NY Times tech workers union ends strike without contract

The union representing tech workers at the New York Times ended its strike Monday — launched days before Election Day — without securing a new contract.

The Tech Guild, which represents about 600 software engineers and programmers on the Gray Lady’s digital platforms, returned to work Tuesday morning without management meeting their demands for higher wages and job protections.

But union leaders declared victory in the industrial dispute.

Kathy Zhang, a senior analytics manager at the Times who heads one of the guild’s units, said the strike was a “warning” to management that demonstrated “our strength and our value” to the publication.

“We clearly showed how valuable our work is to The New York Times, especially on election night, and 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 impact on the Times’ election coverage, which did not include a “state-level or non-presidential” live pin, which measures a candidate’s odds of winning an election in real time.

A Times spokesman disputed that claim, saying the website contained “state-level presidential pins.”

Times management said the strike had minimal impact on the paper’s election coverage.

“It was our smoothest performance in an election ever,” a company spokesman told The Post.

“From Tuesday to Thursday, the presidential results page and the needle page were viewed more than any other piece on The Times’ entire site (in a 3-day period) since the 2020 election, a four-year high.”

The strike was declared after more than two years of negotiations that included unusual demands such as job security for non-US citizens on work visas and mandatory trigger warnings during company meetings involving discussions of news events.

“We are no further along in negotiations than we were before the strike began,” Times rep.

“We look forward to continuing to work with the 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,” a company spokesperson said to The Post.

The union claimed the work stoppage cost the company “significant loss of revenue” because the Times’ iOS app “did not display ads at intervals.”

A company spokesman said the paper “deliberately did not load ads that were slow to load so that our readers could get the news unhindered.”

The guild said its work stoppage also resulted in slower app and website load times, and that “publishing issues produced intermittent and visible error messages to readers about articles and updates.”

Management disputed this, saying the email newsletter link “was due to an external vendor, not our systems, and was fixed very quickly.”

The union also argued that the Times website was able to weather the storm because of the work its members did in the months leading up to Election Day.

“The systems and digital products that worked during the election did so thanks to the hundreds of unit members who worked for months to prepare everything to run smoothly,” Zhang said.

“What broke during this strike broke because our members weren’t at work.”