NYT Tech Staff Use 'Slack Hack' to Fight Union Busting
NYT management forgot why they hired their tech workers when they created an anti-union Slack channel.
Voting has opened for New York Times’s tech staff, who will decide whether to ratify their union: the Times Tech Guild. Reports over the last few months have shown that NYT management are making it clear (arguably illegally) this does not work for them.
I’ll tell you who does work for them, though: people they hired to be better than them at using technology, something that Tech Guild workers demonstrated beautifully this week in response to management urging workers to vote ‘no’ on the union.
NYT management has been delivering memos via a read-only Slack channel, titled #xfun-all, about why unionising would be a bad idea. Xfun is the name of the Times’s tech product design team, and the majority of those staff in the channel were unable to respond.
US labour law states that employers can attempt to persuade employees not to unionise, as long as they report it. However, outright prevention of unionisation, penalisation or coersion of any kind, and a number of other tactics often called ‘union-busting’, are illegal.
NYT app designer and member of the Tech Guild Bon Champion told Fortune Magazine “[t]hese kinds of communications have been pretty steady for the last several months, but really ramped up after the election was set in the last couple of weeks.”
So, the Tech Guild began to use Slack’s emoji ‘react’ functions to craft responses.
Over and above using available reacts to spell “vote yes”, Tech Guild members also uploaded bespoke reacts, such as the Guild logo, and perhaps their most inspired move: a number of bright red, re-labelled, ‘info’ squares.
When staff hover their pointer over (or ‘mouseover’, thanks Tim) those info reacts, each one is titled with rebuttals such as :unions-dont-make-things-harder-they-ensure-we-are-heard:.
Shortly before the ‘Slack Hack’, even Times shareholders had acknowledged problems with the company’s actions. Trillium Asset Management, representing Times shareholders, sent an open letter to Times CEO Meredith Levien asking her to “cease actions that could violate federal labor law” and directing the company to protect long-term shareholders by honouring the workers’ right to organise.
‘Forced meetings’, either one-on-one or in groups, where employees are required to listen to anti-union propaganda are an illegal union-busting tactic. But since a staff member is not technically forced to read a Slack channel, the company should be able to lean on a nuanced reading of these laws in this instance.
However, as noted in the shareholders letter, the National Labor Relations Board “found merit to the charge filed by the NewsGuild of New York alleging that the Company violated federal labor law when it instructed staff not to show support for the union campaign.”
NYT management have also been accused of busting their other staff unions: for example, by offering different holiday pay arrangements to union and non-union staff at its product review department Wirecutter, which could be deemed coercive.
All ballots for the Tech Guild vote are due by the end of February, and a result will be announced by March 7.
For more media industry news, and the latest on Power and Pop Culture, subscribe to Chompsky for free OR pay less than £5 ($7) a month to get all my articles and the weekly news/campaigns roundup newsletter 👇👇👇 Thanks!
If you can’t subscribe, you’re still very welcome here. Please share to show your support instead! 👇👇👇 Thank you.
I don't know much about slack but this seems very good