New York Times Tech Workers Threaten Election Strike – Mother Jones
3 mins read

New York Times Tech Workers Threaten Election Strike – Mother Jones

A photo of the New York Times building with taxis in the foreground

The New York Times’ unionized tech workers are threatening to go on strike if they don’t reach a contract agreement with management.Guerin Charles/Abaca/ZUMA

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With two days until election day, the New York Times faces a potential crisis: The army of tech workers who keep their digital platforms running is threatening to go on strike.

Almost 700 members in newspaper’s Tech Guild—representing the workers who run the famous whale needlemobile push alerts, Wordle, the audio app and many other things – voted in September to authorize a strike. Now there are only a few days left until an election where the candidates are watching locked in dead heatthe workers say a strike could become a reality if they don’t reach an agreement with management, who they claim “has shown an unwillingness at the table to be reasonable on key contract demands.” They say they have been negotiating for more than two years.

“We have made it clear that we must reach an agreement before the election to prevent a strike,” the union wrote in a Nov. 1 letter to management.

Among the Tech Guild’s requirements are only cause for termination without exception, higher wages and more initiatives to promote diversity, equality and inclusion among their workforce.

Times management, for its part, says the workers, who are mostly engineers, are already among the highest paid at the company, earning an average salary of $190,000—$40,000 more than journalists in the Times Guild, the newspaper’s media workers’ union. Their other requests, Semaphore reported in September, includes a four-day work week and non-performance-based annual bonuses. Tech Guild says members who are women and people of color are paid less than men and white people; Times Management believes the methodology behind these comparisons is “misleading” because it does not compare people in comparable roles and that a pay analysis conducted last year “found no evidence of discrimination.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, senior vice president of external communications at Timessaid in a statement to Mother Jones: “The timing of the election deadline is arbitrary and was a decision made unilaterally by Tech Guild management. While we respect the union’s right to engage in protected action, it feels both unnecessary and contrary to our mission to threaten a strike at this time.”

While the timing may be inconvenient for the nation’s most influential newspaper, the Election Day deadline seems intended to remind management that its sense of journalistic exceptionalism is dependent on the workers who run it. Rhoades Ha, for example, said in his statement, “There is no outlet that provides The Times’ in-depth reporting and analysis.” The Times have exclaimed its election pin, launched in 2016, as an accurate and early prediction of election results; union members say without them it doesn’t work.

So could too Times website goes dark on election day if hundreds of tech workers go on strike? It is unclear. “We have robust plans in place to ensure we can fulfill our mission and serve our readers,” Rhoades Ha said. She refused to answer follow-up questions.