The New York Times’ Wirecutter Employees Plan To Strike During Black Friday Week

Writers at The New York Times’ Wirecutter are planning a strike during the product review website’s peak traffic period around Black Friday.

According to the NewsGuild, which represents around 1,300 editorial and business workers at the New York Times, the move follows a company vote in which more than 90 percent of Wirecutter union members voted to authorize a work stoppage lasting one or more days in late November.

The company, however, refused to agree to an initial collective bargaining agreement with significant guaranteed wage increases. And while the company has offered raises across the board, the raises are noted to be only 0.5 percent per year, with additional pay subject to management’s discretion. This has prompted the workers to go on a protest.

“We look forward to continuing to work towards an agreement with the Wirecutter Union in our standard process at the negotiating table,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the New York Times, in an email to Bloomberg. “Our compensation proposal is more generous than what they’ve described and seeks to maintain a similar compensation structure for Wirecutter employees with programs in place for others at the Times Company.”

“We know what we’re worth,” said Katie Okamoto, a writer at Wirecutter. “We feel that it’s appropriate for us to, if we have to, demonstrate how worth it we are.”

To generate revenue, Wirecutter offers subscriptions, runs digital ads and pushes affiliate links to make commission. The planned strike could leave Wirecutter without fresh content for at least 24 hours during its busiest week of the year — a time when customers look to in-depth reviews to help them make their Black Friday and Cyber Monday purchases. The media site thus runs the risk of witnessing a tremendous drop in revenue.

The planned strike follows a previously staged strike by the New York Times technology employees back in August 2021 for half a day.

Originally published at https://retailbum.com on November 9, 2021.