Unionized tech workers at The New York Times are threatening to strike if they don’t reach a contract agreement with management.Guérin Charles/Abaca/ZUMA

With two days until election day, New York Times faces a potential crisis: the army of tech workers who operate its digital platforms are threatening to go on strike.

Nearly 700 members of the newspaper Technology Guild-which represents the workers who power the famous election needlemobile push alerts, Wordle, the audio app and more — voted in September to authorize a strike. Today, a few days before an election during which the candidates seem stuck in a dead endWorkers say a strike could result if they fail to reach an agreement with management, who they say “has demonstrated an unwillingness at the negotiating table to be reasonable on key contract demands.” They say they have been negotiating for more than two years.

“We have made it clear that we need to reach an agreement before the election in order to avoid a strike,” the guild said. wrote in a November 1 letter addressed to management.

Among the Tech Guild’s demands are fair reason for termination without exception, higher salaries and more initiatives to foster diversity, equity and inclusion within their workforce.

Times Management, for its part, says the workers, who are mostly engineers, are already among the highest paid at the company, earning an average salary of $190,000, or $40,000 more than journalists at the Times Guild, the newspaper’s media workers’ union. Their other requests, Semafor reported in September, include a four-day work week and annual bonuses not linked to performance. The technology guild said members who are women and people of color are paid less than men and white people; Times Management counters that the methodology behind these comparisons is “misleading” because it does not compare people in comparable roles and that a salary analysis conducted last year “found no evidence of discrimination.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, senior vice president of external communications at Timessaid in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “The election schedule is arbitrary and was a decision made unilaterally by Tech Guild leadership. While we respect the union’s right to engage in protected action, threatening strike action at this time seems both unnecessary and contrary to our mission.

While the timing may be inopportune for the nation’s most influential newspaper, the ballot deadline appears intended to remind management that its sense of journalistic exceptionalism rests with the workers who run it. Rhoades Ha, for example, said in his statement: “There is no media outlet that provides as in-depth reporting and analysis as The Times. ” THE Times has praised its election needle, launched in 2016, as an accurate and early predictor of the election outcome; union members say without them it won’t work.

THE Times will the website go dark on Election Day if hundreds of tech workers are on strike? It’s not clear. “We have robust plans in place to ensure we are able to fulfill our mission and serve our readers,” Rhoades Ha said. She declined to answer follow-up questions.