Deaf data engineer with New York Times explains strike

Last Monday, about six hundred tech employees at the New York Times walked out of their jobs to conduct a strike demanding fair treatment. The strike is still ongoing.

One of the tech employees is a Deaf data engineer named Brienna Herold and she was willing to answer three questions. She is a part of the NYT Tech Guild.

My first question was to describe two or three of the most critical problems with being employed by the New York Times and what were the breaking points where they felt they had to take a stand.

Brienna Herold: The economy has been changing and for tech workers, our job security is not as guaranteed as before. We have three big concerns: pay equity, just cause protections (without this, we are considered “at-will” which means we can be fired any time, for any reason), and remote work protections. Many of us at the New York Times were hired remotely, which can change any time, really. There’s nothing in our contracts to stop that from happening. It just happened with the Washington Post this week. All of their workers have to go back to their offices in 2025. The New York Times will probably do the same and there’s nothing stopping them from doing that. Many of us can’t afford to move to New York City, especially with our pay disparity. We need a contract that covers those concerns, in a fair way for both of us and the company. But the company has not been willing to give up 100% unilateral control over our rights so that’s why we are now on strike.

Alex: My second question was on how Brienna is participating with the strike as a deaf employee and what she’s had to do with accommodations and communication.

Brienna: That is a great question! When you are on strike, your employer will stop paying you, which also means they will stop providing your accommodations. In my situation, I’m Deaf, so how do I get access on strike? Fortunately, I’m a remote worker, so it means I am striking remotely. I am using my personal laptop and I have Slack, where all the conversations happen with the guild (union). All the in-person and remote workers are chatting there. We also have remote picketing on Zoom. We will watch a livestream of the in-person picketing and we have breakout rooms where we can chat and create plans and do social media outreach. All of that I can access using Zoom captions and chats. It’s not that bad. But it’s not perfect. For more serious, detailed conversations, we will bring in an interpreter. Fortunately, the agency Interpreter Now has donated interpreters for us, to help get access. I am grateful.

Alex: My third question was on if she wanted to add anything.

Brienna: This is the first open-ended, continuing tech workers’ strike in U.S. history so I don’t know how this will end yet. Tech work is also very different compared to other jobs. If you look at newsroom journalists, if they went on strike, no articles would be published. With truck drivers, if they went on strike, nothing would be delivered in America. With Boeing, if they go on strike, no planes will be made. So they have a direct, immediate impact on the company. But with us tech workers, it takes more time to see the impact. So this could end two different ways: it could continue until we finally get a fair contract, or we could decide it’s time to go back to work and end the strike and pivot to a different strategy. In either case, we are still establishing a precedent for tech unions all over America and for any tech worker out there who are considering setting up a union in their company.

Alex: Thank you so much, Brienna Herold, for the very clear explantations of why you / others are striking.

https://newsguild.org/press-release-new-york-times-tech-guild-walks-off-the-job/

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