With two days until Election Day, the New York Times is confronting a potential crisis: The army of tech workers who keep its digital platforms running is threatening to go on strike.
Nearly 700 members of the newspaper’s Tech Guild—which represents the workers who power the famous election needle, mobile push alerts, Wordle, the audio app, and many other things—voted in September to authorize a strike. Now, just a few days out from an election in which the candidates look locked in a dead heat, the workers say a strike could come to fruition if they do not reach an agreement with management, who they allege “have demonstrated an unwillingness at the table to be reasonable on key contract demands.” They say they have been bargaining for more than two years.
“We have made it clear that we need to reach an agreement before the election in order to avert a strike,” the guild wrote in a Nov. 1 letter to management.
Among the Tech Guild’s demands are just cause for termination with no exceptions, higher wages, and more initiatives to foster diversity, equity, 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 union for the paper’s media workers. Their other requests, Semafor reported in September, include a four-day workweek and non-performance-based annual bonuses. The Tech Guild says members who are women and people of color are paid less than men and white people; Times management counters that the methodology behind those 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 the Times, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “The election deadline timing is arbitrary and was a decision made unilaterally by the Tech Guild leadership. While we respect the union’s right to engage in protected actions, threatening a strike at this time, feels both unnecessary and at odds with our mission.”
While the timing may be inconvenient for the country’s most influential paper, the Election Day deadline seems meant to remind management that its sense of journalistic exceptionalism relies upon the workers that power it. Rhoades Ha, for example, said in her statement, “There is no outlet that provides The Times’s depth of reporting and analysis.” The Times has touted its election needle, launched in 2016, as an accurate and early predictor of the election’s outcome; union members say without them, it won’t function.
So could the Times website go dark on Election Day if hundreds of tech workers are on strike? It’s unclear. “We have robust plans in place to ensure that we are able to fulfill our mission and serve our readers,” Rhoades Ha said. She declined to respond to follow-up questions.
