Writes Shawn McCreesh in "Just What Did the [New York] Times Walkout Change?" (NY Magazine).
The picketing outside the Times’ Renzo Piano–designed headquarters went on for more than an hour this afternoon. Over a hundred people gathered under the scaffolding on West 40th Street, surrounded by a crush of cameras.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, their star magazine correspondent and the intellectual force behind “The 1619 Project,” stood next to Scabby the giant inflatable rat and spoke into a microphone:
“Let me tell you, I know what it’s like to work at a newspaper and not make enough to pay your bills. I worked two jobs until I was 30 years old. I reported at my local newspaper and then I had to sell mattresses on nights and weekends just to make ends meet. I loved my job, but we shouldn’t have to struggle financially to work at a place like the New York Times, no matter what position we hold.”
Donald McNeil was there, wearing an old union T-shirt and a brown leather coat with a shearling collar. He was ousted from the paper last year, and Hannah-Jones had played a minor role in that, but he’d always been a dedicated union man. He nodded along while she spoke. “I thought she was great,” he told me.
Donald McNeil! Remember his ouster? That came after he uttered the "n-word" on the mention side of the use/mention distinction. Blogged here and here.
52 Comments on Althouse: "The management of the nation’s most elite, center-left news organization, which, in its opinion pages, supports unionization at places like Amazon and..."
BTW, “star magazine correspondent and the intellectual force behind “The 1619 Project,” sounds several years out of date. Are some circles so deep in the bubble that the people in it still see the 1619 project as something to brag about?"
All the other noisy social and race apparent-struggles are all squirrels to keep the lower classes and those grandchildren distracted from noticing and deciding to storm the Bastille and Versailles."
Then the rational part recognizes a deep recession will mean yet another 10 trillion spending package from Congress…"
"All the other noisy social and race apparent-struggles are all squirrels to keep the lower classes and those grandchildren distracted from noticing and deciding to storm the Bastille and Versailles."
They're going to fail. It will happen anyway.
This country of ours has for long been half free,
Every state is under DC's tyranny.
And still both parties are greatly to blame
For shirking their part in the patriot game.
They won't mind whacking agents of state
The feeling is rage, they're way past irate
And yet at deserters they'll never slip aim
The rebels who sold out the patriot game
Where is the young man, this Earth ever taught
Whose life is less sacred than all the old frauds
Whose boyhood less lovely, whose vision less vain
Than the boomers who paid for the patriot game
"
Do editorial staff set salaries?
The people who hire the editorial staff do."
The oligarchs who own media, to include Jeff Bezos at WP, Bill Gates at MSNBC and Slate, Michael Bloomberg at Bloomberg, and also the owners of the NYT aren't going to truly give away their power or their hegemony. Sure they'll donate to 'worthy causes,' but they won't willingly weaken themselves before they die. Charity and leftist media are sometimes just a sop to the left to avoid focus on the wealth/class distinction. The wealthy win if allowed to create monopolies, the wealthy win if perceived as friendly to the left. The wealthy became wealthy because they are often quite clever.
In conjunction with Sinema's defection from the D Party today, watch both parties rotate into new ideological strongholds. The left has no clear path back to being a working class stronghold, as they are beholden to the greens, the oligarchs, bureaucracies, and non-working dependent class. Will the R Party move further toward workers, as they have a clear shot at dramatically increasing their working class support? Strange times indeed."
“Let me tell you, I know what it’s like to work at a newspaper and not make enough to pay your bills. I worked two jobs until I was 30 years old."
She went on. You have to learn the grift, just like I did. Create something that has to do with race. And it doesn't matter what it is, how factual it is. What matters is that you just stand beside it...hard. And don't let up. Hell, you can create an entire industry on the fiction if you work it right.
Anyway, I head some interviews with these employees. Ugh. As bad an intellectual gathering as I thought the Times employee team would be...it's worse than that. One guy admitted that they're fighting to not have to go into the office regularly "for safety sake, being that we're still in a pandemic." Spoken like a New Yorker. Other's wanted more money. Natch. Others...just didn't know. They just were doing their union thing making noise.
Oh to be an activist. I guess they could look for work elsewhere. I know Bari Weiss is looking for a few good actual journalists. Perhaps...nah. They couldn't cut it."
Today it's not a money-printing inflation but a shortage inflation, with price rationing reduced supplies. So long as wages don't "keep up," it's under control. Otherwise you get an actual inflation spiral out of a mere shortage.
When people's wages are falling behind this inflation, that's a feature not a bug. Victimhood is the wrong category. A suck-it-up category is correct."
I know. It is privately owned. But offered enough money, the family would sell.
And it would not matter if he did buy it. The entertainment value of saying he will would be enormous.
John Henry "
Cosplay.
The "workers" picketed for more than an hour! Shocking! I feel like I just re-read Germinal. I'm literally shaking.
"
The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on.
The Sulzbergers aren't going to sell. Without the paper, what are they? They got millions from Carlos Slim without giving up control. Why give it up now and become like the Chandlers in LA? Or the McCormicks or Fields from Chicago? Just a bunch of squabbling unknowns and has-beens."
Everything is a clown show. "
"Center-Left"
STOP, you're killing me... *snort*"
Why? If one's salary is not increased yearly to at least match the rate of inflation, one's salary is effectively shrinking year to year. Rather than being "absurd," the demand seems fair, rational, and the least that employers owe their employees.
