The New York Times Tech Guild's 600 employees — who code key features like push notifications, live blogs, homepage designs and games — officially quit their jobs on Monday, and the impact on their employer's website is already visible.

According to pollster Nate Cohn, the Times' iconic Needle, used in every major election since 2016, may be too flawed to work. Subscribers are expressing their solidarity online by sharing screenshots of their now-discontinued Wordle/Spelling Bee/crossword puzzle series, following a guild call for users to boycott the NYT Games app. And the TikTok-style vertical video ad “Our Reporters Tell You What to Expect” on the front page didn’t last past Monday evening.

The reason Times engineers want to turn their own website upside down on the biggest news day of the year is precisely this moment Years in the making. When these employees first announced in 2021 that they would form their own union (one separate from the respective editorial unions representing the NYT newsroom and its Wirecutter affiliate), the newspaper's leadership refused to recognize the unity and brought the matter to the forefront of the National Labor Relations Board — which soon filed its own complaint against Times management for violating federal labor law by telling other newsroom employees not to support the tech organizers to express.

The Tech Guild union was officially certified in March 2022, under the auspices of the NewsGuild of New York, which also represents the Times' other unions (both of which separately expressed solidarity). However, the contract negotiation process was grueling, and various points of contention on issues such as just cause protections and return-to-office mandates led to even more disputes and work stoppages at the NLRB in protest. (The RTO fight is particularly significant because many of the organized employees work remotely and did not want to be forced to move to New York City.)

In September of that year, with those disagreements still on the table, the Tech Guild approved a strike authorization vote — and immediately, as a guild spokesman told Thomas Birmingham of the Nation, Times management began meeting with individual members, to offer them a means approved by Human Resources to continue their work on Election Day if they did not wish to participate in the strike. Management sent a follow-up memo last month to reiterate that point, even as NYT executives received messages of solidarity from unions representing the newsroom and Wirecutter. Despite some complaints from individual reporters, such statements made it clear that the internal dynamic was on the Tech Guild's side for its core demands such as equitable protections, flexibility in remote work and solutions to the unequal pay structures that plague the union's non-male and non-white members undercompensated members.

“This decision by the company to force them to strike over very reasonable demands is, frankly, a failure of institutional leadership,” Andrea Zagata, senior news design editor at NYT, told me in an interview. “There are so many things in our contract that Tech can't come close to having, and that's very disappointing.”

Of course, the institutional leadership doesn't see it that way. In an internal email Monday, New York Times owner AG Sulzberger wrote: “It is concerning that the Tech Guild would seek to block this public service at such an important moment for our country.” The Tech Guild was designed “to put all that work at risk” and that the company had “robust plans in place to ensure our essential journalism reaches our readers.” (In response, Times business reporter Stacy Cowley told Laura Wagner of the Washington Post: “These plans were not communicated to reporters in the newsroom.”)

As the Tech Guild continues what NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss calls “the largest tech worker strike in U.S. history,” and as Times newsroom staffers remind each other that they are under the terms of their According to their own contract, they have the right to refuse to accept a strike task that overlaps with the duties of the tech strikers, outside critics have emerged. The CEO of generative AI app Perplexity — which received a cease-and-desist letter from the Times last month asking it to stop using NYT prose for data — offered to help the newspaper ensure that for training purposes , that “essential coverage will be available to everyone during the election,” and asked Sulzberger to send him a message. Other authors on this were the reasons for the tech workers' strike – even though, as other Times staffers noted, those points were “misrepresented” in the report and had long been off the agenda anyway.

“It’s a straw man,” Zagata insisted. “Some people are taking the bait and playing right into the hands of management. But the guild is not striking because of scented products, I can tell you that.”

In the meantime, as Sulzberger himself noted, the strike is likely to last until the election, and workers have received vocal support from other union leaders, such as Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, as well as local politicians, such as the speaker of the NYC Council attacked Adrienne Adams and New York State Senator Jessica Ramos. The Tech Guild strike fund has raised over $100,000. And the newspaper itself remains profitable and has a healthy subscriber base. What it doesn't have, however, is a needle – or a sense of what else might break this week as the Tech Guild marches on To.