Monday, November 4th, the day before this year’s election, The New York Times Tech Guild went on strike due to stalled contract negotiations over pay and job security.
The New York Times (NYT) Tech Guild is a group of more than 600 people who work on the technological side of running the New York Times. The NYT Tech Guild members are mostly known as the people who make the New York Times games such as Wordle, Connections, and the Spelling Bee.
The Guild had been proposing a strike for several months now. The New York Times Tech Guild made the announcement that they would be forming a union in 2021. When they made this announcement, they faced backlash from the paper’s leadership. Even with the backlash they still became an officially certified union in March of 2022.
This year, in a meeting that they tech workers had on September 10th, they decided that they would walk during election week- one of the most important weeks for journalist- as a way to make it harder for the NYT to get election coverage up.
The newspaper giant confirmed in a statement that members would begin protesting outside the Times headquarters daily, beginning at 9am that November 5th. The protesting lasted until November 10th.
During the protesting, the employees were constantly putting out messages asking people around the world to not play their daily game of Wordle and other games until the strike was over.
“The only time the New York Times ever really pops up in my life is during election season obviously, and sometimes in my college classes. I don’t play the games enough to say ‘yeah I’m going to quit the New York Times’, but I could understand why someone would,” sophomore Lilly Camacho said.
As a way to stop people from playing the games, they created Guild Builds. Guild Builds includes several different games to replace your normal gameplay including; Frogger 8th Ave, Scabby’s Fair Contract Builder, Match Strike, Connections: Strike Edition, Strikle, Strikeman, and Guild Adventure.
All of these games are based around the strike. The site has a wide variety of games that can be played, some more challenging than others. The site also includes cooking recipes with witty puns in their names including “Lets Taco Bout that Contract”, and “Solidarity Soup”.
Other than the games and cooking recipes, the website includes the Strike Chant Generator. The generator includes all of the chants that the Guild used during the strike including one based on pop star Chappell Roan’s song Hot-to-Go; “G-O-T-T-O-G-O, Bosses greed has got to go!”
Now even though the website is still available to the public, the NYT Tech Guild has ended their strike but are still in negotiation when it comes to the workers contract. The Guild came back to work on November 12th with a New York Times Tech Guild union member saying that they will “March into the office together in the morning as a symbol of what’s to come for The Times.”
The NYT ultimately called the strike quits as they felt that it was getting them nowhere within their negotiation and they needed pay. Many people were still playing the games that were being posted by the NYT as most people did not know about the strike going on.
“I wouldn’t know anything about it or what to say. This would be the first time that I am hearing about the strike,” junior Ryan Bonilla said.
