Times strike force
Union eyes indie paper amid angry labor talks
If contract talks continue to deteriorate, The New York Times may find it has a new competitor — an independent paper being put out by angry employees on strike.
While both the News Guild union, which represents journalists, photographers and some business side people, and management remain in negotiations, the talks are growing more acrimonious.
Some union organizers are prepping for a potential strike and a strike newspaper, The Post has learned.
“A lot of people are saying we should go on strike,” said one insider at a gathering of Times employees Thursday night.
Union leadership, however, is not quite there yet. But a one-day walkout is being contemplated, a source said.
On Thursday, the company, whose chairman/publisher is AG Sulzberger, and whose executive editor is Joseph Kahn, presented its response to the latest union demands, and said it was only willing to give an additional 0.5% wage hike to workers, upping the offer from 4% to 4.5% upon ratification.
“It’s not a big enough change to make a difference in anyone’s life,” said the insider.
The union, citing runaway inflation and the Times’ profitability as subscription revenue continues to climb, is pushing for an 8% wage hike.
In addition to the 4.5% hike that the NYT is offering on ratification, the company has proposed 3% hikes in 2023 and 2024 and says it will all add up to 10.5% over the life of a new deal.
Getting ready
The company’s counteroffer comes at a time when the News Guild has been prepping all the media units it represents to get ready if and when a strike happens.
On Sept. 17, the News Guild held its first-ever “strike school,” which attracted around 30 participants from the Times as well as employees of Gannett, NBC, Insider, Reuters, Condé Nast and others.
On Tuesday, the union is pushing the agenda further with a one-day course on how to publish a strike publication.
In more tumultuous eras in newspaper-labor relations, strike newspapers — manned by the outof-work journalists — frequently sprung up, but most evaporated when the strikers went back to work. One notable exception is the New York Review of Books, which emerged as a competitor to the New York Times Book Review in the 1963 strike.
Last year, when the union at The New Yorker was considering a strike, an edition of The New Yorker strike edition was prepped, but Condé Nast management and the union reached a last-minute deal.
A strike at the Times is still not in the immediate cards as the two sides are still talking. But “we are getting ready,” News Guild President Susan DeCarava said in an email to all the media outfits the union represents.
The union has not yet called for a strike-authorization vote, though.
The two sides remain far apart, as the last contract expired in March 2021 and rank-and-file workers have not received a wage hike since March 2020.