Tech Workers at New York Times Vote to Certify Union (nytimes.com) 181
"Tech workers at The New York Times on Thursday voted in favor of certifying their union in a National Labor Relations Board election, making it one of the biggest tech unions in America," reports the New York Times:
The workers voted in favor, 404 to 88, easily reaching the needed majority of the ballots that were cast. A win means the union, the Times Tech Guild, can begin negotiations for a contract with management. "We're just elated and really soaking in what this means, not only for us as tech workers at The Times and for The New York Times but also for the tech industry as a whole," said Nozlee Samadzadeh, a senior software engineer.
"I think this is going to be the start of a wave of organizing in the tech industry...."
The Times Tech Guild, which represents about 600 software engineers, product managers, designers, data analysts and other workers, asked The Times for voluntary recognition in April. The Times declined, so the matter went to a formal election through the labor board....
"I think this is going to be the start of a wave of organizing in the tech industry...."
The Times Tech Guild, which represents about 600 software engineers, product managers, designers, data analysts and other workers, asked The Times for voluntary recognition in April. The Times declined, so the matter went to a formal election through the labor board....
Good luck NYT journalists! (Score:2)
Newsflash... Print journalism is dying. You have a chance to keep yer jerb at a few, historically relevant places. This was one of them.
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Print journalism is going to have to find a way to transition to the web without paywalls. Print is going away, gradually but surely. And paywalled content is being deprecated, rapidly.
Interesting. I wonder what they want in a contract (Score:2)
Sadly, the article talking about this is published by the NYT itself and it's paywalled. I can't read it.
I wonder what specifically the workers are looking for in their contract. Shorter hours? Mandatory no-Slack time on weekends? More predictable raises, negotiated years in advance? Surely they had something in mind, something they thought they could only get if they negotiated as a group.
Anyone know?
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You can tell by the way they churn out so much anti-union propaganda.
Both good and bad (Score:2)
I had a blue collar union job years ago. On the one hand it was good that the workers actually had a voice and couldn't just be arbitrarily treated like dirt. On the other hand there was a toxic and combative relationship between management and union, always fighting and it was to the detriment of the company.
The mutual resentment sapped morale, and if you went into management you crossed over onto the side of the enemy. It doesn't have to be that way, good luck to them.
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If you don't want your employer telling you how to do your job, work for yourself. It's that simple.
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I'm in favor of unions, merely related my experience with one. Have you ever worked in a union shop? It has its own set of challenges.
what of the opportunities to be outsourced (Score:2)
I know the owners can just shut the entire operation ( including the print side ), there is a law that is clear about that.
Can they outsource the entire IT department? I'm not sure if they can. Might be cheaper in the long run. If the union raise the cost, a company should seek equal quality, at a better price, somewhere else.
Anti-Union (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's just a handful of the same conspicuous voices repeating anti-union propaganda from the 80's. It's almost like they're being paid.
40 years of stagnant wages, however, has gotten people to wake up to reality. The astroturfers can yell and scream, but we all see through their bullshit.
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I'm not anti-union, but I'd not want to be in one. The value they provide simply doesn't provide value for me directly. In my field you simply change jobs every few years to get 15-20% bumps in pay. This also gives you a chance to find new challenges to keep work interesting and to build your portfolio. A union would cap my earning potential to provide benefits to others. While morally that is a good thing, I'm much happier with my current compensation.
My friends in the industry who stay at one company and
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So you think the majority of IT workers at the NYT voted for the union out of spite?
Re: Anti-Union (Score:4, Insightful)
He's just spreading propaganda. He hasn't thought any of it through.
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You might not have any interest in basic rights to organize at your workplace, but apparently some people do. And what makes you think "Slashdot reader are qualified enough to land a new job pretty quickly"?
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And what makes you think "Slashdot reader are qualified enough to land a new job pretty quickly"?
Slashdot is "news for nerds", and nerds are very employable.
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Its just a website, buddy. Anyone dimwit can read it and comment.
what it means (Score:2)
"We're just elated and really soaking in what this means, not only for us as tech workers at The Times and for The New York Times but also for the tech industry as a whole," said Nozlee Samadzadeh, a senior software engineer.
It means you now need three guys to change a light bulb (or the tech equivalent thereof). Four on weekends.
But then, perhaps "agile" and other buzzword bingo already had that covered, I guess ...
80/20 rule in effect as shown by the vote. (Score:2)
80% of the work is done by 20% of the employees.
