The union representing technology workers at the New York Times on Monday ended its strike — launched days before Election Day — without securing a new contract.
The Tech Guild, which represents about 600 software engineers and programmers on Gray Lady’s digital platforms, returned to work Tuesday morning without meeting management demands for higher wages and job protections.
However, union leaders declared victory in the labor dispute.
Kathy Zhang, a senior analytics manager at the Times who heads one of the union’s units, said the strike was a “warning” to management that showed “our strength and value” to the publication.
“We clearly showed how valuable our work is to The New York Times, especially on election night, and we showed that we have the full support of subscribers and allies across the country going forward,” Zhang said in a statement.
The union said the strike had its intended effect on the Times’ election coverage, which did not include a live needle “at the state or non-presidential level” that measures a candidate’s chances of winning the election in real time.
A Times spokesman disputed the claim, saying the website contained “state-level presidential sleaze.”
Times management said the strike had minimal impact on the paper’s election coverage.
“It was our site’s smoothest election performance ever,” a company spokesperson told The Post.
“From Tuesday through Thursday, the presidential election results page and the Needle page were viewed more than any other section on The Times’ entire site (in a 3-day period) since the 2020 election, a level more high in four years.”
The strike was announced after more than two years of negotiations that included unusual demands such as job security for non-US citizens on work visas and mandatory warnings during company meetings that include discussions of news events.
“We are no further ahead in negotiations than we were before the strikes began,” the Times rep.
“We look forward to continuing to work with Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that takes into account that they are already among the highest paid individual contributors at the company and journalism is our top priority,” a company spokesperson told The Post.
The union claimed the work stoppage cost the company “significant loss of revenue” because the Times’ iOS app “was not showing ads intermittently.”
A spokesman for the company said the paper “deliberately did not load ads that were slow to load so that our readers could receive the news without interruption”.
The department said its outage also resulted in slower load times for apps and the website, and that “publishing issues produced intermittent and visible error messages to readers in articles and updates.”
Management disputed this, saying the email newsletter link issue “was due to an outside vendor, not our systems, and was fixed very quickly.”
The union also claimed that the Times site was able to weather the storm because of the work of its members in the months leading up to Election Day.
“The digital systems and products that worked during the election did so thanks to hundreds of unit members who worked for months preparing everything to run smoothly,” Zhang said.
“What was broken during this strike was broken because our members were not at work.”
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