The New York Times Tech Guild, which represents hundreds of the outlet’s tech staff workers, went on strike Monday morning – one day before the US presidential election.
The threat of a strike has existed within the company for months, raising questions over a potential disruption of election coverage. The newspaper giant confirmed in a statement that members would begin protesting outside the Times headquarters daily, beginning at 9am Monday.
The walkout is a result of a 10 September vote where staff workers decided to go on strike at a critical time – election week – if an agreement wasn’t made. With the largest subscription base of any American newspaper, readers will be widely seeking extensive election coverage.
The Tech Guild called the strike after increasingly intense negotiations between the guild and Times management failed to yield a contract agreement.
Kait Hoehne, Times senior software engineer and Tech Guild member, said the group was hoping to avoid a strike as negotiations had continued into late Sunday night. But tech workers were ultimately left feeling they had no other option after the management’s failure to agree on key issues, the Washington Post reported.
“We love our jobs, and we’re looking forward to being able to do them,” Hoehne told the Post. “But we haven’t seen enough movement from management, and we’ve been bargaining for far too long.”
The Tech Guild’s roughly 600 members are in charge of operating the back-end systems that power the paper’s comprehensive digital operations. The strike could affect not only the paper’s ability to cover the presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – but also the hundreds of House and dozens of Senate races across the US that will determine who will secure control of Washington in 2025.
The strike could have an impact that reaches much further than just election coverage, however. The Tech Guild consists of software engineers, product managers, data analysts and designers that oversee several of the paper’s digital offerings, such as live-blogs, mobile push alerts, its iconic games and the famous election needle.
“They have left us no choice but to demonstrate the power of our labor on the picket line,” Kathy Zhang, the guild’s unit chair, said in the statement according to the Times. “Nevertheless, we stand ready to bargain and get this contract across the finish line.”
Hoehne told the Post that elections bring increased traffic to the website, which puts “stress on the system”. Without experienced engineers on hand to deal with the sudden surge of extra traffic, “teams can be [affected] in a big way,” she said.
The Guild is asking that readers honor their picket line by boycotting the Times’ selection of games, including Wordle and the daily digital crossword, and to avoid other digital extensions such as the Cooking app.
Annie Shields, a campaign lead for the News Guild of New York, encouraged people to sacrifice their streaks in the wildly popular Wordle and Connections games in order to support the strike.
“Enjoy the archive today while you can!” she wrote in a post on X.
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