The Vote of 88 against the union and 404 for it. Has nearly 18% of the workers who are against the union. I would expect that 18% of the staff are the ones who do most of the work at the New York Times.
The way that Unions are Organized in the United States is a very poor implementation of the Union Ideology. And a Poor implementation of a good idea, is worse than a good Implementation of a bad idea.
The Unions of Today in the US, are part of a larger Union gro
bummer. more bad press for unions (Score:2)
It looks bad for unions when they're started just as a company, or really an entire industry, is sunsetting. In 10 years we'll be talking about how unions destroyed the New York Times. But only yesterday most of us assumed NYT was doomed to fail even without ever unionizing their tech workers.
Haha. (Score:2)
Haha. Tech workers are not the core business of NYT. NYT tomorrow could say that they've decided to contract out tech services to another company, just like they probably do for janitorial services.
The only leverage this union will have is to show what hypocrites are the NYT.
The Numbers (Score:2)
404? 88? Did they intentionally pre-plan the vote count to make a joke and a statement?
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Thats an interesting question - do those 88 workers have to have anything to do with the union or can they continue as they are currently?
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Union shakers and movers will become leadership, anyone on the outs with that group will probably leave(~10% or so) the rest will make do and since it is NY anyone not joining won't have a job any longer.
You end up with two leaders, the company and the Union.
Now in the course of events, sometimes the union will make bad decisions. Then again, the company will make bad decisions on occasion.
So the question becomes - "Who will make the best decisions most of the time for the employee?" The company or the union?
The company is not beholden to the employees. In most cases, they look at the employee as a parasite that is necessary, but best eliminated. The company is serving the stockholders.
Ideally, em
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As dear old dad (IBEW) used to say, Management gets the Union they deserve.
Even one of my old anti-Union supervisors who had previously worked in a union shop admitted that with a union many of his problems (at the non-union plant) became the union shop steward's problems.
If Management has a Union form under their operation, then Management has already failed.
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do those 88 workers have to have anything to do with the union or can they continue as they are currently?
NY is not a R2W state, so they can be fired if they refuse to join the union or pay union dues. But it depends on the negotiated contract. A "closed shop" is legal but not required. It is unlikely the union will allow anyone to opt-out and the vote is strong enough that the NY Times will have little power to push back.
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And that is why the US has some of the worst employment laws amongst the western world - join the union or be fired, your personal history with the company no longer means anything because the workers have new masters now and those masters don't like independent people.
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This is not an "American" thing. It is a "New York" thing.
Most (28) states are right-to-work and employees can't be fired for refusing to join a union.
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This is not an "American" thing. It is a "New York" thing.
Most (28) states are right-to-work and employees can't be fired for refusing to join a union.
But they can be fired for everything else. If the boss doesn't like the color of your socks for instance.
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Most (28) states are right-to-work and employees can't be fired for refusing to join a union.
But they can be fired for everything else. If the boss doesn't like the color of your socks for instance.
That's not a right to work state. That's "at will employment" and is the law in 49 out of 50 states (Montana being the exception).
Re: Unions are not what workers think! (Score:2)
But notably is superceded by employment contracts, such as those entered into by a union.
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You have no rights in employment, and you have no protections.
People not being very savvy about the rights/protections they might have, or have been frightened into thinking they have no rights, doesn't mean that anything resembling rights don't exist, to be fair.
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Guess you never heard of "at will" employment states.
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Worst laws, yes. You mean like the right-to-be-fired states, where employees have zero protection?
But I see that the ultrawealthy are still funding their libertarian trolls.
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Used to be much worse for shift workers, when I worked nights to pay my way through college everyone had to join the union and they took a fixed amount out of your pay no matter what you actually earned. Since we were on crap wages, our union fees amounted to one tenth of our entire income.
In the five years I worked there, the unions did exactly nothing for us, ever. No pay rise in five years, nothing.
We did see our union rep once. She turned up in a fancy car. I walked 45 minutes to get to work, and 45
Re:Unions are not what workers think! (Score:5, Insightful)
My father was a union man. The only time I saw my mother smile when paying bills was when she paid those union dues. She knew exactly what she was getting in exchange.
If you think those union dues are the same as taking a pay-cut, you're gravely mistaken. Union dues pay for themselves over and over again. It's the single best investment a worker can make.
Unions mean higher wages, better benefits, and better job security.
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The only time I saw my mother smile when paying bills was when she paid those union dues.
