late 2014. I was on the union’s negotiating committee in 2012, and back then we, too, were extremely frustrated with the Times’ lowball, sub-inflation wage offer and snail-like conduct in negotiations. Back in October 2012, with our contract having expired 18 months earlier and our contract talks inching forward at a glacial pace, we had grown so angry that more than 300 of us walked out and held a lunchtime protest outside the Times. We were making what we thought was a loud statement about Times management being too stingy and too slow in negotiations. We thought that protest was a big deal—the long-sleepy Newspaper Guild at the Times was finally waking up and flexing its muscles in what was the newsroom’s biggest protest in decades. (I should note, as many people would attest, that Donald McNeil, a star Times science and health writer at the time, did far more than anyone else to transform the newsroom’s bargaining unit from a lazy, lethargic, noncombative union into a feisty group of workers that was finally willing to stand up and fight.)
As angry as we were back then, hardly anyone was talking strike. The other day, I was speaking with a longtime NYT employee, who told me, “People are far more pissed off now.”
Frankly, I’m surprised that the Times’ publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, in negotiating his first contract with the newsroom, would let things get so angry. I like A.G.—I have fond memories of the piece he did when he was a Times reporter based in Kansas City and wrote about the trials and tribulations of being a vegetarian living in KC. But I fear that A.G., who became publisher in 2018, is getting bad advice, because he has signed off on a negotiating strategy and tactics that are hurting his—and the Times’—image and seriously hurting newsroom morale, as well.
I realize that the New York NewsGuild’s more militant leadership isn’t always easy to deal with. I realize it has put many new and sometimes difficult issues on the table, just as the Times has. And I have heard some Times journalists complain that the Guild’s in-your-face approach is one reason there is still no new contract more than 20 months after the old one expired.
But the main reason the contract talks have dragged on so frustratingly long is that the Times, with its bargaining strategy guided by the Proskauer Rose law firm, took seven months, an outrageously long time, just to put forward its first response to the union’s wage proposal and then another five months to respond to the union’s initial counterproposal on wages.
Guided by Proskauer, the Times has traditionally taken a drag-things-out-and-delay approach to negotiations. This unfortunate strategy seems deliberate, and it has often allowed Times management to avoid giving a retroactive raise for the first year after the contract expires—that’s what the Times did in the 2012 contract, and it is trying to do that again now. As a result of such maneuvering, no New York Times contract in the 21st century has enabled average newsroom salaries to keep pace with inflation. I surmise that another reason for the slow negotiations is that some lawyers at Proskauer like to drag out negotiations because the longer contract talks last, the more their billable hours climb. According to a 2016 Wall Street Journal article, Proskauer Rose’s “hourly partner billing rate has climbed as high as $1,475.”
While I have great respect for several lawyers at Proskauer, I didn’t love the Proskauer lawyers with whom we in the Guild negotiated. They often arrived late. They often sneered at us. They treated us like wayward fourth graders whenever we had the temerity to make a proposal they didn’t like.
In the current negotiations, the NewsGuild is demanding a wage increase averaging 5.25 percent a year over four years, or 22.7 percent compounded. Such a raise would seemingly keep pace with inflation and perhaps exceed it. According to the union, the Times’ latest wage offer comes to 2.875 per year, or 12 percent compounded. The Times offer, however, doesn’t appear to include a retroactive raise for the first year of any new contract, from March 2021 to March 2022, a 12-month period when inflation was running at 8.5 percent. Instead of a raise for that year, the Times is offering the lame excuse of a 4 percent one-time payment. The Times calls that payment a “bonus,” but it seems more like a booby prize.
I can certainly understand why the Times, like any company, would balk at giving a 22.7 percent contractual raise over four years. That number does seem high, but let’s not forget that inflation has been running at its highest rate in more than 40 years. (Pilots at Delta Air Lines just signed a three-year contract that awards raises of 34 percent.) I imagine that Times management is thinking, what if the Federal Reserve succeeds in reducing inflation to its 2 percent goal next year. If that happens, Times executives would be stewing that they were overpaying on salary.
Whatever pay increase the Times eventually agrees to, the NewsGuild is calling for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that would equal inflation, that would hold Guild members harmless against any increase in inflation. The Times has rejected that COLA proposal even though enlightened employers often agree to cost-of-living adjustments. Not only do such provisions protect employees from having their pay eroded by higher-than-expected inflation, but if inflation remains low, COLA provisions would help the employer’s bottom line by holding down any promised raises. I hope that Times management will see the light on this—and take the enlightened approach.
It’s not as if the Times can’t afford to give newsroom employees a 22.7 percent raise over four years. That’s around ten percentage points above what the Times is offering, and with each percentage point translating into $1.5 million a year in raises, that would cost the Times $15 million annually. That represents just 10 percent of the $150 million stock buyback and a small fraction of the Times’ current $465 million in cash on hand.
Times management will no doubt be thinking something like “What if the nation slides into recession and our profits plummet? We would never want to commit to anything like a 22.7 percent raise or to a cost-of-living clause that fully protects against inflation.” Smart negotiations and smart negotiators can address that, perhaps through a profit-sharing formula. I can see a formula where if profits remain strong, there’s a COLA that covers 100 percent of inflation, but if profits fall, perhaps the COLA provision would protect against just 75 percent of inflation.
During the 2012 negotiations, the Times was proposing a 1.5 percent-a-year pay increase that wouldn’t keep up with inflation. Proskauer’s lawyers argued that a larger increase would hurt the bottom line. At the negotiating table, I proposed that the Times do some profit sharing—that if the union accepted a 1.5 percent raise and the Times profits were strong, then the Times should pay out profit-sharing money on top of the contractual raises that Times journalists were to receive.
I’ll never forget the Proskauer lawyer’s high-handed response: He dismissed the idea of profit sharing as an idiotic, absurd suggestion. I also remember Proskauer’s lawyer dismissing out of hand our proposal for newsroom employees to receive paid parental leave. I’m sure that Times executives keep close tabs on what’s happening at the bargaining table, but I sometimes wonder whether Times management realizes how bad Proskauer’s lawyers sometimes make them look. (Soon after the 2012 contract talks ended, then-executive editor Jill Abramson—embarrassed and incensed that the newsroom’s contract didn’t provide for paid parental leave—made some good internal trouble to make sure the Times provided paid parental leave to the newsroom employees who worked under her.)
I love the Times, and I do think it is the world’s greatest newspaper (despite such serious mistakes as paying far too much attention to Hillary Clinton’s emails and doing too much uncritical stenography about George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s false claims leading up to the Iraq War). I don’t cherish the idea of a strike by the Times’ journalists—strikes can last an unexpectedly long time and sow huge and lasting acrimony.
But I can certainly understand why many Times journalists are angry and ready to authorize a strike. Not only did their contract expire 21 months ago, but those journalists haven’t had a contractual raise since March 2020, 33 months ago. By failing to give its journalists raises for such a long time, despite high inflation, and by offering raises that would leave its journalists behind inflation, the Times is making its employees feel left behind and unappreciated. That’s something that no employer should ever do.
Times management can easily make peace, alleviate the anger, and prevent a strike. A solution shouldn’t be difficult. After several very good years, the Times has generously shared its good times—and its profits—with its investors and top executives, but it should also make sure to share those good times with the employees who day in and day out make the Times such a great newspaper—and such a valuable, profit-making property.
