New York Times' Lunchbox Perk Backfires Amid Work-From-Home Protest (bloomberg.com) 81
Hundreds of New York Times employees are working from home this week in defiance of the company's renewed return-to-office push. Bloomberg News: More than 1,200 people, who are the majority of the journalists and tech workers represented by the NewsGuild of New York, pledged not to return to the office Monday in an effort to get the Times to negotiate over RTO plans, according to the union. "Health and safety policies are a part of contract negotiations and they have to be bargained over," Times software engineer Carrie Price said in an interview Monday. "Being in charge of our own personal risk assessment is important to our membership... Being asked to give up that ability to be in control of my own personal safety for myself and my loved ones, is something that we don't want and it hasn't been negotiated over." The journalists have been without a contract since March 2021 and staff haven't gotten raises in more than two years despite decades-high inflation and rent increases. Meanwhile, they say the company has done exceptionally well in recent years and executives are making millions of dollars each year. [...] On Monday, the Times offered branded lunchboxes to welcome employees back to the office.
aim higher like free catered lunch not just an box (Score:1)
aim higher like free catered lunch not just an box and not even an boxed lunched.
In the old days... (Score:2)
In the old days, large companies had cafeterias with hot lunches. I guess someone realised shutting these down lined the shareholder's pockets a little more.
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Worse, in some areas (looking at California, of course) on-campus cafeterias have been banned because they take away from the tax base / employment statistics for restaurants surrounding the campus.
Citation? I've worked at a couple of California companies with on-campus cafeterias.
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You're reading that "banned" headline as if some government told them they couldn't have a cafeteria. That's not the case. It is true, though, that when one of these big tech companies moves into town and all their employees eat free lunches in a cafeteria, the local businesses all suffer.
Re: aim higher like free catered lunch not just an (Score:2)
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Catered lunches actually benefit corporations [...] But, assuming zero profits 1200 employees taking 15 minute shorter lunch breaks by $15/hr (minimum wage in NYC) would equate to $1134000 of free extra labor per year.
If it only cost you five bucks to feed each one of those employees, it would cost you $1,512,000, which is almost $400k more than the cost you calculated for that "free" labor. Seems less of a "predatory act by company" and more of a "win-win where both employer and employee benefit" to me.
Property values are more important (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignoring the fact that evidence that work from home affects productivity is sketchy at best I'm constantly running into problems with people out sick for weeks on end or obviously struggling with covid while working. The productivity hit from people being constantly sick is way more than what a little water cooler talk gets you.
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This return to work is not about property values. I dunno where this trope came from, but companies will save money by reducing property costs, and most companies lease their offices and don't own them so have no vested interest in collecting rent from themselves.
They have long term leases that are tough to get out of. It looks really bad to shareholders if you're paying millions of dollars in rent on a building that sits empty.
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Right. We've been trying to sublease an unused building, now that we moved out of it, but that all sort of got put on hold with the pandemic. So we're stuck, despite it being in a very good location and near mass transit, etc. But we did get rid of extra leases and rentals, and consolidating smaller offices, because it was a significant expense on the books that was difficult to justify.
Re:Property values are more important (Score:4, Informative)
This return to work is not about property values.
Return to office. Employees have been working this whole time. Propagandizers try to convince people that work only gets done in an office, which is not true.
True, the NY Times company would benefit from WFH and using smaller offices.
The people that control the NY Times - upper-level executives, board members, and large stockholders - own commercial property as part of their portfolios. They would personally benefit more if people came back to the office and helped boost commercial property values, than if the NY Times saves some money.
Governments want people in offices so that the commercial property (and surrounding businesses, like restaurants) are worth more, which makes more taxes. NYC in particular is pushing in-person work hard. Think about how many people don't live in NYC and just commute in from New Jersey, Long Island, etc... and how many no longer work there in-person.
"I'm trying to fill up office buildings," [NYC Mayor Eric Adams] said Wednesday. [cbsnews.com]
There's other reasons people push returning to office, including nonsensical emotional reasons. But property values is a concern in some cases.
