Truth be told, for the present cost of living in the Northeast in general, you’re looking at a family income of $300k to be “comfortable”, or a single base income of $200k. That’s if you want to buy a new car (of which the bulk cost more than $50k), a starter home that doesn’t need major repairs ($800k+), and still have some money left over to save for retirement; in cities like NYC and Boston, you’re easily looking at $250k single/$400k couple for a “Middle Class” existence.
The brutal reality is that everyone who has to work to survive is grossly underpaid relative to the current cost of living. To ignore this fact (or worse, try to compartmentalize it or limit its scope to a reduced “other” category) endangers both the economy and the state.
False. $45k in 2005 is only $73k today, when adjusted for inflation[1]. Even if you use the most generous interpretation of "2000s" to mean 2000, that's only $82k.
If you are a healthy person living frugally then I think the inflation in your personal basket of goods is actually higher than the fed numbers would dictate (esp for rent and housing).
The entire "Recreation commodities" category (which includes other stuff like "Sporting goods" and "Pets and pet products") is only weighed at 2%, compared to 13% for food and 37% for shelter. Even if it's down 50% the impact on the overall CPI is negligible.
>assume you only buy new cars (only up ~25% since 2000, but used cars are now almost as expensive as new whereas they used to be available for half the price or less),
???
There's clearly a "Used cars and trucks" category.
>and underweight housing (basically doubled since 2000, worse if you need to move to a HCOL major urban center for employment).
The index is called "Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers", not "Consumer Price Index for Young Urban Professionals". Not everyone is a recent graduate who recently moved into a high COL city and paying for a market rate apartment. For every person fitting that criteria, there's probably also a retiree who owns their house and/or lives in a rent controlled apartment.
The discussion here is about the cost of living difference for tech workers who I assume are clustered around NYC.
$45K in NYC in 2005 is not equivalent to $73K today for most such people. It is likely closer to $100K today, as the above poster said.
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYXRSA
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA
The same is also true if you use 2005 or 2009 as your start date. I agree there is variance in theory, but in practice it has been about the same as the national.
I’m sure getting it that low means ignoring housing, and making everything in the “basket of goods” worse.
No. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...
>and making everything in the “basket of goods” worse.
Given that food, energy, and shelter makes up the bulk of the CPI, I'm not sure how this can be done. The most plausible thing I can think of is "food is less nutritious than before", but I doubt that's an actual factor. "Food is getting less nutritious so I'm forced to shop at whole foods" isn't exactly a popular sentiment.
The first is you're using the Nationwide averages as opposed to the regional numbers for New York where a lot of these increases are much greater than on the nation.
The second thing is the way it includes housing is by using a thing called the owners imputed rent. And what that does is it tries to back out the rental from a housing unit. The problem is in New York City rent has been rising way faster than that.
30 is the cpi's consistently underestimated a number of its own provisions because of the way it does hedonics and substitution. It basically says that while meat might have risen 50% people switch to fish now and it uses in lower value for inflation.
The CPI over the last 30 years have been so massively game it's almost useless anymore
Another commenter has pointed out new york house prices actually rose slower compared to the rest of the country.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42043147
>The second thing is the way it includes housing is by using a thing called the owners imputed rent. And what that does is it tries to back out the rental from a housing unit. The problem is in New York City rent has been rising way faster than that.
Most Americans own their home. OER might not be perfect, but pretending that they pay market rent doesn't make much sense either. Even for people who don't own their home, new york has rent control, which provides similar inflation protections compared to owning a home.
>30 is the cpi's consistently underestimated a number of its own provisions because of the way it does hedonics and substitution. It basically says that while meat might have risen 50% people switch to fish now and it uses in lower value for inflation.
The part about hedonic adjustment is misleading. While it's true that such adjustments are used. It's only used for small minority of categories (basically clothes and technology), and doesn't include stuff like food (like in your example).
Meanwhile the part about substitution is straight up false:
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/common-misconceptions-abo...
> In January 1999, the BLS began using a geometric mean formula in the CPI that reflects the fact that consumers shift their purchases toward products that have fallen in relative price. [It continues by saying it allows substitution withing categories and not between categories.]
