NYT Tech Guild is on strike – and it’s increasing election coverage.

The 600 workers organized with the New York Times Tech Guild — which programs key features like push alerts, live blogs, website design and the games — officially walked off the job Monday, and the effect on their employer’s website is already evident.

The Times’ iconic Needle, a staple of every major election since 2016, may be too buggy to workaccording to pollster Nate Cohn. Subscribers express solidarity online at sharing screenshots of their now broken Wordle/Stavebee/crossword streaks, after one guild request for users to boycott the NYT Games app. And the front page’s TikTok-like vertical video promotion of “Our reporters on what to expect” didn’t last last Monday night.

As for why the Times’ tech workers are acting to upgrade their own website on the most important news day of the year, this moment has actually been year along the way. Back in 2021, when these employees first announced they were forming their own union (one separate from the respective editorial unions representing the NYT newsroom and its Wirecutter subsidiary), the paper’s leadership refused to recognize the unit and referred the case to the National Labor Relations Board—which soon filed his own complaint against Times management for violating federal labor law by telling other staffers on the newsroom not to express any support for the technical organizers.

Tech Guilds trade union was officially certified in March 2022 under the auspices of the NewsGuild of New York, which also represents the Times’ other unions (both of which separately expressed their solidarity). But the contract negotiation process was grueling, and various problems with issues like just cause protection and return-to-office mandates themselves fueled several NLRB disputes and walkouts in protest. (The RTO fight is of particular importance in light of the fact that many of the organized workers work remotely and did not want to be forced to relocate to New York City.)

In September, with these disagreements still on the table, the Tech Guild approved a strike authorization vote—and immediately, as guild spokesman told the Nation’s Thomas BirminghamTimes management began meeting with individual members to offer them an HR-approved means to continue their work on Election Day if they did not want to participate in the strike. Management sent one follow-up note last month to reiterate this point, even as NYT executives received declarations of solidarity from the unions representing the newsroom and Wirecutter. Despite some grumbling from individual reporters, such statements made it clear that internal momentum was on the Tech Guild’s side, for its core demands for fair protections, telecommuting flexibility, and fixes to the unequal pay structures that undercompensated the union’s non-male, non-white members.

“This decision by the company to force them to strike for what are very reasonable demands is frankly a failure of institutional leadership,” Andrea Zagata, a senior news design editor at the NYT, told me in an interview. “There are so many things in our contract that Tech is not close to having, and that’s very disappointing.”

Of course, the institutional management does not see it that way. In an internal email sent Monday, the New York Times owner AG Sulzberger wrote that “it is troubling that the Tech Guild would attempt to block this public service at such a moment for our country,” that he is “sad that this action by the Tech Guild was designed to jeopardize all of this work,” and that the company had “robust plans in place to ensure our essential journalism reaches our readers.” (In responseTimes business reporter Stacy Cowley told the Washington Post’s Laura Wagner, “These plans have not been communicated to reporters in the newsroom.”)

As the Tech Guild pushes with what NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss refers to as “the largest tech worker strike in US history,” and as Times Newsroom staff remind each other that they is right according to the terms of their own contract to refuses to put on weight any task that overlaps with the duties of tech strikers, outside opponents have appeared. CEO of generative AI app Perplexity – which received a cease-and-desist letter from the Times last month, asking it to stop using NYT prose for data-training purposes — offered to help the paper ensure “essential coverage is available to everyone during the election” and requested that Sulzberger message to him. Other authors at X seized a 2-month-old Semafor report on certain guild requests, including banning fragrance products, bereavement leave for dead pets, and triggering warnings in internal meetings to suggest that these were the reasons behind the tech workers’ strike — though, other Times staffers noted, those things were “mischaracterized” in the report and has not been on the table for a long time anyway.

“It’s a straw man,” Zagata insisted. “Some people take the bait and play right into the hands of management. But the guild is not going on strike over scented products, I can tell you that.”

Meanwhile, as Sulzberger himself noted, the strike is likely to continue through the election, and workers have been called out by other union leaders, such as Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, as well local politicianslike NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and New York State Senator Jessica Ramos. Tech Guild’s strike fund has raised over $100,000 in donations. And the newspaper itself remains profitable and maintains a healthy subscription base. What it doesn’t have, however, is a pin — or any sense of what else might break this week as the Tech Guild marches on.