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Property values are one of the biggest factors, and are prioritised over what's beneficial to the business itself or the employees.
It would be much better to convert a large proportion of those offices into apartments. Then people might actually be able to *live* in NYC instead of wasting hours clogging up the roads and rails twice a day.
Office buildings are inefficient by design, they are only "full" for 8 hours a day, the other 16 hours they sit empty just wasting space and money. If people actually lived
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I have to pay the same mortgage whether I'm at home 24 hours a day or only 14, so I clearly can't afford to go in to the office.
Re:Property values are more important (Score:5, Informative)
It is. It's not about leases or office expenses. It's about those people who well, have offices.
You worked 30 years and earned the corner office. Now the pandemic comes and the office is empty save you and a bunch of other people with offices. Who are you going to brag to about your corner office?
Meanwhile, the serfs working in the cube farm (if lucky) or open-plan space aren't there to see the "top guys" with private offices and gloat over them.
People with offices, not surprisingly, actually enjoy going to the office - something like 60-75% like commuting and going to the office into their office. Whereas those in open-plan offices generally hate it, with only around 20% enjoying it, and cubes improve matters a bit, by about 33% or so. It's no surprise because pre-pandemic, open-plan office spaces save money on office space, but drop productivity by 10-20% over a cube, and those drop productivity as well.
That's why RTO comes from. If it was purely about costs, most businesses would locate in cheap areas - why have a downtown Manhattan penthouse at $20,000/sq. ft. when the same building probably offers floor 3 for $8,000/sq. ft.
The prestige of having that nice office in the sky isn't very high when the serfs aren't there to kowtow to you.
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Nearly 25% of the other staff resigned, so the new rules were turned off pretty quickly.
The company I work for has some "flexible working arrangements" that are totally inflexible but from what I can see no-one is following them.
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The companies themselves yes, but the owners of these companies also often own property, which they then lease to the company.
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One of the drivers of the Canutian push to turn back the clock on WFH is the sunk-cost fallacy of executives seeking to "justify" the money drain of their commercial real estate commitments. The Apple flying saucer is perhaps the most obvious example.
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Apple was leasing a lot of property. Lots. And some was crap, and if you weren't in the main building it was clear you weren't that vital. But also, they had the extra money. So consolidating that might actually help costs in the long run, maybe, maybe not. The Mac people however aren't important enough to be in the new building.
On the other hand, Apple is NOT typical. Neither is Google. Both have way more money than they know what to do with, enough so that they can waste a bunch without pissing off
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> people out sick for weeks on end or obviously struggling with covid while working
Vaccine side effects :)
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Dickhead.
Re:Property values are more important (Score:4, Insightful)
I bought a neti pot when covid hit (Score:2)
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Oh working from home affects productivity a lot. Now that you can actually continue working during meetings where some narcissist who loves hearing himself talk drones on instead of sitting there mentally undressing the intern while pretending to listen to the bozo, productivity sure took off to new heights.
Re:Property values are more important (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess I'm lucky to be where I work. The owner of the company stated that our productivity -increased- with work from home. The idea that they're running with is that occasional connections with your coworkers and getting out of the house can be healthy for your mental state, but they have no intentions of forcing it but rather encourage periodic get-togethers instead. I'd say that's a very good compromise.
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Periodic social get togethers are much better for getting to know people than forcing people to sit next to each other every day while they're busy working.
We do the same, every few months we'll rent a meeting space like a hotel and get everyone together for a couple of days. It's usually a few hours of presentations, possibly some leisure activities and the rest of the time just socialising with colleagues.
When i was forced to commute to an office every day, i was constantly tired or sick and found most of
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This. I keep hearing airy pronoucements about the importance of "corporate culture" and "collaboration" and whatnot, but in reality the conversations I heard back in the days when I commuted to the office consisted almost entirely of 1)gossip that would make a high school mean-girl clique look like Plato's Symposium, 2)placing and settling of sports pool bets, and 3)random content-free small talk.
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Almost everywhere I've heard of has seen massive increases in work productivity during covid precisely due to WFH.
The exceptions, are meatspace-only type work, like traditional sales and perhaps marketing.