Which union are you shilling for? Nobody pays dues by putting money in an envelope, smiling in anticipation of all the good that will come from it. Thirty years ago my dues were deducted (unwillingly) right from my paycheck before it ever left the company's payroll office, like any other "tax for the greater good".
Unions mean higher wages, better benefits, and better job security.
Did you really say that with a straight face? Unions mean strikes, walkouts, grift, kick backs, organized extortion, and nepotism. Think "Teamsters" when you think of unions. (OK, perhaps I'm
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Union dues go straight to union management. There is little to no benefit to the average union worker. The only workers the unions stand up for are the ones that deserve to be fired. The ones that make the work day harder for the majority of the other workers that have to cover for the bottom of the barrel. Add to that, that unions also donate very heavily to one political party and the half of the workforce that does not agree with that political agenda are having their paychecks deducted to support po
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If there's no benefit to the average worker, why does every company, when faced with unionization, do everything in their power to stop it? Here's a hint: it's the same reason that they don't allow you to discuss compensation with your coworkers.
When workers act collectively, they have real power. Power that your corporate masters don't want you to know you have. Unions mean power for the workers. That power translates into better working conditions, better compensation, better job security, better be
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If there's no benefit to the average worker, why does every company, when faced with unionization, do everything in their power to stop it?
Here's a hint: because economy isn't a zero-sum game, and this is a loss-loss scenario for everyone (except for union leaders, and their paid shills like you).
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Here's a hint: because economy isn't a zero-sum game
What that's true, it's clear that you don't know what that means. Union dues buy better working conditions, better salaries, better benefits, better job security, etc. That is, they pay for themselves many times over.
Unions give workers power that they wouldn't otherwise have. The alternative is to continue to be ground under the boot heel of their corporate masters.
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Unions mean higher wages, better benefits, and better job security.
That is great for the members of unions who can wield power by strike action, but what about the rest of us? What seems to happen is that wages get negotiated up in certain industries, while other people barely scrape by, with nobody to speak up for them. Is it fair that a driver on the London Underground earns far more than a trained nurse?
Don't get me wrong, I think unions do valuable work. But the better wages and benefits are patchy. My rather right-wing former boss thinks all unions should be banned. M
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I think unions do valuable work. But the better wages and benefits are patchy.
I see what what you mean. It does seem like it just covers over some more fundamental problem. Though I suspect that real issue is more fundamental.
I had a boss once, my first job after my undergrad, who was as close to Fuzziwig as you could get in this modern age. He saw it as his responsibility to make sure his employees were taken care of. He even provided transitional housing for new hires who had to move and very often provided personal loans to help cover emergency expenses. He covered the full co
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That is a heart-warming story. There are indeed benevolent employers in this modern age. And as far as I know, the money they spend on their valued employees is a good investment, even if you look at it with the cold eyes of pure profit. This has long been known. In Birmingham, England, where I live, the Cadbury family have a long tradition of philanthropy, including building a whole model town at Bournville, to house the workers at the chocolate factory. Excellent houses, and all sorts of health benefits a
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I've never needed [a union] my entire life.
Me neither. That is not the point.
Whether you could benefit from organised collective bargaining depends a lot on what skills you have for sale in the labour market. I am fortunate to have marketable skills in electronic design. I could probably get paid a bit more, if I made a fuss, without needing a union to support me. What about the people who clean the offices, take care of the old folks, serve beer at the bar, and all those little jobs that are so necessary to make a good society? They are very much i
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I've never needed one my entire life.
That's where you're wrong. You have no idea how much you left on the table. This is by design.
You can estimate how much you're getting screwed by how many premium items you get ever year. That's anything the company gives you with their logo, from tshirts to travel mugs. Those, along with other tactics, are there to make you feel like you're valued and appreciated, even if your compensation doesn't reflect that. Why do you think you were forbidden from discussing compensation, anyway?
I don't mind if some others want someone negotiating for them
This framing is pa
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Hmm...no, I've been quite happy with my salary as I progressed.
Yes, exactly as your masters have intended.
Do you think they want you dissatisfied? No, they want you to think you're doing great.
But how could a company forbid speech?!?
This is extremely common. If this is a new idea to you, you haven't been paying attention. But we knew that already.
I don't know how you can say the individual has no power.
Because I'm not completely delusional.
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People not getting what they deserve is largely their own fault
Blaming the victim, I see.
The worst part about this is that you don't even know how badly you're getting screwed. It's a real shame.
