With Walkout Looming, New York Times Management Prepares for a Nearly Empty Newsroom

Inside The New York Times, the top brass is bracing for a walkout. Last Friday, the Times Guild, which represents about 1,450 employees, alerted management that they planned to stop work for a full 24 hours on Thursday, December 8, if they did not have a contract by then. “We are all operating under the assumption that we are walking out on Thursday,” sports reporter and unit member Kevin Draper told me. 

The two sides are meeting again Tuesday, as planned, though management balked at the Guild’s request, in a letter to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and president and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, to enter additional marathon negotiating sessions over wages, health insurance and retirement benefits, and return-to-office policies. “We really were hoping that the response would be, let’s add more bargaining sessions and get as close as we can before Thursday and then see where we are,” said Andrea Zagata, a staff editor who helps produce the print edition of the Times. “Instead the response that we got was well, I guess we’ll see you on Tuesday.” 

Meanwhile, management has entered contingency planning. Since Friday, there have been a series of meetings to prepare for the work stoppage, according to a Times editor. Some managers are looking into how to pull more stories off the wires to fill gaps in the report and asking people individually whether they plan to work on Thursday, according to two Times reporters. Various staffers have been asked to file stories early, or do advance work like they would for a holiday schedule, said Zagata. Guild members got an email Tuesday morning from Jacqueline Welch, the paper’s chief human resources officer, “to remind you of how company policies apply while you are exercising your right,” according to internal messages reviewed by Vanity Fair. “If you are on strike on Thursday, you will not be paid for that day. This is standard practice,” Welch wrote. (Management is billing the action as a strike; the Guild is calling it a walkout, because it’s for a defined time frame.)

A walkout could still be averted, depending on what progress is made at the table Tuesday. As of this writing, 1,111 staffers—76% of the Guild’s entire unit—have signed the work-stoppage pledge. “While we are disappointed that the NewsGuild is threatening to strike, we are prepared to ensure The Times continues to serve our readers without disruption,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement. 

The Times Guild has been in protracted negotiations since their last contract expired in March 2021. Outrage over the delay has been spilling into public view for months now, with journalists in September appealing to senior leaders to get more involved. A confluence of factors have prompted some staff to pay more attention to what’s happening at the bargaining table, including a new window into it, provided by Zoom, and the fact that they haven’t gotten a contractual raise in more than two years while inflation erodes their salaries. The backdrop to all of this is the financial success of the Times, which has been in expansion mode—spending $550 million to purchase The Athletic and a price in the low seven figures for Wordle—and touting their growth and strength. 

As I noted in September, the union has become more aggressive in its organizing efforts, such as releasing the damning findings of a performance-evaluation analysis in an NPR news story. “I would prefer to just be doing my job on Thursday,” said Draper, noting “the Guild did not go from zero to walkout.” But “if they are not moving on hundreds of people writing them emails, thousands sending them a petition about return to office, and dozens of bargaining sessions, it felt like something a little bigger was needed, and that’s how we’ve arrived at the current moment of potentially walking out Thursday,” he said. As the 24-hour walkout looms, the Guild has continued to use Twitter—as they have in the past—as part of their public pressure campaign, even co-opting the paper’s signature election needle to forecast the odds of Thursday’s stoppage: 

Unionized employees at the Times have both threatened walkouts and actually walked out before—there was a brief walkout in 2017 over copy editor cuts, for example—but the paper hasn’t seen a full-day work stoppage like the one the Guild is threatening since the ’70s. And now that they’ve stated the threat publicly, there may be a different calculus for Sulzberger. “The Guild is testing his ego, not his wallet,” said one Times employee.