This is exactly what I was saying. It has become a cost of living index, not a measure of inflation anymore. The hedonic adjustments can be laughably hand-wavy (it is a very difficult problem on how you measure inflation when using CPUs -- the real answer is you shouldn't and CPI's basked is a bad bad way to do it). That FAQ is always pretty funny and defensive (a lot of "give us a break -- it doesn't really affect anything much").
> Even for people who don't own their home, new york has rent control, which provides similar inflation protections compared to owning a home.
This is one of the huge issues. (1) Not sure if you live near NYC, but ask any new yorker about how much rent control has helped -- the answer is usually pretty low. don't have a heart attack looking at this rental rise in the last 5 years https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys...
However that isn't the important part - rent control shouldn't effect measures of inflation -- this is precisely why CPI is bad. You can't legislate away inflation, you mere push the money around and prices rise asymmetrically but you still have the fundamental issue that CPI no longer even tries to measure -- too many dollas chasing too few goods. So you stop some of using those dollars on housing -- they just bid of something else instead.
CPI is a terrible horrible very bad measure of inflation. Its been that way since the 70s at least when the concept was turned on its head.
I wonder if there is a similar measure for time kids spend in school. My kid comes home early every Wednesday, and there’s are ~15 other early dismissal days during the school year too.
I would bet almost everything that relies heavily on labor has been increasing in price faster than official figures for the basket of all goods and services.
You need to understand that when people bitch about the "cost of living", they're not speaking in broad terms. They're speaking in specific terms, inclusive of their insane budgetary choices that they believe are mandatory to be seen as high-status.
Yes, you can live just fine on the median income. But in order to have your ego stroked as the super important high class person that you obviously are, you have to spend some money. Choosing to live in NYC in the first place is certainly part of that, the rest is just gravy.
My generation is the one that got mercilessly bullied for interest in science, engineering, and computers.
Gen Z watched The Social Network and suddenly decided that software development was cool. It is, by no means, a caricature, since these people graduated. The software profession is thoroughly infested by status strivers, at this point.
The media still openly pokes fun at tech whizzes like Mark Zuckerberg and even Jeff Bezos in a way that they would never do to e.g. Jamie Dimon. The perceived statuses are still incomparable, and I think any competent Gen Zer knows it.
Tell me your viewpoint is unreasonably biased without telling me your viewpoint is unreasonably biased.
It reads like you are projecting your own beliefs of what New Yorkers and tech workers are like, and then screaming about that intersection.
Look at the junk in this section for exampe
> Cereals and bakery products
And ofcourse all the items in fruits and vegetables had the highest inflation.
>> Cereals and bakery products
>And ofcourse all the items in fruits and vegetables had the highest inflation.
A simple check shows this is false. The "Cereals and bakery products" category went up by 28.6% since January 2020, compared to 17.9% for "Fruits and Vegetables". You get similar conclusions if you use compare against January 2005.
Those are literally part of the CPI.
>interest rates
The "C" in "CPI" stands for consumer. Unless you're taking out loans to buy your groceries, interest rates shouldn't be a factor on your expenditures.
But they're not.
It's more a focus on how people "feel" about their situation than it is math. It's resonant to me.
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-the-self-fulfill...
As in "people feel as though they want to be paid more"? You may find the idea interesting and resonant, but how does that affect anything? It's still true that they're on more than journalists, regardless of how they feel.
[0]: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-mont...
[1]: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/low-moderate-liberal-food-plan...
I'm curious about what portion of those that are living on $74k or less are doing so solo, and how many are only able to do so by racking up debt / getting support from family / etc.
I live in an area less expensive than NYC and, at least anecdotally in my circles, if you don't have a partner (or other assistance like roommates, parents, or something along those lines) it seems pretty damn rough to get by on ~70k.
1. A Tesla Model 3, on which I spend 1k a month with insurance
2. 1.5k rent for a studio in a good safe location with utilities
3. Rest on groceries, eating out movies etc.
If I decided to get a cheap car, I could easily have 600$ or more to spend on housing etc. So it would be tight but as a single 20s male, I would make it with 50k a year after taxes. Everything else just goes into savings. I think people have lavish tastes, or no control over their spending if they can’t make do with 70k a year after taxes.
