New York Times Tech Guild strike exposes frictions in solidarity

The New York Times Tech Guild returned to work this past week after an eight-day work-stoppage, concluding the longest and largest tech worker strike in American history.

An overwhelming majority of the nearly 700-person unit represented by the NewsGuild of New York voted to authorize a strike after two-and-a-half years of negotiations that have failed to yield a contract.

The pace of bargaining picked up after the strike vote — from one or two sessions a month to multiple in one week, according to a member of the union’s elected leadership — but the two sides remained far enough apart that workers chose to walk off the job on Monday, Nov. 4, the day before the election. 

Eight days later, workers returned to the office without a contract agreement in place. They re-entered discussions with management on Nov. 18. 

The strike’s timing highlights the friction between spheres of solidarity internally and externally. Within the paper, an estimated one hundred workers crossed the picket line to ensure the Times election needle was put up on Nov. 5. And broader support of the paper has come under question, as the collective Writers Against the War on Gaza has been calling for a boycott of the paper for over a year due to the Times’ coverage of Palestine.

Despite strike breaking, tech workers say the stoppage had impact

The Times leadership’s public-facing position has been that the strike was minimally disruptive to operations.

But Benjamin Harnett, a principal data platform engineer and a shop steward for the Tech Guild, says behind the scenes, the work stoppage was felt. 

“Just because the site doesn’t go down doesn’t mean that the company isn’t impacted,” Harnett told The Objective, citing targeted advertisements, subscriber acquisition, and internal communications. “I think that we will see in the next offer that comes from them that there was an impact.”

For the average Times reader, it’s true that the strike didn’t appear to affect their user experience. The site didn’t have major outages, and despite the labor action being planned around the U.S. election to be maximally disruptive, most election features — including the notorious prediction needle — seemed to work smoothly.

The guild said that lack of visible disruption might have something to do with the roughly 400 individuals who worked on tech during the election. Those include a sizable contract force and an estimated hundred tech guild workers who opted to work during the strike, as Insider first reported.

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Related: New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike during Election Week

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Internally, Times management has been adamant that the strike did not change their position on the contract.

“While the strike was intended to disrupt our election coverage and undermine our ability to reach our readers, it was unsuccessful,” chief technology officer Jason Sobel and chief growth officer Hannah Yang wrote in a note sent on Nov. 11 reviewed by The Objective. “Ultimately, all it did was cost members who participated 2.3% of their annual wages — more than $3,500 on average including today’s paid holiday. Today, we remain as far apart as we were when the strike was announced.”

Despite that posturing, management is back in discussions with the guild.

“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 in the Company and journalism is our top priority,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement to The Objective.

“If you look at previous actions within our unit and the newsroom unit and Wirecutter,” Harnett said, “the company asserted that they would never change, they would never make a better offer.”

He pointed to Wirecutter, which was acquired by The Times in 2016, striking on Black Friday, Times newsroom workers walking out over negotiations stalling, and the Tech Guild protesting the company’s return-to-office policy: “The action happened, and then some weeks later, they came back to the table with a better offer.”

Contrary to some reporting suggesting negotiations are being held up over frivolous demands, workers say their bargaining has been focused on three key issues: pay equity and fairness, just cause protections, and RTO policy.

Sobel and Yang’s note argued their current proposal meets those central demands. But not to voting guild members, as 95% chose to authorize a strike.

“The strike was a lot of effort,” Harnett said, “but we’re determined to win a decent contract that is supported by the members.”

Paper faces external pressure, questions about solidarity outside of newsroom workers 

One issue absent from negotiations and the picket line was Palestine.

The Times currently faces boycott calls from groups including the grassroots collective Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG), which argues that the paper has manufactured consent for Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine through dehumanizing language and consistent bias toward Israeli and American sources. Internal directives have told reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “occupied territory.” 

These issues are being discussed inside of the union, even if public statements have been limited. Harnett told The Objective that to him personally, securing a contract and publishing criticism of the paper’s Palestine coverage “are separate issues, but not unconnected.”

“Having increased labor power, having job security, having the ability to push the company only helps people to feel more comfortable expressing other feelings,” he said. 

One source affiliated with the New York War Crimes, a publication of WAWOG, told The Objective that the argument that worker power will lead to people speaking out is self-serving. They agreed to speak on condition of anonymity due to fear of violent reprisal from groups supporting Israel. 

