Why The New York Times Needle Could Break Tonight – Mother Jones

Than the sun above the put New York Times Building on election night, the Times Tech Guild — the union of workers that runs the company's news, gaming and culinary infrastructure — ended its second day of strike. Their strike, an attempt to enforce a deal they have been negotiating for more than two years, could tonight bring down one of America's most beloved and hated election night forecasters: The Needle.

As reporter and survey expert Nate Cohn explained on X, the technology team “built and maintained the infrastructure that delivers the data [the needle] Dates and lets [the Times] publish [it] on the Internet.” At the time of publication, the needle is up. But it's unclear whether it will endure without the guild's work.

The Tech Guild wants equal pay, remote work protections and — what many advocated for Tuesday night — protections against arbitrary dismissal, known as “just cause.”

The 173 year old Just has developed in recent years into more of a technology company in which news is a central, but not singular, component. Its games and cooking apps are driving subscriptions; it has expanded into audio and sports. With this transformation, the way in which employees organize themselves within the company has also changed. Today, the newspaper is home to one of the largest technology unions in the country, in addition to its newspaper and advertising workers unions.

Kathy Zhang, desk director at the New York Times Tech Guild, has had “probably hundreds of conversations” with her colleagues up to this point. I asked her about the picket line, the needle, and why workers go on strike.

What would you normally do on Election Day if you weren't on the picket line?

I am a senior analytics manager on the audience team at New York Timeswhich means I source data on traffic trends and monitor how people listen to audio and engage with our coverage.

This will be my third presidential election here. I was at the Just for nine years. In 2017, on January 20th, Inauguration Day, I was the person who stayed up past 1 a.m. waiting for our data to come in to update our editors on what poll traffic looked like. Election Day is one day, but election season is a long time, and we spend a lot of time preparing for it. It's unfortunate that management let it drag on so long.

I know you all have been saying this could happen for a while, right?

We have been negotiating for almost two and a half years. We started negotiations in July 2022. It was September 10th when we passed a strike authorization vote with 95 percent approval. We told management the very next day that we had given them two months notice. We were negotiating all last week, but on Sunday evening management decided to walk away from the table. So the ball is literally in their court.

On the Internet I have seen right-wing media focusing on some unusual causes and claiming that you are negotiating things such as Bereavement leave for petsTrigger warnings about political issues, that sort of thing.

The main issues currently unresolved are simple cause – meaning we can't be fired without cause – and flexible working so that people who have caring responsibilities or live hundreds of miles away are not forced to quit Office. We are an entity where, as you know, our members see a great deal of inequality in the way we are paid. We want to be paid fairly.

Instead of talking about the real problems, management has given right-wing media talking points. It's actually quite depressing coming from a newspaper that supposedly cares about independent journalism; They spread misleading arguments.

I saw a clip on Fox News saying we were looking for job security for illegals. Now I've spent a lot of time working on the visa and immigration proposals we have on the table. I don't know what job security means for illegals, because it's literally about people with visas, right? It is important to us that people are informed about whether they are getting their visas sponsored.

I'm an immigrant myself, I'm a naturalized citizen, and I care about democracy – that's why I'm out here in a union! It was a complete mischaracterization of our proposal. Things came up that were on the table for maybe seven minutes two years ago and haven't been talked about since. I think it's really telling that the company would rather talk about things that it believes make us seem unreasonable than talk about the fact that this company is doing $400 million in stock buybacks -Dollar approved, i.e. money that flows directly to the shareholders. Bags, not for workers.

It does nothing but make rich people richer, and they'd rather threaten election night coverage than make a fair deal with their workers.

If this continues, how will the strike affect coverage on election night and beyond?

There are so many interconnected systems that drive our work that I can't even tell you all the things that may or may not go wrong. And there are systems that readers will not see and that will cause us a lot of problems.

But we have a lot of support from our colleagues in the editorial and advertising departments. They wrote letters to management telling them they needed us. Our newsroom colleagues are the ones who provided our lunch today – some of them are on the picket line in their free time before their shifts start or after already working a full day.

This is the largest tech workers' strike in American history that I know of. What sets you all apart from other tech unions? What helped you get this far?

We are the largest “high-tech” union in the country with bargaining rights, but we received a lot of support and solidarity from other unionized tech workers.

I think part of it is that New York Times is a newspaper company, but what other newspaper has six or seven hundred technicians in the company? Sometimes power depends on the sheer number of people you have. We have hundreds of people and it's hard to organize! But it also means that when people stand together in solidarity as we fight out here, we know that we can get through this.

That's why we're currently fighting for greater pay equity. We fight to ensure that people are not fired without cause. That's really all we're fighting for.

One of the most amazing things I've seen is that people who I knew voted against unionization and against the strike authorization vote are on the strike line today. Because in the end, which side are you on, right?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.