This morning at 8 a.m., New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien received a letter from Bill Baker, unit chair of the Times guild, that was signed by more than 1,000 employees. Subject line: “Enough. If there is no contract by Dec. 8, we are walking out.”

Back in September, I wrote about how the unionized staff and management hadn’t come to terms on a new labor contract and were threatening to do something like, well, what this letter has finally threatened to do. For months, the newsroom has been pressing its publisher for a bigger share of the Times’ profits, but it turns out the guy whose predecessors were nicknamed Punch and Pinch is no pushover. So now they’ve decided to give the boss a hard deadline. The letter demands a weeklong marathon bargaining session over health-care funds and return-to-office policies and their pension plan. But what the employees really want is permanent increases in base pay. If they don’t get enough of a salary bump, they’re going to stop working for 24 hours next Thursday.

A walkout is technically a strike, though one with an end date. There was a one-hour walkout over a lapsed contract in 2011, and another quick afternoon walkout in 2017 over copy editors being eliminated. But those were mostly shows of solidarity. What the employees are preparing to do next week would be something not seen at the paper of record since 1978. Picture it: a full day without the New York Times. No one covering the tumult in Guangzhou or inside Buckingham Palace or what our president is saying. From midnight to midnight, no reporting, no filing stories, no podcasting, no comment moderating, and definitely no responding to editors’ queries.

(via Lucianne)

[Don’t expect Joe Biden to intervene in this one. — Ed]