“The Palestine exception is alive and real: the thing preventing people from speaking out is not lack of worker power, I think it’s an overwhelming atmosphere of fear,” they explained. “I think that culture of fear remains, even if you do have a strong union, some of these things fall outside of just cause [protections].”

The Times’s editorial guild’s past organizing illustrates this point. In 2020, staff, backed by a strong union, organized to criticize the paper for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that called for the military to be unleashed on demonstrators protesting the police killing of George Floyd. 

Several high-profile journalists tweeted that the piece put Black staffers in danger, eventually pressuring the paper into issuing a mea culpa. The union was directly involved: The NewsGuild of New York issued a condemnation of the choice to publish Cotton’s piece. One Times writer, Jazmine Hughes, pointed out in a tweet that the story was a “labor issue.”

But in other editorial cases, the newsroom union hasn’t provided the same backing.

Last year, hundreds of Times writers and contributors, including Hughes, signed a letter criticizing the Times’ coverage of transgender issues. But when those same writers called out the guild, the union said it takes “no position on the subject matter of editorial coverage” in a statement to Vanity Fair. 

And as more and more evidence has piled up debunking the paper’s exposé about systemic rape by Hamas, neither Times reporters nor the union behind them have taken public action yet, besides two who publicly resigned.

Hughes ultimately quit the Times last November after being told she violated newsroom policy by signing an open letter from WAWOG critical of the paper’s coverage. Times Magazine contributing writer ​​Jamie Lauren Keiles also resigned after similarly being reprimanded for signing the WAWOG letter.

Otherwise, public dissent from within the newsroom over Gaza coverage has been minimal despite a strong union that has been critical of the paper in the past.

U.S. unions at large grapple with solidarity with Palestine 

This same friction between domestic solidarity and international solidarity is visible elsewhere in the U.S.  union landscape. 

While unions like the United Auto Workers have issued statements supporting a ceasefire, many of those same unions also endorsed a candidate for president who was unwilling to change course on Israel from her predecessor. 

Unions with more direct material connections to the conflict have similarly failed to use their leverage to push change in America’s foreign policy.  

For example, when the International Longshoremen’s Association successfully went on strike earlier this year, some pointed out that the union’s exception for military shipments meant the labor action did not ultimately oppose U.S. imperialism.

And internal union efforts to oppose the genocide in Gaza have struggled — the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union voted down a resolution this summer calling on dockworkers to refuse handling military cargo bound for Israel.

A stronger labor movement might be more emboldened to fight against the war in Gaza —  union density was a few percentage points higher in the 1990s when unions were deeply involved in the fight to end apartheid in South Africa. Repealing laws like the Taft-Hartley Act, which bans secondary boycotts and gives the president broad authority to stop strikes harmful to national interest, could encourage more labor actions outside of typical contract demands.

Still, many domestic union members have taken strong actions in protest of Israel’s occupation. ILWU members helped prevent Israeli vessels from docking in Oakland in 2010, 2014, and 2021. The Service Employees International Union has put its weight behind legislation to block arms sales to Israel.  

And internationally, unions have been key allies of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

Workers should face these issues head on — a solidarity that excludes the people of Palestine isn’t true solidarity. 

“There have been over 150 media workers and journalists killed in Palestine in the 14 months since 10/7. Solidarity cannot be a national exercise for us here in the west, but must be international, otherwise it is meaningless,” the New York War Crimes affiliate told The Objective.

Within journalism, the Freelance Journalism Union, a branch of the International Workers of the World, has been outspoken in its solidarity with Palestine. It is working with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate to connect reporters and editors with English-speaking PJS members to help more outlets platform Palestinian journalists. The union called its members to strike on May Day and Nakba Day in solidarity with calls from Palestinian workers, and ran a fundraiser to get supplies to members of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate on GoFundMe before the platform shut it down in December. 

The Condé Nast and New Yorker Unions published a joint statement in October expressing solidarity with Palestinian journalists.

“We hope this encourages other journalistic trade unions to organize actions to pressure Israel to stop targeting media workers, and so those journalists know that their colleagues in the West stand in solidarity with them in the fight for a free press everywhere,” the organizers of that statement told The Objective.

And Times publisher A.G. Sulzburger himself signed onto a Feb. 2024 letter from Committee to Protect Journalists affirming support for journalists in Gaza.   

Whether similar labor action is undertaken from Times workers remains to be seen.

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Chris Mills Rodrigo is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.

This story was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Jen Ramos Eisen.