The New York Times Tech Guild is on strike

The New York Times Tech Guild went connected onslaught astatine 12:01AM ET today, reports The Washington Post. The guild represents implicit 600 bundle engineers, merchandise managers, information analysts, and designers for the media company. Its onslaught leaves the institution bereft of important method expertise conscionable 1 time earlier Election Day, erstwhile the Times’ important backend systems volition beryllium nether precise dense stress.

The guild has been bargaining since 2022 for its archetypal national declaration with the company. Negotiations betwixt it and the Times deed logjams implicit things similar a “just cause” proviso that prevents the institution from firing workers unless it’s for thing similar misconduct, arsenic good arsenic wage increases, wage equity, and return-to-office policies, reports the Times. The guild says connected a GoFundMe page for the workers that it’s moving to code radical differences successful wage and subject that disproportionately targets women and radical of color.

Times services — including games similar Wordle and the NYT Cooking app — are inactive functional. (The guild, which volition beryllium picketing successful beforehand of the paper’s Times Square bureau each day, asks that readers grant its picket enactment by not utilizing immoderate of those services, according to The Washington Post.) But the Times’ election sum is heavily tech-driven and could endure without national idiosyncratic support. A pledge signed by implicit 750 of its journalists said they can’t bash their jobs without the workers, whose efforts are important erstwhile things spell incorrect with cardinal sum features similar the Times predetermination needle.

Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told the Post past month that it has “robust plans successful spot to guarantee that we are capable to fulfill our ngo and service our readers.”