Personally, having been WFH since 2011, I can't recommend it enough. I'm able to get twice as much work done at home as in the office in a given day. So much bullshit routine things are simply eliminated, and there is no "I'll go for a quick walk for the third time today, because I can't concentrate due to
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Let's be honest, EVERYTHING is more important than people's lives to the corporate masters. Health? Fuck that. Sanity? Nope. Family? Fuck your family away if it gets in the way of profits or the CEO getting a new leer or yacht or fifth home this year.
At some point it'd be nice to see a return to semi-sanity for our overall outlook on life, but I think we're so locked in on profit as religion that it just can't happen without something major going down. Basically, until we show them that killing us isn't pro
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the CEO getting a new leer
Good point; habitual sexual harassers are in favor of RTO for obvious reasons.
None of those people need to be in that building. (Score:2)
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Suit people: Quit yer bullshit.
In New Reality, bullshit quits the suits. Bye-ee!
(seriously. Where I"m at it's been a mutiny, quite bloody, and for now the suits seem to have lost. But where I am is far.. far from typical suit mentality like a NYC staid, boring old company like NYT)
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True. AI is almost good enough to write basic propaganda of the kind that majority of NYT content is nowadays. It already does a lot of tangential work in writing it, in addition to writing some of the simpler collation stories.
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AI has a better-than-5th-grade writing level, however. So humans have that going for them.
Shiny trinkets and swag no longer work (Score:3)
...and if i wanted a branded metal lunchbox, it'd have to be an OG Star Wars one from 1977.
Nothing else will do. Besides, the best lunchboxes are them soft-sided insulated thingies. No one totes a lunch pail anymore..
Well, maybe a bento box would do. Esp. if from a good Japanese joint.
But nah.. swag just doesn't sway anymore. Hasn't, not for a while.
The only thing worse they could have given out... (Score:2)
would have been a tote bag.
Personal Risk Assessment (Score:5, Insightful)
"Being in charge of our own personal risk assessment is important to our membership"
I seem to remember a number of people using this argument to avoid using an experimental drug just a year ago and being fired for it.
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So if the top level planners do what you want, then it's okay, but if they don't then it's not? Just want to figure out how this decision tree works...
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It's called Lefty Hypocrisy. It's rampant.
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It's called being pro-life. Protecting the people. Supposedly what the righties want people to believe they stand for but instead, as reality shows, they don't care how many people die. Especially if it's women.
It's called Righty Hypocrisy. It's rampant.
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Clearly you've never heard of libertarianism nor the non aggression principle. Things must seem pretty simple in your right/left dichotomy, though.
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Didn't you hear? The administration says those are unpeople, we can't talk about them. They're terrorists.
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They called themselves that. https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/... [hdnux.com]
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"Being in charge of our own personal risk assessment is important to our membership"
I seem to remember a number of people using this argument to avoid using an experimental drug just a year ago and being fired for it.
Yeah, at will employment states sure can backfire.
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those with stock will stick around for as long as they can. those that need the jobs (freshers) might put up with it. those with experience will leave when they get the first chance.
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"Woke" is the word used by people who wish they had the nerve to just say "Uppity".
Did they really think that works? (Score:2)
"Branded lunch boxes"?
Really?
Be honest, suits, would you take this serious? No? Then why do you think anyone who actually works is that stupid when even you are smarter than that?
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And repeat that daily. I don't care for one-offs.
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For the brief moment I had the planning committee's ear, I mentioned that people would be happier getting the money it cost to make the company branded bullshit instead of the company branded bullshit for Christmas. The CEO and VPs looked at me like I'd grown three heads. The idea of NOT wanting to advertise the company that was slowly sucking our souls out one low-paid day at a time just blew their minds.
I was subsequently removed from the planning committee meetings because I said things that "don't reall
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If the fuckers eat the lunch boxes, I'm tempted to say they were worth it.
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Delusional people are often deeply committed to their illusions. Then they shoot (remove) the messenger. Some eventually wonder why they are making so many bad decisions, but not many get to that point.
