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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

According to Google, the NY Times has a profit margin of 6-10% in most quarters. They're not exactly rolling in cash. Not to mention, there's a bunch of other teams at the NY Times that presumably want raises too. What's the justification for giving a raise to developers, but not to the writers that produce the company's main product?

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I'm sure the tech guild would be happy for the writers' union to win contract raises too. I don't know why you think they wouldn't be.

Is there enough money to afford the proposed pay raises? 6% profit margin isn't much. Granting the proposed pay raises to both groups could easily put the company in the red.

Not sure where your 6% figure comes from, but you can easily find the 2023 Annual Report which states the following:

> Adjusted operating profit margin (adjusted operating profit expressed as a percentage of revenues) increased to 16.1% in 2023, compared with 15.1% in 2022.

You might also look into the NYT's recent history of stock buybacks while denying raises to their lowest-paid employees. The money is there.

There are a host of other real expenses that need to be paid that "adjusted operating profit" doesn't account for. I'd be really surprised if total net profit was more than 50-65% of that.

Point taken. I'd still maintain that the stock buybacks are egregious and need to stop.

To emphasize: that point I can totally agree with. While I don't know the details of all the reasons this union is striking, I can certainly imagine lots of good, plausible reasons, and stock buybacks (if they are egregious) would be at the top of the list.

I was just pushing back against using "big tech comp packages" as some sort of baseline for what unions should be pushing for. It is completely unrealistic and people who say stuff like this hurt their own cause by not living in reality.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ny+times+profit+margin

In June it was 10.6%, in March it was 6.9%

share compensation doesn’t use cash

It does use cash unless the company dilutes the stock by adding more shares. And if they dilute stock, they're effectively taking money from the existing shareholders. There's no free lunch.

being a public company with a liquid market is a license to print shares and the market can decide if it wants to stick around at a similar company valuation

my primary observation is that the world NY Times was formed or floated shares in didn't have the same shareholder tolerances that exist now

tech companies are controlled by one or two key founders, which wouldn't fly at one point, with rampant dilution

they rely on the appetite of the market, and in some other risk on stock markets around the world, even more extremes are seen to fit the appetite of the market

nobody is suggesting its a free lunch, if the market tolerates it then its available to attract talent competitively, or for talent to collectively bargain to extract that value

with the dilution not occurring all at once, I bet you’d be surprised what shareholders would tolerate

The board of the directors represents the shareholders, and they would likely not approve of any significant dilution. Again, the money has to come from somewhere. Either from revenues, or from the existing shareholders. The latter would just tell the union to pound sand, unless the Times is genuinely struggling to recruit talent (not likely).

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