Your Wordle Streak Is Under Threat After NYT Fails to Bargain With Tech Workers
Tech workers affiliated with the New York Times are officially ready to strike—a development that could impact Times readers (and gamers), if such an action drags on long enough. Yes, we’re looking at you, Wordle players.
On Tuesday, the New York Times Tech Guild voted to authorize a strike after negotiations with the paper’s management fell through. The Guild represents some 600 tech workers, and, despite two years of bargaining, has yet to achieve any sort of deal with the owners of the paper. Axios writes that , “Of the union’s 622 workers, 89% participated in the strike authorization vote Tuesday and an overwhelming majority supported the vote to strike.” The strike is related to a return-to-office policy that the newspaper’s tech workers have fought.
How does this impact your Wordle gameplay? It really only impacts it if you don’t want to be a scab. In the past, Wordle players have shown solidarity with the bargaining workers by refraining from interacting with Times products , including the beloved game, which the Times bought in 2022— the same year that the Tech Guild was formed. And of course, the New York Times site needs to function for anyone to use it.
Not playing Wordle for a day would notably break the streak —that mystical phenomenon of heavily weighted significance that many players live for (said “streak,” of course, refers to a player’s winning streak). You don’t necessarily need to break your streak to support the Guild workers, though the Guild has asked (during a past labor action ) for readers to support them by refraining from using the Times’ products. “Read local news. Listen to public radio. Pull out a cookbook. Break your Wordle streak,” the Guild tweeted in 2022 , ahead of a walkout.
Support for the striking workers should hopefully transcend your mobile gaming interests and extend, instead, to the fact that they are human beings who deserve equitable benefits.
Though strikes have declined drastically in recent decades (millions of Americans used to participate annually in work stoppages; now the number is frequently in the low hundreds of thousands), last year was a banner year for organized labor. Indeed, in 2023, the number of strikes in the U.S. rose 141 percent from the previous year . And that’s great but, as I think I heard in a movie once, those are rookie numbers . We gotta pump those numbers up.