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Journalists working for The Athletic demanded that The New York Times recognize their efforts to join the newsroom’s union — setting up another labor battle with management.
The Times disbanded its long-heralded sports department in September 2023 and replaced it with coverage from The Athletic, a digital sports news website it bought for $550 million in cash in January 2022.
On Monday, an organizing committee representing the 200 non-unionized staffers at The Athletic sent an email to Times publisher AG Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien urging them to voluntarily recognize their bid to join the Times Guild, which is part of the NewsGuild of New York.
The union representing New York Times employees wants management to recognize a move by The Athletic workers to join their organization. REUTERS
“We are proud of all that The Athletic and The New York Times as a whole has accomplished since our 2022 acquisition, and we know that our inclusion in the Times Guild will only further strengthen our work,” the email said.
“We urge the company to recognize what has been true since the company began publishing The Athletic’s work under the banner of The New York Times: We are one newsroom, and our colleagues at The Athletic are Times Guild members.”
The NewsGuild warned the Gray Lady that failure to recognize The Athletic workers’ request to join the Times Guild will lead it to “pursue other legal pathways.”
Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, said that the union “will not support a two-tier system that disenfranchises workers and undermines our members, nor will we accept management’s charade that The Athletic is a separate entity.”
The Athletic is the subscription-based sports news site that was acquired by the Times in 2022 for more than half a billion dollars. The Athletic
Jen Sheehan, a Times Guild spokesperson, told The Post that Athletic staffers are not offered the same benefits as their unionized colleagues.
“We know anecdotally that they earn far less than what Times Guild members do,” Sheehan told The Post.
She added that Athletic workers’ health insurance “is not as robust and as stable as it is under [the] contract” under which Times Guild members operate.
Sheehan also said that Athletic staffers are subject to performance evaluation based on “web site metrics.”
“That’s not a thing for the rest of the newsroom,” she said. “That’s a key difference.”
The New York Times recently withstood a work stoppage by its tech department which launched a strike to coincide with Election Day. Christopher Sadowski
Jordan Cohen, a spokesperson for the Times, confirmed to The Post that the publication received the request and is in the process of reviewing it.
The letter from Athletic staffers follows a one-week work stoppage just before Election Day by the union that represents more than 600 tech employees at the paper after talks for a new collective bargaining agreement stalled.
Last month, the two sides reached a tentative agreement that calls for wage increases of up to 8.25% over the length of the contract as well as “just cause” protections against termination — among other benefits.
The strike, which was timed to coincide with the presidential election, did not cause severe disruptions to the newspaper’s coverage of the Nov. 5 contest, according to management.
New York Times Company’s stock was trading at slightly above 0.6% as of noon on Monday. Its share price was around $53.20. In the last 12 months, the stock has increased more than 12%.
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