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If you think those union dues are the same as taking a pay-cut, you're gravely mistaken. Union dues pay for themselves over and over again. It's the single best investment a worker can make.
Unions mean higher wages, better benefits, and better job security.
(Union) workers at Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown, KY went on strike last year for six weeks. The average worker was making ~$24.50 pre-strike, with the company offering yearly increases over five years, topping out at ~$27.50 in year five of the contract. The net result of the strike was $0.14/hr difference over five years. There was no other difference I can see between the company's pre-strike offer [heavenhillfacts.com] and the post-strike agreement.
That was lose-lose for everyone involved except for the union itsel
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That's simply not true. It's just a lie you've been told to believe. You are not powerful. Your skills are common.
My buddy Steve used to believe that because he seemed to be working his way up the ladder. That is, until he found out a kid working underneath him, they just hired, was making significantly more than he was. It tuns out that the "big raise" he got just brought him up to the base pay for someone in his position. He'd been getting fucked for years without even knowing it, all while thinkin
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That's common for people hired from the outside versus promoted from within. I have had that work against me when starting and for me now that I'm established.
Part of that is you have established skills for the position your in that are considered more valuable than the internal experience someone already at the company has.
Another part is it's easier to negotiate when you have a job and are applying from the outside versus internally where the position (theoretically) is what is interesting to you versus
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That's an odd way to defend getting screwed by the company. They will do all they can to pay you as little as possible. With a union, that kind of shady practice is a lot more difficult if not impossible. They'll drag wages and benefit up a lot farther than an individual can by jumping jobs every few years, which, btw, ultimately hurts the employee.
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What Golden goose are you talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans now work more hours than the Japanese. So tell me again how it is that we don't need unions.
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Wages aren't necessarily the biggest issue companies have with unions. One of the bigger issues is the loss of control over how your business is run, such as bringing in less expensive/more efficient automation that will reduce your workforce. Example:
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ports-automation-vote-20190620-story.html
There is also the issue of being able to fire bad employees (see just about any public teachers union).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room
I know several teachers (Score:2)
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Or maybe they feel she isn't worth an extra $5k a year. Does a doctorate actual help a teacher perform better? Isn't that up to the district to decide? Also, why would they hire somebody for an extra $5k, and then constantly be trying to fire that same exact person for no good reason?
It's always been the most ridiculous things too...
In YOUR opinion it's ridiculous. If we are going to go with one-shot examples, my neighbor has a kindergartner, and the kid's teacher is atrocious. She gets angry at the kids and parents for no good reason, and most people
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The seventies is also when internationalization picked up. Wages didn't go down because of lower union membership. They went down because jobs were being moved to countries with much cheaper labor and American workers had to compete. Union membership went down due to a combination of union jobs (manufacturing) being offshored and workers realizing that the unions weren't doing much of anything for them any more.
Germany didn't have that problem (Score:2)
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Because some companies care about their workers.
Oh, right. Bezos and Musk are known far and wide to care about their employees. This is the only reason they fighte tooth and nail against unions!
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Because some companies care about their workers.
Oh, right. Bezos and Musk are known far and wide to care about their employees. This is the only reason they fighte tooth and nail against unions!
Yes, in actual real reality there's a huge competition to work for Musk, and landing a job there isn't so easy. Are those people fighting each for opportunity to work for Musk masochists, or what?
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I can't imagine anyone being in the workforce for more than a year or so and not seeing employers and employees as, at best, antagonistic towards each other, if not outright enemies. It's an adversarial relationship from the very beginning. The workers want to be treated well and be well compensated for their work. The employers want as much as possible out of the worker, while paying them as little as possible and attempting to either remove benefits, or squeeze the employee themselves to cover those benef
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You have had really shitty jobs, then.
I'm in the my 40s and have only worked one job like that (at a local movie theater in my early years.) I guess one job took away the free hams they use to give us at Thanksgiving but I never really add that to my budget in any case.
I think a lot of people don't realize how expensive health care is and assume companies are making a fortune on health benifits. It's really easy to see how untrue that is though. Look at the cost of COBRA where you work. The reason it co
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I've spent most of my career at small and young (Series-A and series-B... series-C is where I usually start to think about polishing up the resume and moving on.) startups. And my own experience has been far more along the lines of the GP's companies that care about their workers than the antagonism you describe.
Setting aside internships, the only company where I'd have even considered voting 'yes' to unionization was my first job out of college, at a defense contractor that was also the largest company I'
Re:Unions are not what workers think! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is long debunked propaganda. Unions have always been a huge benefit to workers. Take your fear-mongering elsewhere. The people aren't going to buy in to your nonsense any longer.
