Tech workers at The New York Times have unionized

A majority of the 600-plus tech workers at The New York Times have formed a union with the New York News Guild and are seeking voluntary recognition from the company.

The new union includes engineers, product and project managers, data scientists and analysts and many other technical support staff. Like other recent tech unions, the group won't be pushing for higher salaries; instead, they'll ask for pay equity, better paths for career growth, better health care benefits, improved diversity and inclusion policies, and just cause firing protections.

While support staff like typesetters and proofreaders were once unionized with the Times, the disappearance of those jobs also led to the end of their unionization. While editorial Times staff remained unionized, the last two decades of technology hiring at the Times instead followed employment patterns more similar to the rest of the tech industry.

Many Times tech workers have a history of choosing to work at the company because of their interest in the newspaper's mission. While tech worker unionization has started to become more common across the industry, most of the new unions are based at companies with progressive cultures or mission-oriented work outside the tech space, like Glitch, Kickstarter and Mobilize.