I don't think the median income is after taxes, is it? That would be more reasonable, for sure. My comment was made in reference to friends who make $70k/yr before taxes.
I actually can't think of an EU Capital where that's achievable anymore, bar possibly the socialist outlier of Vienna. In Dublin a good studio is at least 2k, and you'll pay 52% tax on earnings over €70k as well...
I live alone in a 2br. I don't have assistance from family or a partner.
Now, I do not live in a luxury building, and I am not building up a nest egg from my salary. And I rent. But when people think about the costs of NYC, a lot of people forget that you don't need a car, car insurance, or gas.
Where you get into trouble is if you're paying a stupid large amount for rent. It is very possible to pay 1-2k / month in rent. Most people who move to the city at that budget live with roommates initially, but most find a really good deal, sometimes rent controlled, organically through networks after a year or two of living here. Deals are hard to find as they should be, but certainly exist, and most longterm locals have a great deal.
You are robbing from your future to live in the present.
This might be ok for you specifically as you are making a gamble on your ownership of the startup paying off. Perhaps you have a family safety net. Or Perhaps you are ok with taking the risk that you don’t have enough money in your older years.
It’s not really ok for standard employees to live that way. The USA social contract is that each person must self-fund their own retirement. Deferring that savings to “later” has truly staggering costs in compound-interest-years lost.
The majority of standard employees live this way, or with less.
So you can't actually afford to maintain your lifestyle, unless your retirement plan is a revolver.
What is false?
I didn't make any claims other than saying that in my circles I see some of my friends and colleagues have trouble making it by on $70k. I'm not sure how you would be able to tell me that I'm wrong about that. I'm happy that you are able to make it on $70k, though.
Okay, then let's make this rigorous.
Falsifiable Claim: People live a life of struggle on 70k a year in new york, where struggle is defined by constant worries of physiological needs, safety, and security, as categorized in Manslow's hierarchy of needs. https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Falsified by counterexample.
QED.
For a lot of people, they may mean 'struggle' in the sense of living below where they want to be, which is relative. Maslow's hierarchy is helpful to categorize.
Can we maybe just have a normal conversation without trying to flex our superior debating skills?
I was curious how many people that make the median wage in NYC are living comfortably solo -- that's it!
You're making up claims, disconnected from my comments, and then falsifying them yourself in some sort of weird self-debating comment.
Just because it's possible, doesn't mean most are willing to take the set of preferences in my head that allows me to be so cheap and rewire their own brains like that.
The Soviet Union "officially" had the highest production of food per capita in the world, yet they had to import food. Because you cannot eat government statistics.
If you did a 30 second search, you'd see it's factored into the CPI, with "Shelter" (which further breaks down into rent and owners' equivalent rent) making up 36% of the CPI basket.
Unless owners are completely in the loop in terms of the rental market (which they likely are not, they don't rent), they may not come up with good estimates for what an equivalent rent would be.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241009171432/https://www.bls.g...
The problem with your retort is it ignores the very context I outlined above. The present rate of inflation appears more manageable, but because most of it is driven by absurd inflation in shelter and transport costs (homes and cars), those two areas are starkly higher than inflation overall - as much as 50% or more, in some metros.
So while your napkin math makes for a good soundbite, the reality is that it just hides the complex truth of inflation. So yes, while $45k might be inflation-equivalent to $73k today, that purchasing power is significantly different. $43k in the 2000s could buy you a starter home in most states, albeit not in most metros; nowadays, $73k can’t even cover basic necessities in many states and all metros, not without significant sacrifices.
So my point still stands.
Which reminds me of another thing. A good friend of mine is currently getting their MBA from a fairly well regarded school. One thing they recently learned about is structuring compensation. The general adage is that whatever you pay an employee must be in reflection of the multiple you get back from that employee. For example a ratio of 5:1 would be for every 1 dollar you pay you get 5 back.
When you start thinking about it like that, you realize just how underpaid people are. So many companies - in fact the vast majority - it’s much higher, in tech for example it’s usually around 10:1 and often as high as 25:1 or more.
