NYT Lawyer Sends Email on Dealing With the Union to the Union

Anyone who’s despatched a non-public and necessary e-mail to a number of recipients is aware of it may be sophisticated. You need to test the order of the recipients, cc assistants that remind the higher-ups to learn and reply to mentioned message, and, most significantly, be sure to don’t ship the e-mail to somebody you’re not presupposed to. I guess one New York Times lawyer is at present wishing the Earth would swallow him for forgetting that final one.

Last week, Times outdoors counsel Michael Lebowich, a accomplice on the regulation agency Proskauer Rose, made the error of emailing a memo titled “Tech Organizing Unit Scope Decision Options” to representatives of the union for the outlet’s expertise and product staff, in line with the Daily Beast. The memo detailed choices the Times might take to cope with the proposed union, the New York Times Tech Guild, and restrict its impression. The Guild claims that 70% of employees have pledged to vote in help of a union.

The Times has refused to voluntarily acknowledge the Guild, which represents about 600 workers, and has opted for holding an election carried out by the National Labor Relations Board. Both sides are additionally preventing over which staff are eligible to vote, with the paper searching for to limit the election to software engineers. Union representatives say this could slash the potential bargaining unit by greater than a 3rd.

The Daily Beast states that Lebowich despatched the e-mail to a number of of his coworkers at Proskauer Rose and to Andrew Gutterman, Times senior vp and deputy normal counsel. In addition, he cc’ed Rachel Sanders, an organizer for the New York chapter of the NewsGuild, a union for the information media that represents the Times’ tech and product staff.

Lebowich lays out three choices for the Times within the e-mail. One possibility concerned permitting for a bigger union—i.e., permitting extra staff to take part within the vote—which the regulation agency argued might probably enable the paper to defeat the union proposal in an election. A second possibility known as for allowing a medium-sized union. Meanwhile, authorizing a smaller union would most likely imply the hassle would succeed, however can be restricted in its scope and measurement.

The Times determined to go along with probably the most “aggressive” possibility, the Daily Beast reported. This would doubtlessly create a union with lower than 400 members.

Angela Guo, an organizing member for the New York Times Tech Guild, advised the outlet that the e-mail confirmed the Times was not holding an election to make sure all voices had been represented. Its objective was to make the union as weak as attainable, she maintained.

“That is not a neutral stance, that is not indicative of wanting a free and fair election in which everyone’s voices are heard,” Guo mentioned. “This is just additional proof they are being disingenuous with their intentions.”

A Times spokesperson advised the Daily Beast that the e-mail contained a “range of options the Company has and considerations for each choice,” additionally acknowledging that it was despatched to the union consultant accidentally.

“We have continued to assess our position, and today, as part of the NLRB process, we submitted a legal filing in response to the Guild’s petition that outlines which groups we think should be organized together in the same unit, as well as who we think is and is not eligible for the unit,” the Times spokesperson mentioned. “Our view is that each of our functions has vastly different responsibilities, performs different work, and has separate supervision. This does not preclude employees from forming other units.”