The Other New York Times Workers On Strike
Security workers Karen Letellier, left, John Garafalo and Lila Rivera were among the 1,100 e
Security workers Karen Letellier, left, John Garafalo and Lila Rivera were among the 1,100 employees of The New York Times who walked off the job for 24 hours, Dec. 8, 2022.
Claudia Irizarry Aponte/THE CITY
When a man wielding a sword and an axe entered the New York Times building last month and demanded to speak with a reporter, it was security workers, among them Karen Letellier, who confronted him, ordering him to surrender his bag and drop to the ground.
“Our job is a huge responsibility,” said Letellier, 36, a concierge who has worked for the Times for five years. “There is no room for mistakes when people’s lives are at risk.”
Letellier, like other security workers, is also one of the lowest-earning employees at The New York Times. She is among the nearly 1,100 New York Times Guild members who walked off the job for 24 hours at midnight Thursday. They’re part of a union that includes reporters, editors and assistants, but also lower-wage workers like security guards, IT specialists, ushers and sales coordinators who earn as little as $52,000 annually.
They, like all the Times staffers on strike, contend they’ve lost out on the Gray Lady’s boom of recent years. One of the few profitable media companies in the country, it reported a $36.6 million profit in the third quarter and an operating profit of $51 million, up from $49 million the previous year, even as it spent $550 million to purchase the sports news website The Athletic, and an undisclosed amount in “the low seven figures” range for the Wordle game app this year.
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