This makes it much more straightforward in understanding things and the power imbalance when thinking about it like this
> A good friend of mine is currently getting their MBA from a fairly well regarded school...
Let that good friend of yours get actual job in some non-superlative companies like Wall street banks or FAANG. They will learn how their fantastical ratios of 5:1, 10:1, or 25:1 work in real life.
> ... you realize just how underpaid people are...
If that were true those 100s of thousands companies be making enormous unheard of profits. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
This means nothing. Its a red herring. The fact is executives are paid outsized to the rest of a company typically, certainly when you look at companies of size like Google, Microsoft or even Intel or Nvidia (and so it goes down the chain really), and I really question the value of most executives, as they tend not to like being scrutinized by outside parties, especially within their own organizations, but the reverse is untrue. They really seem to hate accountability but sure love getting the board to rubber stamp golden parachutes and big bonuses for themselves
If a corporation can find 350 million dollars to pay out in executive bonuses salaries etc. I'm certain than is an allocation problem not a money problem.
>If that were true those 100s of thousands companies be making enormous unheard of profits. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
>Let that good friend of yours get actual job in some non-superlative companies like Wall street banks or FAANG. They will learn how their fantastical ratios of 5:1, 10:1, or 25:1 work in real life.
They have one, I'm declining to use identifying information. The largest bonuses and salaries funnel upward, its no secret, with huge executive (and to be clear, I'm bundling VPs and SVPs in this) getting hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in bonuses that those below them see a fraction of.
Like profits being at record highs last year?[0] and thats just 5 seconds of running a search.
Not mention we are talking ratios here. So just because some SMBs aren’t taking in millions doesn’t mean the ratio is any less true
[0]: https://thehill.com/business/4561631-corporate-hit-record-hi....
Labor compensation is determined primarily by substitutability. A $200K engineer creating "$1M worth of value" is not automatically deserving of a higher wage unless there is no one else willing to do that engineer's job for $200K.
I’m not saying don’t people pay well but the executives - non executive power balance is huge and I don’t see how a person can deny this.
Materially executives are also rarely helped accountable for their terrible decisions or layoffs would actually be laid at their feet.
Labor market imbalances of power are well documented and easily discoverable. It’s really plain at this point that material productivity gains have almost entirely been funneled to the top, with workers benefitting very little. Wages have not kept pace with productivity gains since the 1970s, even if you include the recent blip of wage increases they aren’t meaningful in the grand scheme of things.
I don’t know why we just accept these as truths or whatever cause they don’t have to be
I'm not a fan of the status quo. Things should change.
Minimum wage is $15,000/yr.
With an MS in the life sciences I can make $16/ at the big local public university doing research.
Anyone making over $100k is doing fine and has no sympathy from me.
I did strenuous manual labor for next to nothing once upon a time. After about 8 years of that, on top of regular 60 hour work weeks, I spent almost every waking moment of 4-5 years to learn and better myself with about every sacrifice you could imagine short of divorce. I'm now making significantly more and working much less with an extremely happy family.
I'm not some trust fund kid. I have a high school education. My father worked 3-5 jobs to provide for my family growing up. So if you haven't picked it up, I know what the other side looks like.
I work in tech now, I wouldn't even reply to a recruiter presenting a 190k job offer if it meant living in New York. I can get more working remote. It's not because I'm spoiled, it's not because I make bad financial decisions, it's because I know my value and won't compromise and I sure won't reduce my family's quality of life because some multi million dollar company wants to short change me.
I get paid fairly for my experience and what I bring to the table, I make sure of that. If my employer isn't matching what I know I can get on the market, I will first negotiate (which is right where the NYT Tech workers are at), then leave for greener pastures if that falls through. I can do that because I worked hard to bring more value to myself in an in demand field.
I'm sorry if you're making a lower salary, but that doesn't mean everyone should just take what they're given. That's how people are exploited.
These arguments aren't just wrong. They are backwards and self limiting.
What I read from parent is that lifestyle inflation must be high in some of these demographics when the rhetoric used is about survival, despite evidence of many more people 'surviving' on far less income.