I understand small employers may not be able to meet this standard, but small employers are not typically unionized. Large employers all too often reward top management with handsome bonuses and other incentives each year even when not warranted by performance, or when they claim they cannot afford to increase salaries, (e.g., when the American people bailed out the Wall Street banks/investment firms teetering on collapse in 2008/2009, those firms gave millions in bonuses to their management)."
Why would you expect them to be different than conservatives? They're all people. (And we'll all eventually be Soylent Green for the worms.)"
Do editorial staff set salaries?'
"The people who hire the editorial staff do."
So then: NO."
They will pretend to, while continuing their fealty to the wealthy whom they have always served."
"STOP, you're killing me... *snort*"
Tell me about it, right? Who really believes the NY TIMES is or ever has been "left?""
I think most people who work at newspapers fall into the former.
Newspapers have never paid well.
I decided against a career that I had as a college major, partly because up until about twenty years ago the pay was notoriously awful.
I guess that makes me smarter than the people at the NYT, but we already knew that..."
Workers of the world, untie!
Speaking of Untie and the NYT; Wordle in 2 today, so suck it : )"
Actually, they should have to struggle financially. I can’t think of any other way for them to learn to appreciate the struggles that ordinary citizens go through daily. Maybe if they have to decide whether they can afford things they’ll better appreciate the plight of a single mother when her weeping kids tell her they’re still hungry after their meager supper, but thanks to Joe Biden’s inflation she’s spent all her money and she won’t be able to get more groceries until payday, which is Friday and a week away. Maybe the Times writers will be better able to contemplate the plight of electricians, and plumbers, and transit workers, and trash collectors, and grocery clerks, and, yeah, clerks in mattress stores if they have to stretch their salaries a bit.
Ah, who am I kidding? Deplorables exist to be deplored."
Blogger Robert Cook said...
'Center-Left'
"STOP, you're killing me... *snort*"
Tell me about it, right? Who really believes the NY TIMES is or ever has been "left?"
Cook, of course, is to the left of Lenin. I was about to object to "center left" too."
Nikole should watch it. Kaleb, Clarkson's co-star and farm assistant talks about his work day raising cows, chickens and a pig on his farm, working another farm for hire and then working for Clarkson.
In the final episode, Clarkson totes up his profit and loss for the year to find that he has made $144 pounds profit. He also talks about how he basically works 8 full-time jobs (The farm, 2 newspaper columns, the farm show, who wants to be a millionaire and a couple other things)
In fairness, while he did not make any money on the farm, Amazon paid him a boodle to make a show about the farm, so there is that. Perhaps that is the secret to making a profit from a farm.
I did not hear any whining from Kaleb or Jeremy about how unfair life is.
I think IU convinced my grandson to watch it by telling him Clarkson ploughs the fields with a Lamborghini. (I didn't tell him it was a Lambo tractor and not a Countach)
John Henry"
Coincidentally, I just listen to C.S. Lewis advocating reading the "old books" vice the more recent often slanted opinions of more recent authors. We saw that with Trump, you had to go to the original video lest the NY Times, et al, give you fake news of what he said.
https://youtu.be/jFHQDIE7CSw
In the precapitalistic ages writing was an unremunerative art. Blacksmiths and shoemakers could make a living, but authors could not. Writing was a liberal art, a hobby, but not a profession. It was a noble pursuit of wealthy people, of kings, grandees and statesmen, of patricians and other gentlemen of independent means. It was practiced in spare time by bishops and monks, university teachers and soldiers. The penniless man whom an irresistible impulse prompted to write had first to secure some source of revenue other than authorship.
Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality "
But tell me, friend. Is there ever going come a time when you stop regurgitating the bullshit you’ve swallowed? The rhetorical trick you’ve fallen for is this. The media single out some people who are a couple sigma from the norm and then insist that they are representative of an entire class or an entire generation. Of course there were people who lived beyond their means along the Boomers — as there are among Gen-X and the Millennials and Gen-Z. But where I live out here with my fellow Deplorables in the Shenandoah Valley most old timers live from one Social Security check and pension payment to the next. And every months those checks buy less and less. Biden bragged about how large the Social Security COLA was, but pensions are fixed and the COLA doesn’t begin to cover the increases in the cost of groceries."
Hahahahahahahaha! That's one for Babylon Bee or The Onion."
Sh*t just got real."
"'Howard said...
Do editorial staff set salaries?'
"The people who hire the editorial staff do."
So then: NO.
Dude, it might be a convenient fiction that the editorial pages and the news pages operate independently but neither has ever claimed to operate independently of the people signing paychecks. I expect you to take back every disparagement you've thrown at Roger Ailes and Fox News Corp."
Carlos slim should just pony up more cash
What would he get for that investment?
The appearance of credibility?
Democrat voters and NYT's readers specifically are stupid people.
Credibility is completely unnecessary as long as the NYT's makes it's readers feel superior to Republican voters and specifically Trump supporters.
Never Trumpers still glom on to the media narratives for the same reason."
Of course from their point of view the pity of it all is that there are fewer and fewer positions for those shovelers. But they keep shoveling it--bless their hearts. "
How are you different from anyone who sells mattresses for a living and writes a blog to stroke his ego. You should pay the NYT for the exposure. All you have to sell is your opinion, and everybody already has one of those. Be grateful for what they pay you. Don't give up your night job,"
Beta male doing his beta thing?
Anyway, if this keeps up, where's Althouse gonna get her blog material?
How are progs going to figure out the party line?"
Lovely to watch the Freep, friend of union labor, twist themselves to justify crushing the unions like the return of Henry Clay Frick."
They are worthless. Hard to really ask for more money in their situation."