Sign of the Times: An Account of the First Tech Workers’ Strike | Long-Haul Mag

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SUMMER 2026<br>ISSUE 07

Sign of the Times: An Account of the First Tech Workers’ Strike

JOHN CRUICKSHANK, WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SARAH DUNCAN,<br>BENJAMIN HARNETT, KAIT HOEHNE, PENINA KESSLER, DAVID MORANT,<br>ROHAN RANGRAY, SIERRA SAITTA, JEFF SISSON, ERICA VENDETTI,<br>YUCHEN, AND MORE MEMBERS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES GUILD

1 MVP, or “minimum viable product,” is a tech management term of art meaning an expedient first delivery, made with the promise that improvements will come later.

2 Part of the point of the speech is to illustrate the relative opacity of these mechanisms or kinds of work even for other workers within the unit.

3 A code freeze is a policy that mandates cessation of the usual deployment of new code, since the integration of new code into a complex system typically is accompanied by the risk of technical breakdowns.

Workers in the New York Times Tech Guild went on the first official tech workers’ strike in the United States, during the week of the presidential election in November, 2024. Following the strike, the Times Tech Guild became the nation’s largest union of tech workers with a collective bargaining agreement.

Tech workers at The New York Times began to organize in 2018. The campaign to form a union originated in a conversation between two workers, Kathy Zhang and Goran Svorcan-Merola, and proceeded underground through 2019 and into 2020, moving cautiously from one person to the next. In the summer of 2020, however, amid the uprising following the police murder of George Floyd, the Times solicited and published an op-ed by Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the deployment of the National Guard to suppress protestors in New York. A number of Black journalists risked their employment by speaking out publicly in protest. In solidarity, hundreds of employees from across many departments of the Times walked off the job.

The motion and solidarity generated by that action gave tech workers the momentum to go public with our union drive. We reached a majority of support in tech departments by the spring of 2021. It is difficult to imagine that we would have reached this stage in the absence of the walkout. It was an early lesson in the importance of both methodical, committed organizing and a willingness to shift course in moments of upsurge, without guarantees, a lesson only imperfectly remembered when we struck in 2024.

Despite Times management’s fierce anti-union campaign, we won union recognition in spring 2022, with a landslide 82 percent vote in favor. The more than 700 engineers, designers, data scientists and analysts, product managers, and project managers who make up our union include everyone who works on the Times’s website and mobile apps, digital products widely understood to be essential to the Times’s unique financial success among news companies.

We work in teams, typically ranging from three to ten people. Product managers direct and make decisions about the software we build; designers shape elements of user experience; software engineers design technical architecture, write and review code, and fix bugs; analysts wrangle data about business operations; and project managers coordinate complex initiatives between these and other roles. All of these functions combine to maintain and extend an intricate tangle of software, connecting reporters and editors to subscribers and browsers. Our work backs digital subscriptions and advertisements, facilitates the publication and distribution of the print edition, generates reports critical to the business, and powers all the games, recipes, and interactive stories.

A day at work might see engineers review one another’s code before the launch of a new feature, meet to discuss requirements for a pending project, attend an architecture review meeting to reconcile a proposed module of software with existing paradigms, and receive a late-night page dispatching them to fix a bug that has affected readers.

These patterns of work and interaction were critical to understand as we built our union, and particularly as we came to see that, in order to win a first contract, we might need to strike. Each of us understood the pieces of the system closest to our work, but almost no one, neither workers nor managers, had a detailed working knowledge of the whole. To discover our strike leverage, we learned that it was necessary to enter into discussions with our work teams. What work was most timely and most critical to the business? What could not easily be reassigned? Without union workers on call, what was most likely to break and when? To find out, workers had to ask each other. These collective deliberations were a crucial step beyond the top-down mobilizations that characterized much of the preceding contract-bargaining campaign. Turning to each other in this way, we forged power to strike.

In striking, we discovered the intransigence...