What I read from you is that you fiercely maintain negotiating power because you can and feel it's only right given your high value. Why WOULD anyone leave money on the table, after all?
Both can be true.
Yes, the notion you need 300k to be comfortable anywhere is absurd, but just because someone makes more doesn't mean their desire to achieve a better quality of life is any less valid than anyone else. Do people with higher salaries need more? No. But why assume that just because an individual or group of people want a better quality of life they're "privileged?"
FTR, 100k as a average base salary is pretty low for tech in NYC. When the other 90k is bonus and RSUs that probably vest over 4 years, the stock has fluctuated 50%, and this being the journalism space, I wouldn't expect to see the full value. They have every right to try to negotiate better quality of life improvements out of NYT, especially for something as low impact on revenue as pet bereavement, as ridiculous as that is. I feel a lot of these comments don't understand tech compensation, where sometimes companies can't meet market value in cash so resort to all kinds of quirky benefits to attract/retain skilled workers. That is exactly where I see such a crazy request coming from when a company pushes back against giving more than a 2% annual raise.
If you think it's reasonable to pay exorbitant rent, food, gas, utilities, simply because you live in some concrete jungle then you are blind. It doesn't justify you actually deserving to make that much other than someone choosing to pay you that much.
However, journalism in general is a struggling business, which will probably push wages down on average across the profession.
Double however, the NYT has been doing really well at adapting to the modern media landscape and currently has record subscribers and profits [0], so I can see why the union thought it would be a good time to play hardball.
Triple however, I'd quibble a bit with your numbers, even if I think the overall point is well taken. It might be hard to live on the UES on 100K. It's not so hard to live by the Cortelyou stop in Brooklyn or in Sunset Park, both lovely areas.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t...
It really isn't.
You’re right that personal standards, subjective as they are, can make an argument highly misleading. However, you’d be careful not to make the mistaken assumption that your personal standards are the norm, either.
I’m seeing a lot of “you’re wrong, no sympathy for anyone over $100k” responses to my argument here, all of them making the same assumptions: that anyone making that much dosh must obviously be whinging about paying more for their Maserati or unable to afford rent on that high-rise condo anymore. Everyone is extrapolating some false narrative despite overwhelming evidence that even the most highly-paid among us are getting squeezed out of the housing market or struggling to make ends meet, and that’s exactly what the powers that be (people who don’t have to work to live, because they have all the money) want us to devolve into.
At the end of the day, there’s exactly two groups: those who must work to survive, and those who don’t need to due to immense wealth. Statistically speaking, you’re never going to be the latter, so you should be just as concerned about “highly paid” workers struggling to make ends meet as you are “low-skilled” workers, because we’re all workers.
- Minimum is 1.0 Living Wage ™ (after taxes, rent, insurance, utilities, savings... you get to eat 3 meals and 2 snacks per person per home).
Having the mental stress of trying to determine when would be the right moment to approach the moody boss to make a case for your livelihood shouldn't be a thing.
I'd like the freedom of not having to pay the time tax of determining if I'll make rent or not...
Its pretty easy to go to college on loans and rack up $150k in debt for an average 4-year degree. Its easy to spend $35k-$50k on a new car, even 10 year old cars in good shape are $10k-$15k. Housing costs vary a lot more by area, but I think most would agree its extremely expensive these days.
The idea that a young family could have $5,000/mo just in debt payments between school, vehicles, and housing is insane to me. That doesn't even account for day to day expenses, children, vacations, etc.
It isn't easy for a 4-year degree. To get to that level generally requires law school or medical school debt or an unfunded graduate degree.
For 4-year degrees around 80% of students graduate with less than $30k in debt.
For public schools only 7% of graduates have debt above $50k. For private nonprofit schools 12% have debt above $50k. For private for-profit schools it is 32%.
That does include estimates for housing, food, books, etc so there's wiggle room especially if you have family near by and live at home.
For anyone going to school entirely on loans though, you wouldn't make it a year with only $30k in debt.
To me its less interesting to look at what the average person who is able to afford college today borrows to pay for it. That's a self-selected population and doesn't show what the impact would be on anyone who gets into college but doesn't have family money, scholarships, or grants to help pay for it.
