The union representing tech workers at The New York Times ended a strike Monday that began days before Election Day without securing a new contract.
The Tech Guild, which represents around 600 software engineers and programmers on the Gray Lady digital platform, returned to work on Tuesday morning after management failed to meet demands for higher wages and job protections.
However, union leaders declared victory in the labor dispute.
Kathy Chan, senior analytics manager at the Times and head of the Guild division, said the strike was a “warning” to management and demonstrated “our strength and value” to the paper. .
“We made it clear, especially on election night, how valuable our work is to The New York Times, and we continue to demonstrate that we have the full support of our subscribers and allies across the country. ,” Zhang said in a statement.
The union said the strike had the intended impact on the Times' election coverage, which did not include a live “state-level or non-presidential” needle that measures candidates' chances of winning in real time. .
A Times spokeswoman disputed the claim, saying the website featured “state-level presidential needles.”
Times executives said the strike had minimal impact on the paper's election coverage.
“This was the smoothest field performance we've seen during the election cycle,” a company spokesperson told the Post.
“From Tuesday to Thursday, the presidential election results page and the Needle page were viewed more times than any other page across the Times site (in three days) since the 2020 election, the highest in four years. .”
The strike was declared after more than two years of negotiations. These included unusual demands, including job guarantees for non-U.S. citizens with work visas and requiring trigger warnings in company meetings that involve discussion of news events.
A spokesperson for the Times said, “Negotiations are no further along than they were before the strike began.''
A company spokesperson said: “We continue to work with Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that takes into account that they are already the highest-paid individual contributors in the company and that journalism is our top priority. I look forward to working together,” he told the Post.
The union claimed the Times' iOS app “intermittently failed to display advertising” and the outage caused the company to suffer “significant losses in revenue”.
A company spokesperson said the newspaper “intentionally did not load ads that would take time to load, so that our readers could get the news smoothly.”
The guild said the outage also slowed app and website load times, and “a publishing issue resulted in intermittent visible error messages for readers of articles and updates.”
Management disputed this, saying the issue with the email newsletter link was “due to an external vendor, not our system, and was fixed very quickly.”
The union also claimed that the Times site had managed to weather the storm thanks to the work of its members in the months leading up to Election Day.
“Our systems and digital products functioned well during the election period thanks to hundreds of force members who spent months preparing to make sure everything ran smoothly,” Zhang said.
“The breakdown during this strike was caused by members not working.”
