New York Times Confronts Labor Strife as Tech Workers Push to Organize

The Times’s management has declined to voluntarily recognize the new union, which is seeking to organize as part of the NewsGuild of New York.

The company has recently sent pamphlets to tech staffers that say it has made progress on “career growth and development, company culture and [diversity, equity and inclusion] and compensation and benefits,” according to a copy of the document viewed by The Wall Street Journal. It has encouraged them to vote against the union.

Danielle Rhoades Ha,

a spokeswoman for the New York Times, said the company didn’t voluntarily recognize a technology union because it would be “an unproven experiment with lasting implications.”

“The success of digital product development relies on collaboration, speed and constant experimentation, all of which a collective bargaining arrangement could stifle,” Ms. Rhoades Ha said in a statement.

The conflict with tech workers highlights technology’s growing importance in newsrooms as publishers experiment with new digital products. “In a way, it just reflects the transformation of journalism from a print, old-fashioned medium to what it is now, where there’s a huge amount of tech involved,” said

Ruth Milkman,

a labor sociologist at the City University of New York.

Digital experimentation has helped fuel the Times’s growth. Of the 375,000 digital subscriptions the company added in the fourth quarter, 204,000 were for non-news products such as its games, cooking app and product-recommendation website Wirecutter.

Staffers at Wirecutter went on strike in late November before their union reached a deal on its first collective bargaining agreement with the company.

Labor-organizing efforts across U.S. media have ramped up in the last few years, and other publishers have faced similar pressures. Last year, workers at the Condé Nast publications the New Yorker, Pitchfork and Ars Technica reached their first contracts with the company, averting a strike after 2 ½ years of negotiations and a protest near the home of top company executive

Anna Wintour.

Workers at outlets including the Atlantic, Politico, BuzzFeed News and Insider have also organized.

In 2021, 1,542 U.S. media employees won union recognition with the NewsGuild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America union, a 52% increase compared with the previous year, according to data from the organization that helps media workers form and operate unions.

Unionized staffers at the Journal are affiliated with the NewsGuild and are operating under a contract with parent Dow Jones that expires this summer.

At the Times, the 80-year-old union that represents more than 1,300 journalists and some non-newsroom staffers is also part of the NewsGuild. The union is currently in negotiations to renew a five-year contract that expired last March. As the two sides bargain on issues such as diversity and pay, the company has granted nonunionized employees new holidays including Juneteenth, Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Veterans Day.

The Times said it would add those as permanent holidays for unionized staffers if they relinquish the right to bargain in the future over paid-time off policies, according to a note the Times union’s bargaining committee sent to members on Jan. 25. The union filed an NLRB complaint over the matter.

The Times has agreed to give union workers Juneteenth off for 2022, according to a note the committee sent its members this week. Juneteenth, which was made a federal holiday last year, observes the end of slavery in the U.S.

Ms. Rhoades Ha said the Times proposed in July of last year offering NewsGuild employees the same paid time-off benefits that the company gives nonunionized and Wirecutter Guild staffers.

Among the diversity proposals the union has introduced are the right of transgender staffers to change their bylines on articles retroactively, so that they reflect the identities they assumed publicly after transitioning.

“Those are issues that a growing number of people in the newsroom really care about, and are starting to see as important to their job as some of the traditional protections like healthcare and paid-time off,” said

Stacy Cowley,

a business reporter at the Times who serves on the union’s bargaining committee.

Ms. Rhoades Ha said the company’s practice is to maintain archived articles as they were originally published, so changing bylines isn’t possible. She said the company is proud of its efforts to improve diversity and pay equity and to expand paid-time off. “There is work remaining and we look forward to continued progress,” she said.

The tech workers seeking to organize at the Times want more salary transparency and accountability over diversity, equity and inclusion, say Times software engineers who support forming a union.

Should the tech workers vote in favor of unionizing in the NLRB election, the Times would be required by law to recognize their union.

A New York Times investor, Trillium Asset Management, sent the company’s chief executive a letter this week expressing concern over the publisher’s handling of labor issues.

The company’s approach to the tech workers’ organizing effort suggests the Times “is not operating in a neutral or good faith manner to have a free and fair election,” Trillium said in its letter. The firm—which is focused on environmental, social and governance, or ESG, matters in its investing—owns a roughly 0.4% stake in the company’s Class A shares.

Ms. Rhoades Ha said the Times called for a free and fair election in which managers can share views with employees and staffers can share views with each other.

When the push by the Times’s tech workers went to the NLRB last summer, Times management asked the agency to rule on the scope of the union, arguing that smaller divisions within the company’s technology group had separate interests, according to Ms. Rhoades Ha.

Tech staffers opposed the Times’s approach, saying that smaller groups would have less bargaining power than one union, said

Goran Svorcan-Merola,

a senior engineer who works on the iPhone crossword app and Games team at the Times.

The NLRB ruled in favor of the tech organizers, saying they could vote to organize as one large group.

Write to Alexandra Bruell at [email protected] and Allison Prang at [email protected]