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What Does the Growth of Media Unions Mean for the Broader Labor Movement?

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-9795040

1558-1454

Dave Jamieson,

Digital Economy and Work Transformation

In the fall of 2015, my Huffington Post colleagues and I sent a letter to our founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, telling her we'd rounded up a couple hundred union cards. The writers and editors at Gawker had recently joined the Writers Guild of America-East, and we intended to do the same. Everyone had their grievances or concerns. Lack of transparency on pay. Shifting job titles and responsibilities. I was especially worried about our editor's personal business interests (Huffington would soon join the board of Uber) and the conflicts they might create with our journalism. Many of us viewed unionizing—which, until Gawker, had never happened at a “digital native” newsroom—as the only way to seize some agency in a hellish industry.However she felt about dealing with a union, Huffington told us she would remain neutral. After a messy but brief fight over the scope of the bargaining unit, our corporate overlords at Verizon, which owned HuffPost at the time, voluntarily recognized our union. Within two years we had our first contract.As it turned out, HuffPost was just one newly unionized shop in an unprecedented wave of organizing. Dozens of newsrooms soon joined the Writers Guild or the NewsGuild, from old legacy institutions that had never had a union, like the L.A. Times and the New Yorker, to new media and podcasting ventures like Gimlet and The Ringer. As a labor reporter, I'm paid to spot and understand such trends. Yet I've been surprised again and again by the pace of organizing in our field. According to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, workers launched union campaigns at thirty-seven media outlets in 2020 alone. Every single one succeeded. What had seemed like a throwback just a few years ago—bargaining collectively in a newsroom—has fast become the norm.Sometimes people ask me what I think this burst of union activity in journalism means for the broader labor movement, at a time when just one in ten US workers belongs to a union, half the rate of forty years ago. I believe the organizing within media has made journalists more aware of the struggles of other workers, and better equipped to tell their stories. But I'm not convinced that the unionization of media portends a turnaround for unions writ large. Without major structural changes to our collective bargaining system, the growth of media unions is likely to remain an anomaly.After all, journalists have enjoyed some unique organizing advantages compared to other workers. For starters, a lot of the freshly unionized media workplaces, including my own, show a progressive face to their readers. Our then-editor-in-chief couldn't bust her staff union without jeopardizing her brand and her business. Those of us who were gathering union cards knew that. This specter of hypocrisy doesn't apply everywhere—billionaire Joe Ricketts shut down his news sites when workers tried to organize—but it has surely helped pave the path to union recognition at certain news outlets.It also helps that journalists are a noisy bunch—all the more so when we're talking about journalism—and the line of work comes with a built-in platform. Workers in other industries should envy the attention media union campaigns manage to draw, especially on Twitter. Journalists with large online followings have pummeled management at sites like Slate and the New Yorker during union fights. I know from covering union campaigns that public scrutiny can moderate the behavior of bosses and insulate union sympathizers who might otherwise be retaliated against. Many reporters and editors have taken great personal risks trying to organize their workplaces, but few would have had the same exposure as a nurse, a fast-food cook, or a warehouse worker in a union effort that drew little or no media attention.I was nervous when my colleagues and I were forming a union. I was worried not about losing my job but about disrupting relationships in a workplace I loved. But our road to a union and a contract was seamless compared to what many workers face. I often think about a Michigan worker named Kathleen VonEitzen, who tried to unionize a group of franchised Panera Bread cafes in Michigan in 2012. Kathleen earned around $10 an hour as a baker and couldn't afford health insurance for herself and her husband, who'd had two heart attacks. She and her fellow organizers gathered signed union cards from 90 percent of the expected bargaining unit, but they faced a relentless anti-union campaign, including “captive audience” meetings at a local hotel. The owner of Kathleen's store said he would fight the union “until his dying breath.” The National Labor Relations Board's general counsel accused the company of a litany of illegal acts for which there were no meaningful penalties.Nevertheless, workers voted 11 to 7 in favor of joining the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM). Most people think that means you get your union. It doesn't. Kathleen's employer challenged the size of the bargaining unit, dragged out the process through years of litigation, and let employee turnover do its work. When I caught up with Kathleen in 2015, three years after the “yes” votes came out ahead, she was doubtful they would ever have a contract. Many of the union supporters were gone from the cafes, replaced by workers who knew nothing of the campaign. Kathleen was so exhausted she needed to step back from the effort. “Sometimes you have to have a life that doesn't involve you fighting to have your union recognized,” she said.At the time, I wrote about the Panera campaign because it was a rare effort to unionize workers in the relatively new world of fast-casual restaurants. As a BCTGM organizer explained, “These are bakers just like I was a baker.” I write about the campaign now to illustrate how much harder it can be for workers to form a union when they face a determined employer and have little influence or public support. I wonder how Kathleen and the others would have fared if they had a bigger megaphone, a boss who had more reputational damage to fear, or a legal framework that wasn't tilted inexorably in the employer's favor.The success in organizing newsrooms shows how union density begets more density. Unlike Kathleen, who waged her fight in a virtually union-free industry, journalists have the benefit of organizing in a business where union contracts have become commonplace. At this point, any media boss who has managed to keep a union at bay should fear the inevitable, even at shops where collective bargaining once seemed highly unlikely, such as Politico. Indeed, it has become a little strange to not be organized in this field. Media unions have achieved a density not unlike the formidable Culinary Workers Union, which, through years of organizing sweat, now represents service workers at all but a handful of properties on the Vegas Strip. One of the most powerful things a union can do is to normalize being in a union.The collective bargaining in journalism has already done a lot to improve standards. More newsrooms have implemented pay minimums that make it harder for companies to bring in younger workers, especially women, on exploitative salaries that hobble them for years. In a field where the only guarantee is that someday you will be laid off, unions have secured severance packages that make for a softer landing. Rarely can the union save your job—in six years our bargaining unit has shrunk from roughly 250 members to fewer than 100, thanks to near-annual layoffs—but some unions have managed to negotiate buyouts instead. A lot of journalists end up thanking their unions as they're headed out the door, grateful there was an entity to advocate on their behalf.The union activism inside journalism has helped the broader labor movement in certain ways. A lot of writers are influential people with large followings. It matters when they talk about unions. The wave of campaigns has also meant a crash course in collective bargaining for those who determine what's news. When HuffPost was forming a union, I was one of just a few in the newsroom who had a handle on how the process worked, and only because it was my beat. Now we have an entire committee of coworkers who serve as stewards. These experiences have made writers and editors more attuned to stories about workers, and more conscious of the power dynamic inside a workplace. The success of the NewsGuild and Writers Guild have exposed rifts within those unions about the costs of expansion, but even those conflicts have their upside. It was hard to imagine just a few years ago that so many journalists would be talking publicly about union democracy.Unions are more popular now than they've been in years. The latest polling from Gallup showed that roughly two-thirds of Americans approve of organized labor, the highest rate since 2003. Meanwhile, unions have recently notched some of their greatest victories in decades. Workers in New York City just formed the very first union at an Amazon warehouse in the United States, and Starbucks employees have been organizing stores around the country. But short of a full-scale overhaul of collective bargaining law, organized labor will struggle to restore union density anywhere close to what it once was. As Kathleen told me after four years of fighting unsuccessfully to have her union recognized, it seemed like the whole system was stacked in the company's favor. “It's not that workers don't want unions,” she said. “It's that they can't have them.”