NO CONTRACT, NO CODE
Lessons from the First Official Tech Worker Strikes

Partway through autumn 2026, the official strikes of workers at The New York Times and Kickstarter still represent high watermarks of organizing and militancy in tech. As workers, our power begins in talking to each other, in reflecting together, in learning from each other’s struggles. This panel, organized in conjunction with Haymarket Books, looks to transmit from these strike experiences what might be relevant to anyone trying to organize in the tech sector and maybe workers organizing beyond the sector as well.

As you’ll hear more in detail, workers in The New York Times Tech Guild went on the first official tech workers’ strike in the United States, during the week of the presidential election in November, 2024, and following the strike became the nation’s largest union of tech workers with a collective bargaining agreement. Guild members won “just cause” job security protections, checks against unpaid on-call time, immigration and visa support, guaranteed annual raises and more. Less than a year later, workers at Kickstarter United followed suit: drawing important lessons from the Times Tech strike, they stayed on strike for 42 days, winning contractual protections for a four-day work week, universal pay minimums, and certain protections regarding the introduction of AI to their work.

More than for the content of the contracts, these strikes are significant, they are worthy of reflection, because they were generative of solidarity. They produced new information that might guide our organizing across the sector. They begin to shed the light of shared experience on a fundamental and a much speculated-about question: what happens when tech workers withhold our labor? What indeed is the leverage of withheld labor in this sector, and how might that leverage be cultivated?

Our experiences suggest something that is not necessarily unique about tech work, but that is, perhaps, a defining feature of it: our strike leverage builds durationally, and not all in one place, but on a team by team basis. Tech is like some sectors, and unlike others. It is also to some degree specific to each workplace, and its particulars are always in flux. And so we are learning that our organizing must be attuned to these questions, it must be a matter of inquiring together where our leverage resides, conferring where we work as to how we might claim that leverage, then accordingly acting together.

More than anything these are stories of workers in the tech sector learning how to strike. But beyond the specificity of tech work itself, these strikes underscore an enduring and universal insight: that there is a practical utility to democracy in our organizing, and to workers collectively determining the direction of their struggles.