union representing technical workers The New York Times ended its strike on Monday – Launch day Before Election Day – Without securing any new contracts.
Tech Guild, which represents About 600 software engineers and programmers On the Gray Ladies digital platform, returned to work tuesday morning Without their demands for higher wages and job security being met by the management.
However, union leaders declared victory in the labor dispute.
Cathy Zhang, a Times senior analytics manager who heads a unit of the guild, said the strike was a “warning” to management that demonstrated “our strength and our value” to the publication.
“We clearly demonstrated how valuable our work is to The New York Times, especially on election night, and showed that we have the full support of clients and colleagues across the country,” Zhang said in a statement.
The union said the strike had its intended effect on The Times’s election coverage, which did not include the “state-level or non-presidential” Live Needle, which estimates a candidate’s probability of winning the election in real time.
A Times spokesperson denied this claim, saying that the website featured “state-level presidential innuendos.”
Times management said the strike had minimal impact on the newspaper’s election coverage.
“This was our best site performance ever during an election,” a company spokesperson told The Post.
“From Tuesday through Thursday, the presidential election results page and the Needles page received more views than any other article on the entire Times site (over a 3-day period), a four-year high ”
The strike was announced after more than two years of negotiations, which included unusual demands such as job security for non-citizens in the US on work visas and mandatory trigger warnings during company meetings that include discussion of news events. Was.
“We are no further along in negotiations than we were before the strike began,” the Times representative said.
A spokesperson for the company told The Post, “We look forward to continuing to work with the Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that will take into account that they are already the highest paid at the company.” We are among the individual contributors and journalism is our top priority.”
The union claimed the work stoppage caused the company “significant loss of revenue” because the Times’ iOS app was “intermittently not displaying ads.”
A spokesperson for the company said that the newspaper “intentionally did not load advertisements that were slow to load so that our readers could receive the news uninterrupted.”
The guild said its outage caused slow load times for apps and its website and “publishing issues generated intermittent and visible error messages to readers on articles and updates.”
Management denied this, saying that the email newsletter link problem was “caused by an outside vendor, not our systems, and was fixed very quickly.”
The union also claimed that the Times site managed to weather the storm because of the work done by its members in the months before Election Day.
“The systems and digital products that worked during the election are thanks to the hundreds of unit members who worked for months to ensure everything ran smoothly,” Zhang said.
“What broke during this strike broke because our members were not at work.”
