NY Times Tech Workers Strike at the Worst Possible Time!

According to Katie Robertson, reporting in The New York Times here (if you can believe those union-busting jerks), The Times Tech Guild, a union that represents workers like software developers and data analysts at the paper of record, went on strike Monday morning, just ahead of the election. Negotiations continued until Sunday evening, but the parties could reach no agreement.

Workers are seeking “for cause” termination provisions, pay increases, pay equity, and the ability to work remotely.  The last demand saddens me. The Times has committed to continue through June 2025 its current requirements that workers come in only two days a week, on top of  the option to work remotely for three weeks per year. Perhaps tech workers really don’t need to be in the office that much, but people! You need to get out of your apartments! 

According to the union’s GoFundMe page, the union consists of  600+ tech workers — “software engineers, product managers, data analysts, and designers” who, and this is the crucial point, “power games like Wordle, Connections and The Crossword.” As of yesterday, if you play the games in The Times, you are crossing a virtual picket line. Same goes if you use the Cooking section.

And that’s why the timing is so tragic. Between Gaza/Lebanon and the election, I haven’t been able to read the news in weeks. Puzzles are one of the ways I distract myself from my snowballing fear of waking up in a dystopia of one kind or another. The Tech Guild is separate from the other unions that represent New York Times workers. Journalists say that it is okay to continue reading the news, so long as you don’t take a sanity break to do the crossword or make dinner with a New York Times recipe.

There’s only one way left to distract oneself. The polls are the one place you can be sure that nobody will talk politics!

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