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Not as bad as the 'your dog's going to miss you now that we're making you come back to the office' advertisements [ctvnews.ca] in downtown Toronto.
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"I missed you too, CEO. With every bullet so far at least"
Wow this is a tough one! (Score:4, Funny)
Should I go with my personal saftey and control over my own life, or should I go with the neat-o branded lunchbox?
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Depends... If almost nobody comes in to claim a NYT branded lunchbox and you get one? It might be a valuable collector's item in a decade or two?
Re: Wow this is a tough one! (Score:2)
I bet they could fetch all of 50$ from the pawn shop a few decades from now.
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Never mind personal safety. The commute alone will probably cost more than the missed lunchbox, not to mention the wasted hours going to and from the office!
News for the news. (Score:2)
I guess the NYT missed the news that branded lunchboxes pretty much lose all their cool by the time you get to the 5th grade.
lol @ journoes (Score:2)
Maybe they should learn to code so they can find a real job.
If you don't like the working conditions - quit. (Score:1)
Wow....so much crawl... (Score:1, Insightful)
...licking the boots of your corporate masters.
Lol.....Land of the "Free".
Assholes only want you back in the office for two reasons:
1: Useless management wants to actually see their slaves
2: The US ruling class is getting leaned on by the building owners.
One silver lining of Covid was it clearly demonstrated WFH works, and can work well for all sorts of people. Now they want to wind that back.
I manage a team of 10 cyber security architect and I do not give a flying fuck where thry are as long as the work ge
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Us the IT workers know this. We've known this for decades now.
Explain it to suits for whom it's still 1986 and they still think in adding-machine and typewriter mentality. That's what Covid did was explain it most graphically.
I really think it's real-estate investments driving this "return" mentality. An awful lot of companies make more $ with real estate than with work. McD's is one. Sears is another. Or was. Is Sears still at thing? I thought they'd croaked.
The only ones where I am at that can't cop
That's the way capitalism works: (Score:3)
"executives are making millions of dollars each year"
the CEO's eat tenderloin while you eat shit.
haha (Score:2, Flamebait)
Google's running into it.
Apple's running into it.
Now the NYT is running into it.
Enable your precious snowflakes and validate them all you like, what does it get you? MORE DEMANDS.
"give up that ability to be in control of my own personal safety for myself and my loved ones'
Oh shut the fuck up. People have been 'going to work' since the beginning of the commercial-industrial era during times when real, actual, dangerous diseases like POLIO were widespread. Don't want that job? Fine - let it go to someone
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I had to go in tons this years -- for physical work, things that cannot be done via VDI or VPN... like schlepping a few cool million dollars worth of hardware around to upgrade everything.
It was like rebuilding the airplane while still flying it. We did it all, from cooling to power to compute to storage and network. All of it is new.
And at the end of this effort... we manage it all from home.
The old days are done. And we're gonna make sure they're still done. The work gets done, and metrics say faster
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For those things which can't be done remotely, the removal of thousands of commuters from the roads and rails make the experience a lot better too.
Plus if they close down many of the offices and convert them to residential property, perhaps people who need to work in a specific location could live within walking distance.
There's so much talk about the environment these days, cutting away a lot of unnecessary travel would be hugely beneficial for the environment and climate targets.
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Had to do a bunch of that myself over the last 18 months. The thing is prior to the pandemic most of the time I came to work and sat in an office administering an HPC facility that was in a different building halfway across the campus. Unless I need to actually fiddle with the hardware there is no need to be in the office. Even is something has broken I can be in the office faster than the vendors deliver the parts. Hell Lenovo just took over a week to deliver a replacement PSU on a machine with 4x24x7 supp
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When you don't bother to learn any skills other than "management by walking around" while the geeks you sneer at learn skills essential to producing valuable goods and services, yes, you're just gonna have to suck it up and take it when they get demanding.
NY Times is trash (Score:1)
What? (Score:2)
On Monday, the Times offered branded lunchboxes to welcome employees back to the office.
Is this a newspaper or an elementary school? Negotiate a contract, respect your employees' union, and stop acting like assholes.