Walk the talk
Liberal shmiberal – union-busting at the NY Times:
Last April, 650 tech employees at the New York Times announced that they were unionizing. Rather than applauding them and proceeding to negotiate a contract, the company instead refused to voluntarily recognize the union. This is despite its own editorial board supporting a bill that would have made it legally binding for employers to voluntarily accept union requests when they are backed by a majority of the staff.
As the paper’s own editorial explained: “Under current law, an employer can reject the majority’s signatures and insist on a secret ballot. But in a disturbingly high number of cases, the employer uses the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionize.” Now, this is what the New York Times company is accused of doing to its own employees.
Since last year, the Times has been accused of trying to scare workers into changing their minds – to sow division among the employees, divide the unit, and erode support for organized labor. Last week, federal labor regulators claimed that the company had broken the law by telling large swaths of employees that they were actually “managers”, and that they were therefore prohibited from publicly supporting the union.
“Liberal” is often used as a synonym for “left-wing” or “progressive” in the US, but they’re not really the same. Unions aren’t really a liberal cause these days. Not sexy enough…as well as of course having to do with redirecting a little of the wealth from the bosses to the workers, when lots of liberals are bosses or allied with bosses.
The New York Times gets away with a lot. They are the journalism equivalent of the supreme court. They offer prestige, big budgets and job stability at a time when those things are in short supply in this industry. The half of our country terrified by Trump sees them as an army of truth, and everyone in media wants to work there. (Call me!) But let’s be honest: the people who control the New York Times company are acting like real weasels.
It’s not just that they are hypocritical, yammering about the public good while acting from pure selfishness – it’s that they want to have it both ways. While more outwardly evil media bosses like Rupert Murdoch may be proud to embrace their Ayn Randian reputation, those who lead the Times want to be accepted as good people on the Brooklyn-brownstone cocktail party circuit, even as they quietly try to stop those who work for them from having an equal seat at their tastefully appointed table. Screw that.
I think Hamilton Nolan is exaggerating the keenness of Times people to be seen as liberal. The news side is keen to be seen as non-partisan, and the editorial side is very mixed – there are plenty of conservatives and “centrists” along with some a little more leftish. The Times is more establishment than it is liberal.
I have covered hundreds of anti-union campaigns. No matter where they happen, they are all based on lies and fear. Whether they happen at an Amazon warehouse or at the New York Times, they are a demonstration of contempt for the idea that an employee may deserve to be treated as someone whose humanity is just as real as that of an employer.
Respectable people don’t engage in union-busting. People who run anti-union campaigns are not Good Liberals. Hundreds of workers raising their voices have not been enough to convince the New York Times executives to act right. Maybe it’s time to stop inviting them to the cocktail parties.
Ok, but I think it’s either naive or hyperbolic to say the Times sees itself as composed of nothing but Good Liberals.
My boss has tried several times to bust our union (so far, unsuccessfully, though they are about to get their wish from internal strife). They did actually manage to bust a union organized by the support staff (clerical, custodians, etc) after only a year of voting in the union. They bill themselves as faculty-friendly when they are anything but. Do they actually want to be seen as faculty-friendly? Probably not. They’re more interested in sucking up to the money men who run the government, and in a deep red state, that means anti-union legislators who control our budget.
The only reason our job is even marginally bearable is because of the union. My latest supervisor came from a private college where they had no union. What I hear from my friends that work there almost makes my job look like a good one…almost. Except…our president is more than happy to stand up in a college meeting and basically tell us he is not going to honor certain parts of our contract he doesn’t like. That’s actionable…but only if we can prove that’s what he’s doing, and I’ve learned that they have ways of wiggling through it. Some obvious violations of our contract went to grievance and then to arbitration; he controls the grievance committee, and selects half the arbitration committee. We have never had a successful grievance.
Unions are too important to let bosses kill them off, but too many people in our country don’t see that. They don’t have enough historical knowledge to be aware of what things were like pre-union. They don’t realize that the union has done a lot, even for non-union people by getting better hours, better working conditions, etc, that trickle down to everyone. So they don’t go out to protect a union because they’ve been told the unions are all about greed.
All of the below is based on nearly thirty years working in the belly of a major metro newspaper, in the newsroom, but not as a journalist myself.
Journalists (outside such reportorial brothels like FOX News) do tend to skew heavily left. Some might be a bit more centrist or even thoughtfully conservative, but true right-wing ideologues are much rarer. Part of the reason for that is that the kind of deliberate blinders that extreme conservative ‘thought’ requires are difficult to wear and still do a good job of basic journalism. Meeting people, talking to them, getting their side of things–all that builds empathy, and a desire to see the problems of the world actually get solved. This tends to either progressive views, or occasionally a particularly iconoclastic form of conservative libertarianism. (It shares this with academia, in pretty much the same manner–the more you are exposed to information, the more it becomes difficult to completely ignore that information.)
But most media companies, whether TV, radio or newspapers, are not owned by journalists. They are owned and run by corporations, who act just like any corporation in Western Capitalism, attempting to extract maximum profit off the backs of their workers. Gone for the most part are the days of even the tycoon-publisher, who was obviously profit-motivated (and usually a conservative straight white dude), but usually also had the desire to create a personal legacy and strengthen the paper as an institution. Following the wave of major newspapers ‘going public’ and becoming stock-held corporations in the latter part of the last century, the notion of “the publisher” has gone by the wayside.
That’s an important clarification. It makes Hamilton Nolan’s commentary even more beside the point.
It would have made more sense if he’d said lots of people think of the Times as “liberal” or on the left (which is already wrong), but in fact it’s a corporation, which does what corporations do.