If you have to work to live, then we’re on the same side, and we all deserve more money to help us offset this cost of living crisis.
Turns out I was wrong, and my failure to adapt my standards has likely cost me an opportunity to own a home sans a significant pay rise.
Once I accepted that new data, however, I was able to see the immense gap between reality and expectation, as well as understand that it’s not necessarily my fault for missing that opportunity. I went with the widely-propagated programming for new homeowners at the time, and missed the pitfalls despite my ample additional research. Housing is complicated, and it’s the biggest hindrance to a more stable, equitable, and productive society in my personal opinion.
This is a global problem, and it requires solutions at all levels. Remote work is amazing, and I 100% support it (and exist on hybrid despite being in a major metro), but we need more on a local, state, and federal level as well. Heck, it’s so bad that we can’t even blame a singular or group of enployers anymore: the system is broken, and desperately needs updating so it can work again.
Yeah but if they're remote they can live in cheaper parts of the country so the 100K+ range of inner expensive cities is less justified and they're competing on a country wide market.
> grossly underpaid relative to the current cost of living
This is just very, very out of touch. The vast majority of the world lives just fine on far, far less than what the median worker at NYT currently makes.
For some, esp. those who choose to be childless, a relationship like that is probably the closest we'll come.
I was happy the startup I worked at during that time allowed me to take a week off as sick pay... sent flowers with a handwritten note from our HR leader the following morning, but I opted to come back after a couple days as I needed to take my mind off things.
I take it you've never lost a child? Because I've lost both and sad as it was, losing a dog doesn't even come close. Losing the dog was sad, but I got over it and eventually adopted another pup. Losing the child was so unimaginably awful that I struggle to find the words...
Police knocking on my door at 2am to tell me. Calling my wife at 2:30am to tell her (she was away on business). Waiting for her to find a flight home. The funeral. Dealing with the estate. Waking up every few weeks feeling like it was all a nightmare, only to realize it was not.
It's fucking awful.
Again, it doesn't exist because it makes no sense.
The point of cleaning products is to clean, which can be done perfectly well with no scent. If they're just covering up uncleanliness with a pretty scent, then they're not cleaning.
Some people have serious allergies to common scents, and some people just find them unpleasant and slightly nauseating.
The journalist union should push for an increase too, then.
NYC cost of living is enormous.
Print newspapers are essentially dead. Online news? Barely anyone pays for that. Online with ads? Reddit/twitter/facebook/youtube pay zero dollars for the content they put ads on.
If you're in tech and you want to maximise your salary - a company's gotta have money before they can give it to you. And newspapers don't have money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/business/media/new-york-t...
> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, which ran from July through September, rose 16.1 percent to $104.2 million, from $89.8 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 7 percent to $640.2 million, compared with the same period in 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t...
> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, from April through June, rose to $104.7 million from $92.2 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 5.8 percent, to $625.1 million, compared with the same period in 2023.
A $40k wage gap between tech and journalism it'd be nice to close.
That's gonna be one difficult negotiation.
Even quadrupling the $18k per employee, you're still trying to get a $40k raise from an organisation with a profit of $72k per employee. That's going to be tough.
Far tougher than moving to a different job at a company with more money.
Net income seems to be healthy, too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/04/earns-new...
When I was much younger, a few years out of high school, I ended up being the last developer on a sinking ship, and had asked for a pay raise to get me up to where the highest paid of the employees who had left were, IIRC that was around $5/hr, and was denied. I should have used that as an RGE, but instead just hung on until around a year later when a job fell into my lap. But the employer would have been hurting if I left, and was definitely more expensive for them to lose me than it would have to keep me. But in the end, the parent company folded a couple years later because of a very, very bad bet they made.
Tech generates more money than the Times. It makes sense that the employees should be paid to reflect that.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with high paid workers striking for even higher pay. It’s not like the suits don’t hoard bonuses for themselves.
It's the journalists that create the content for the tech end. Without them, there would be no Times tech employees.
The problem remains that with the advertisers, there cannot be journalism.
