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The New York Times tech guild’s election-week strike is over, without a contract

Nieman Lab · Joshua Benton · last updated

For a union considering a strike, the phrase “maximum leverage” is always top of mind. If the goal is to push management into action, the withdrawal of labor should be designed to maximize its impact on operations. If you represent longshoremen, you time a strike (and its potential economy-wide impact) to the weeks before a presidential election. If you represent auto workers, you target high-profit plants from all three major U.S. automakers at once to maximize their collective need for action. If you represent workers at a product-reviews site that makes its money off of affiliate revenue, you plan to walk out on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

And if you represent tech workers at The New York Times, you time your action for the publisher’s single biggest traffic day of the year — a presidential election. That’s just what the Times Tech Guild did last week — going on strike Monday morning, just hours before the first polls opened in Dixville Notch.

But what happens when that moment of maximum leverage…passes? Election night came and went at the Times without a cataclysmic tech collapse. (The union notes a number of smallish problems in the tech stack; management insists even those were no biggie.) On Monday evening, just over seven days in, the Times Tech Guild called off its strike and said its members would be returning to work.

The strike ends not with a new contract, but with a statement that workers had shown “our strength and our value to The Times.” (The initial strike announcement did not set a time limit on its length. While the union is calling it a success, it’s hard to imagine Times management considers it a defeat.) The Times Tech Guild has been in negotiations for its first contract for more than two years; did this abbreviated strike, er, move the needle?

Only time will tell. But union supporters may want to remember the last time a Times union attempted such a time-targeted labor action — at Wirecutter, the product-reviews site, where workers struck from Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2021. Those workers also went back to work without a contract — but the two sides reached a deal only a couple of weeks later.

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