The Staff Association of the New York Times has filed a legal complaint against the company over its decision to disband the newspaper’s sports section and outsource its work to non-union employees of The Athletic, the subscription-based sports website that runs the Time The complaint, filed on Thursday, alleges that the company violated the core principles of the Times Guild’s collective bargaining agreement – an agreement that was only recently won after a bitter stalemate. Timebut the company claims it has the right to outsource itself and allow non-union workers to do unionized work without the same job protections, wages and other benefits we fought so hard for,” the union said in a statement, calling the company’s claims “ridiculous on their face and a brutal attempt to destroy unions.” Time declined to comment on the complaint and pointed Vanity purse to last week’s memo.)
The staff union is demanding that the company “cease and desist from further violations of the terms of the agreement” and is calling for “economic remedies” for all staff who suffered losses (although the company has ensured that no staff will be laid off as a result of this decision and that the sports staff will be reassigned to other desks in the newsroom). Among other things, The Times Guild is also asking for “all correspondence, guidelines, memoranda and other written materials published by the affected company regarding plans to outsource certain work currently being carried out by the Sports Desk to The Athletic” and “concerning the reassignment process.”
Times Guild sent management a petition with more than 1,100 signatures from employees and alumni to “demand that Time management stop violating our contract and respect union work.” Publisher AG Sulzberger has accepted an invitation from the sports desk staff to meet them directly, according to a source familiar with the situation. Time one reporter told me, and more of an ongoing search for answers that were missing from the company’s public statements and other comments about the decision. “In none of these things is there an explanation for why they’re doing this. There’s a ‘We’re Allowed to do this,” which of course the union is disputing some parts of, and broad platitudes about being committed to sports or trying to give readers as powerful coverage as ever. Time.”
Time Staff have been demanding an explanation for the company’s decision to close the sports desk since management abruptly announced the decision last week. Some staffers say they remain in the dark about how the newsroom will cover major sporting events in the future. “I’m working on the new s print hub, and a lot of what I’m doing is running the sports coverage online and helping to get it ready for our print edition,” says the longtime staff editor Tom Coffee“No one has explained to me how this is going to work after we dissolve the sports department and start using material from The Athletic.” Next year’s Olympic Games in Paris are high on Coffey’s mind. Timesays Coffey, “takes the coverage of the Olympics extremely seriously, and I don’t know how that’s going to work. I don’t think anyone has thought about that.”
As I recently reported, management invited sports staff to a morning meeting last Monday to announce the decision, but a Time news alert with the news went into the world before editor-in-chief Joe Kan had even said the words aloud to the room. Days later, what should have been a routine company-wide meeting turned controversial as executives pressed for answers from management. Kahn admitted at the staff meeting that the “choreography” of the announcement wasn’t perfect. During the meeting, Time contributors also asked about the different standards and editorial processes between The Athletic and the Timea concern for some Time employees (deputy Wirecutter and Athletic publisher Cliff levya former Time masthead member who oversaw standards for the Time newsroom, said The Athletic’s “core” standards and journalistic values are the same as those of the Time.)
The company has 20 days to respond to the complaint; if the company denies the complaint, the guild can request arbitration. The Washington Postcould an arbitrator ultimately “decide that Time sports coverage is guild work, which would mean that the sports coverage cannot be outsourced to The Athletic and the Time editors should produce Time‘s sports coverage.” An arbitrator chooses the side of the Timeon the other hand, could set a worrying precedent for the newsroom Time A staff member told me last week, “There’s a genuine concern in the newsroom that if this stays, they could do this to any section.”
