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If you usually start your mornings with the New York Times mini crossword, by guessing the latest Wordle, or by listening to The Daily, you’re now wrapped up in a labor struggle between the union and the newspaper. Workers at the paper are engaging in a one-day walkout and are asking readers to break their streaks and change their routines on December 8 as part of a “digital picket line,” while the workers stand on a real picket line at the Times office.
More than 1,000 New York Times workers are set to walk out unless management agrees to a fair contract with their union, the Times Guild. The last contract expired in March 2021, and workers have been negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement for more than 20 months. The union alerted management on December 2 that its members will walk out and stop work for 24 hours on the 8th if a deal isn’t reached by then. More than 1,100 members of the unit signed the walkout pledge.
And it looks like one hasn’t been reached: Vanity Fair reported on Tuesday that management “balked” at the union’s request, sent in a letter to the Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, to enter all-day, marathon negotiating sessions. There have been meetings since Friday, per Vanity Fair, to prepare for the work stoppage and to fill in gaps in coverage. The Times is also reportedly referring to the action as a strike, though the Guild is calling it a walkout; unlike strikes, which can go on for an undetermined amount of time, the walkout has a set time frame of 24 hours.
The union is asking the Times for wages that keep up with inflation (and a $65,000 salary floor for the lowest paid positions), enhanced health insurance and retirement benefits, an option to work remotely, and for the company to not expand “a biased performance evaluation system.” (In August 2022, the New York Times News Guild, which represents the Time’s workers, released an analysis that showed the company’s performance review system has “for years given significantly lower ratings to employees of color.”)
The union has been using a graphic similar to the New York Times election needle to indicate the chance of a finished contract, or how likely a walk out would be. On Wednesday, that needle moved into the far left section: very likely, or a 95% chance of a work stoppage.
Along with that work stoppage, Guild members are asking New York Times readers to stand with them on the “digital picket line” and not engage in any Times platforms on Thursday. “Read local news. Listen to public radio. Pull out a cookbook. Break your Wordle streak,” the Guild’s Twitter account shared. Guild members will also rally outside of the New York Times building at 1 p.m. on Thursday.
More than 100 million readers have registered accounts with the Times, per company data, and “tens of millions” of readers engage with its work each week. That counts both print and digital readers, but digital has been growing: the Times added 180,000 digital-only subscribers in its most recent quarter of 2022 alone. The newspaper’s array of online offerings, including its podcasts like The Daily and its games platform also attract millions; according to 2020 numbers, The Daily has 4 million listeners a day, and “millions” also log on to guess a new five letter word each day through Wordle, the game that the Times bought in January 2022.
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