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.

In striking, we discovered the intransigence of management and new strength of our own. We reclaimed our values from our employer, and we learned how our power as workers is made: When we take action, we build capacity for action.