Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBlake | Hacker News Reader

My first instinct reading this was to think about the gothamist/dnainfo kerfuffle.

However, Checking the new yorkers revenue shows around 200 million/yr, I definitely did not expect that and likely means it can easily support a union. (unless the new yorker is loaded with debt, which it might be)

View on HN

Not taking a position either way, but revenue is not the important number here: its excess margin, which in publishing is extremely low.

And the New Yorker has a history of being notorious for expenses -- at its height it had writers paid on contract for a full year that write one story (an excellent story, but still), expense accounts through the roof, and an editorial staff that none could rival. Those specific days are gone but its cost structure is still above what many other publications have, so I suspect the margins are still well below average. I love the New Yorker (it went off track for a while, but it's gotten much better in the past 10 years) and what they do takes serious investment and talent, but there's also ways to do it smartly. Although it looks like all of this is preemptive so we'll have to see where it goes.

That may be true, but if the margins were low because the excessive expenses were due to paying people too much (per your example), then a union trying to raise wages might be the last thing they need to survive. :-)

Back in my day, you raised wages when you could demonstrate success in your endeavor to drive more revenue/margin. You got paid less when you drove costs higher.

Seems like this is a basic law of economics or something. Monetary rewards for success, monetary losses for failures. Unions have a tendency to be out of sync with this, which means their objectives aren't aligned with managements. Which ... never ... ends well.

I agree -- that's why this will be very interesting to see how it shakes out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com