After editorial staffers at the New York Times-owned Athletic announced their desire to join the newspaper’s newsroom union, management informed the Times Guild on Thursday that they would not be honoring their request.
“Management’s decision does not come as a surprise, given The New York Times’ long history of union-busting,” the Times Guild said in response to the news. “We filed for an election at the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] and that process is moving forward. Sports jobs are Times Guild jobs. It’s that simple.”
“Instead of doing the right thing by its Athletic workers, Times management is continuing the charade of pretending it operates separate newsrooms in an attempt to keep a two-tiered system that disenfranchises Athletic workers,” the union said.
The New York Times acquired the online sports news outlet in 2022 and while management originally claimed The Athletic’s operations would be separate, they were integrated into the newsroom, the union explained in a press release.
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The Athletic was founded in 2016 as a subscription-based, advertisement-free sports site that would appeal to diehard fans of various teams, but it ultimately struggled to profit without ads and sought a buyer. The New York Times acquired it for a reported $550 million.
Times management shuttered the New York Times’ sports desk in September 2023 and the work was allocated to Times staff assigned to The Athletic. Now, about 200 editorial staffers for The Athletic, which now serves as the New York Times’ de facto sports section, have organized to be part of the Times Guild.
Stacy Cowley, a New York Times business reporter and elected Times Guild officer, told Fox News Digital that when a reader opens the sports section in print, they’ll see Athletic stories.
“The way that management has interacted with them has built the support for unionizing and for them coming in to the Times Guild,” she said. “We often have a joke that management is our best organizer and that’s really proved true in this case.”
“I think that Athletic employees very much felt the erosion of their independent identity and the growth of them being treated as a unit of the New York Times and that built real momentum amongst their staff to say, ”Well, if we are New York Times employees doing New York Times work, then we should be part of the New York Times Union Guild and have the benefits and protections of that contract,'” she added.
The NewsGuild of NY has three “bargaining units,” or unions, at The New York Times, which includes The Times Guild with about 1,500 newsroom, business and support staff, the Wirecutter Union made up of about 100 editorial staff, and the Tech Guild, which includes about 700 tech workers.
The News Guild is confident it has a strong case to present to the NLRB, Cowley said. She also criticized members of management who told The Athletic that they would be good partners in their efforts to unionize.
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“They have never been good partners in this,” she said. “When they bought The Athletic, the initial response was, ‘They’re going to operate completely independently.’ They waited until three weeks after, I think it was three or four weeks right after we closed our 2023 contract, they turned around and closed the sports desk, and all of us were very cognizant of that timing.”
“It was a pretty pointed move, they did not bring this up in contract negotiations, they waited until we closed the contract and then dropped that news on us a month later,” she added. ‘When members of the newsroom confronted them about it in a pretty heated meeting, their response was, ‘Oh, we had no plans to do this.'”
Now, she said, members are left with the possibility that either they sincerely made this decision to close the news desk in the span of a couple of weeks with no previous plans to do so, “which is not a great sign of their ability to forecast” or “they lied to us and knew all along that that’s what they were going to do and waited until we closed the contract to do it.”
“They have not built up a lot of credibility with their employees about how they interact with the union,” she added.
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Now, they wait to see what the NLRB will say, Cowley said. The Athletic’s hearing is scheduled for next week.
“The period where there’s a big question mark is what comes after that, because how long it takes the board to issue their ruling is very much variable,” she said.
Cowley also hit the Times’ editorial board, which has consistently taken very pro-union positions.
“The New York Times is a large, publicly traded company with a lot of very highly paid executives, and they recognize that union contracts transfer some power over to the workers, and very few companies voluntarily go along with that,” she said.
The Athletic publisher David Perpich told staffers on Thursday he believed the best approach was for the site’s journalists to have a separate bargaining unit within the NewsGuild.
“The Athletic’s newsroom is completely independent from The Times’s, with separate leadership,” he wrote. “This difference has allowed us to preserve policies and practices that are specific to the needs of covering sports both nationally and locally, with a workforce around the country. That has enabled us to maintain our unique workplace culture and deliver our distinctive best-in-class journalism for fans.
“Further, The Athletic needs to be an economically sustainable business that can financially support what has grown into one of the largest newsrooms, with more than 500 journalists. We’ve made progress towards that ambition, but we still have a long way to go. A separate contract and bargaining unit is the best path for maintaining the size and strength of our newsroom and achieving further growth.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the New York Times for comment.
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