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Says someone who thinks Marxism brings liberty to the workers. Ask the Ukraine about that one right now.
What? What does the situation in Ukraine has to do with Marxism. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have Marxist systems.
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What the fuck does Marxism have to do with the current conflict in Ukraine? Neither Russia nor Ukraine have had anything even vaguely resembling a Marxist government in over thirty years.
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Actually, unions aren't what you think. But feel free to not want one, and enjoy your 50 or 60 hour weeks, accruing vacation time that you'll never be able to take.
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There is no reason that family ownership precludes any particular political view. The Sulzberger family supports left-of-center views and that is reflected in the paper. The NYT has supported some righty views, such as their cheerleading for GWB's 2003 invasion of Iraq, but those were exceptions. Mostly, the NYT leans left.
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On any really important issue (like the US going to war, or labor rights) they're firmly behind the establishment.
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On any really important issue (like the US going to war, or labor rights) they're firmly behind the establishment.
The cheerleaders for the war were neoliberals like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Wolfowitz, not "the establishment".
The NYT has been mostly pro-union. They are only anti-union when the unions target them.
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It is hilarious and a little bit sad that you think a corporation like the New York Times that has been owned by the Sulzberger family for over 100 years is "left wing".
It is hilarious and a little bit sad that you don't realize that it is very much "left wing".
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That is how America works. That culture war nonsense that you're all so invested in is just to distract you.
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The right wing has controlled American Media for a (Score:2)
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It is hilarious and a little bit sad that you think a corporation like the New York Times...is "left wing".
This is a troll, right? If not, I regret to inform you that your IQ bars you from entry to a site labeled "news for nerds," please see yourself out, you have been deemed unworthy of the expense of having security escort you out.
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You have no idea what what left is, do you?
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It's hilarious and a lot sad that you can say that with a straight face. The Times hasn't published anything right of Stalin in 6 years, and nothing even vaguely centrist since the 90s.
That's actually a good point. They USED to be a hard news source, probably only 20 years ago.
That is simply not the case anymore, but it's pointless for us to mention here. We're going to be modded into the negative numbers anyway.
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nothing even vaguely centrist since the 90s.
The NYT was enthusiastically pro-war in '03.
The war had bipartisan support, and 80 senators voted for it, including Biden and Clinton, so it certainly qualifies as "centrist".
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The Times hasn't published anything right of Stalin in 6 years
Comments like this demonstrate how broken the Overton window is in the US. Mainstream politics are so far skewed to the right that anything centrist or moderately socialist is indistinguishable from cold war era communism.
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The majority of Americans are centrist. The majority of the media is very left leaning. The loudest voices are coming from the Progressives (extreme Left). It's a problem we have that our media and the politicians that get the most amplification do not actually represent the majority of the country.
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Where do you think Biden is on the political scale? By European standards he's a conservative. Not even a moderate conservative.
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In America the problem seems to be Americans don't have the foggiest idea what Communism is, but use the word frequently.
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So if Biden is fairly left of centre, it's no wonder you see no difference between what Europe calls the centre, the moderate left, the old school socialists, the far left and the Communists.
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I'm saying how can you have a discussion about politics when a huge range of ideas and philosophies are all just "extreme left/communism" on your scale?
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I've been paying attention for the last 50 years
No, you haven't. You'd have to be blind and deaf to still be shouting BASB like it's some great insight and not the complete nonsense that it always was.
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Oh, how we all wish that was really true.
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Get real. Our "radical left" would be center-right in the rest of the world. On the right, however, we have actual Nazi's. Out in the the open, hanging Nazi flags and Trump flags over bridges.
You'll have a hard time finding a centrist on the right right now. They've been getting more and more extreme every year. The party is almost unrecognizable.
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Keep moving that goal post. Eventually, you'll be able to score.
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Vote unionize out of spite and then skedaddle to greener pastures?
Please do. Little else could make your co-workers happier.
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A big problem with "old" unions like CWA is their membership has been shrinking so they have more pensioners than active members. In many cases, they have mismanaged the pension funds, so need to divert dues from current members to top up the funds. These legacy costs are avoided with a fresh start.
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Total bullshit. 10 seconds to post, 10 hours to debunk, then it looks like there's legitimate debate where there is none.
Take your anti-union propaganda back to your corporate masters. Tell them that we're not going to buy that bullshit any more.