Little distinguishes much of american mass-media 'journalism' from a ChatGPT precis of a Press Release or Reuters/AP wire. What does is generally in the form of an Op-Ed, and is generally at the behest or bias of a billionaire or their lobbying proxy.
In 2024 this has gotten to the point where America's Largest Newspaper chain will not endorse a presidential candidate out of fear. That's 200+ separate publications.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/29/media/usa-today-gannett-n...
Both the advertisers and the journalists rely on the Tech Employees as their core dependency for distribution and scaling factor, and are weighted in compensation accordingly. Much as it ever was - the people selling adspace and doing the logistics of distribution always made more than the people writing copy or typesetting.
The Reuters/AP wire is journalism.
> Some background: The Tech Guild represents hundreds of software engineers, product designers, data analysts and others who make and run our website, apps, games and publishing systems. It’s a sister to my union, the NYT Guild, which reps the newsroom (and advertising, security & more!).
> The NYT Guild contract contains a no-strike clause. That means we in the newsroom are legally forbidden to go on strike with Tech. So we will be supporting them in other ways, some of which you can also do.
When the union was formed in 2021, tech workers were insanely in demand and carried basically all the chips. But now that that has cooled significantly, and many tech workers are having trouble finding work, the union is in a precarious position of being founded on ideals of 2021, but having to negotiate with the reality of 2024.
> The guild said it was asking readers to honor its digital picket line by not playing Times Games products, such as Wordle, and not using the Cooking app.
I’m not familiar with digital picket lines, why not ask that people not read via the site? Tying the picket line to Wordle and the cooking app seems to trivialize the importance of the team – Wordle was an acquisition!
Have you looked at what the owners of the New York Times make and compared that to the average “newspaper owner” in the US?
The unscented cleaning supplies is a weird request, but it does kinda make sense and the cost should be pretty low - don't know why they removed that requirement.
I can often tell if someone was wearing anything but the mere hint of perfume minutes after they've left an area, and anything stronger gives me headaches or worse.
The idea that they “bristled” at a union supporting people like me is total shit
I have a friend who is very sensitive to scents. She may not be able to work in a typical office again because of it. I'm very sensitive to harsh fluorescent lighting and noisy office environments and get migraines. You can push through for a while but eventually you burn out.
We've also realized we're both "mildly" autistic [1] over the last few years, along with quite a few other software engineer friends. The sensory sensitivities fall under that umbrella.
Tech has traditionally been more accepting of neurodiversity than other careers, so it's great to see a tech union raising issue like this that don't cost much but make a big difference for anyone affected.
[1] Book: Unmasking Autism by Devon Price
$100k is about $72k after tax[0].
Suppose I want to support a family in NYC. Average cost of living is about $9,000/mo for a family of four[1].
That's $108,000 per year. Or about $36,000 above what I would need to support an average 2-kid family, living paycheck-to-paycheck.
So if I want to be able to support a family, 100k is not even close to enough.
edit: forgot to add the sources
[0] https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=100000&from=yea...
The costs in cities like NY and SF are so high that many kids end up in care as soon as parental leave expires. One of the big recent public policies in NYC is "3K," public schooling for kids starting at 3 years old.
It's practically a college tuition per kid at age 0 though.
Raising a family is a choice, and that choice should be made deliberately, considering all aspects, including financial impact.
It is no more the responsibility of the employer to consider the family of the employee anymore than for them to consider if the employee is a gambling addict, or spends frivolously on OnlyFans subs or funko pop collecting.
I just think "can they support a family of 4" is a decent heuristic for whether people are getting paid enough.
And the pet bereavement et al sounds like bargaining chips (no better proof than them being dropped in the negotiation process.)
> Most employees in the tech union receive pay of more than $100,000, and average compensation, including bonus and restricted stock units, is $190,000, according to a Times spokeswoman. That figure is an average of $40,000 more than members of the Times’s journalist union, she said.
> Times leaders have also bristled at the nature of some of the guild’s requests. The union previously sought a requirement that the company use unscented cleaning supplies and offer a pet bereavement policy that included a leave of up to seven days, though it has since backed down from those demands.