Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers.
— Lenin, 1919.
On Thursday, December 8, around 1,100 New York Times reporters, editors, salespersons, IT specialists, concierges and security personnel, and other union workers represented by the Times Guild, a member of the News Guid of New York City, initiated a 24-hour strike, beginning at midnight.
The mass action was initiated after the Times Guild workers warned, last Friday, December 2, that they would launch a strike on Thursday if a “fair deal” was not reached with their employer, the New York Times Company, by Wednesday, December 7. In return, on Wednesday, the company’s representatives snubbed the workers by walking out of ongoing negotiations after 12 hours at the table, and with more than 5 hours left until the Guild’s deadline.
As if to mock the workers, the company’s spokesperson claimed that the strike was unnecessary, and chastised the Guild for taking “extreme action.”
The warning and subsequent strike followed nearly two years of stalling by the New York Times Company, which has refused to negotiate in good faith with its workers toward a new, “fair” contract.
The Times Guild’s demands are wide-ranging and fairly ambitious, but also, at the same time, perfectly reasonable.
In addition to general salary raises, the workers are demanding equal pay for equal work for women and people of color, who are paid, on average, significantly less than white men. Among other “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” demands, the Guild specifically wants more women of color to be elevated to leadership roles within the company’s newsroom, in order to address the company’s lack of diversity.
The workers are also demanding a more robust and comprehensive health-care plan. In particular, the workers want coverage for mental health, fertility, and family planning services. On this point, the Guild has included a demand of “equitable treatment for temporary and casual workers employed by the company on a regular basis.”
So far, the company has agreed only to a few of these demands, and even then, only to partially fulfilling them. This is despite the fact that the company’s profits have grown considerably in the last few years. The New York Times Company’s projected adjusted operating profit for 2022 is estimated at over $320,000,000.
On Thursday, hundreds of workers picketed outside the New York Times office near Times Square. The Times Guild workers were joined by comrades from other newspaper guilds, who commuted from as far away as Pittsburgh. Workers delivered speeches and chanted slogans like “We make the paper, we make the profit!” and “Hey Gray Lady, time to pay me!”
The Times Guild strike is the latest in a recent series of organized labor actions in the news media industry.
Across the labor movement, a mood of solidarity has prevailed. However, some socialists and progressive activists have balked at supporting the Times Guild workers.
Some socialists have objected on the grounds that New York Times employees are already paid far more than the average proletarian worker. Some have gone so far as to say that the strike is reactionary, that it is against the interests of the proletariat as a whole, because it expresses the demands of a privileged upper stratum.
According to Business Insider, base salaries at the New York Times range from $53,392 to $306,000 per year. A recent article on the strike in a local New York paper, The City, stated that some employees “earn as little as $52,000 a year.” By contrast, in 2021, the U.S. median wage was $37,586 per year, according to the Social Security Administration; meanwhile, a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of just $7.25 per hour would earn about $15,000 per year. Clearly, even the lowest-paid employees of the New York Times Company are among the best-paid waged workers in the U.S., which, in turn, is one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita — New York City’s astronomical cost of living notwithstanding.
The Times Guild is fighting for a $65,000 per year salary floor, as well as an immediate 10% pay raise for all employees.
We certainly shouldn’t deny that real disparities exist within the proletariat, both within this country and globally, that privileged upper strata of the working classes do, indeed, exist, and that often, throughout the labor struggle’s history, these upper-strata workers have failed to stand in solidarity with the working-poor.
But for all this, we cannot turn away from the Times Guild’s strike.
Yes, these upper-strata workers enjoy privileges closed to the proletariat writ large, and yes, these privileges engender vacillation among the wealthy and comfortable workers, but every injustice against these privileged workers, every slight from their bosses — the capitalists and their lackey corporate managers — forces them into antagonisms with capital, and draws them closer to the proletariat, to our great common struggle for economic dignity, for social justice, for political power.
Should we isolate the relatively privileged workers? Should we count them among our class foes? Should we reflexively turn them away, back into the arms of their capitalist bosses? Of course not! To do so would serve only to grow the army of capital.
This is not to say that we must beg the high-earning, relatively comfortable, exceptionally privileged workers for solidarity. On the contrary! When the relatively privileged workers strike, we must call them to strike with us, the underprivileged mass of workers. We must awaken them to the plight of the proletariat, and demand that they stand in solidarity with the rest of the working classes. The privileged upper-strata workers must be made to realize — and, as capitalism continues to decay, will be forced to realize — that proletarian solidarity is their only salvation. It is the relatively privileged workers who must actively choose to forsake their status, who must stand in solidarity with us.
Another common objection has been voiced by anti-war activists: The New York Times is one of the premier mouthpieces of American imperialism. The Times has again and again repeated casus belli lies straight from the U.S. government, including the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” lie that the George W. Bush administration used as its pretext for the Iraq War. The Times has run hundreds of pro-war opinion columns, calling for unilateral military action against America’s “enemy” states. Some anti-war activists refuse to support a strike launched by the employees of such a company.
The vast majority of Times writers are tasked with pumping out mundane articles on mundane news items. The newspaper’s political bent, its bloodthirsty support for Yankee imperialism, is the prerogative of its owners and large shareholders, its upper management, and its editorial board — not of the company’s workers.
Still, there can be no doubt that the New York Times employee, whatever their role, stands in the conveyor-belt system of Yankee-imperialist propaganda.
But if this were enough to rinse out solidarity with workers, there would not be a single industry within the U.S. Empire that “deserved” our solidarity. There is no “ethical work” under capitalism; every job, however “mundane” or “noble,” however quiet or celebrated, is a link in the chain of world imperialism. Doctors and nurses, however many lives they save, carry on their work so that private hospitals can profit from human suffering — the Hippocratic Oath notwithstanding. Public school teachers raise the next generation of docile workers, while private school teachers raise the next generation of arrogant rulers. Novelists, musicians, and other artists, even those who “speak truth to power,” participate in a market furnished and controlled by the ruling capitalist class.
The determining factor is not whether a worker stands within the world-imperialist system; we all stand within it. Every agent of the imperialist war machine — every cop, every imperialist troop, every prison guard, every “tough-on-crime” judge and prosecutor, every designer and manufacturer of munitions that kill our siblings in the imperialized periphery, every worker directly employed by the manufacturing arm of the war-machine, and, of course, every politician within the U.S. two-party duopoly — is, in no uncertain terms, our enemy. But we, the workers, who are forced, by the necessity of earning a wage, into the cogs of capitalist production, who are exploited and oppressed by the capitalists and their agents, have the power to abolish this machine — if only we can unite and struggle as a class.
The New York Times workers, the relatively privileged “professionals,” must realize that the sole condition of the success of their struggle, of the fulfillment of their just demands, is their class solidarity with the proletariat. We implore the Times Guild workers to continue their struggle, to demand $60K salaries, full benefits, and more — but not only for themselves! These demands must be extended to all workers, to the whole proletariat — and not only to the imperial proletariat of the U.S. Empire, but to all oppressed workers of the world.
That is why we extend solidarity to the striking New York Times workers: The workers, united, can never be defeated! The workers, united, will bring down and liberate ourselves from the system of mass violence and exploitation that oppresses us all.
