Copy this CollectionFaced with a volatile industry where companies rapidly rise, fall, and change hands, employees at digital media companies are using a traditional tool to protect their pay, benefits, and rights: unions. Beginning in the late 2000s, but picking speed with Gawker’s unionizing in 2016, digital media newsrooms have joined either the NewsGuild or the Writer’s Guild of America East union.
Union bargaining has secured pay increases, severance packages, and benefits. Some contracts have created new channels of communication between workers and management, such as regular meetings. It has also pushed news organizations that advocate for labor rights in their content to also live these issues with their own employees. Some clauses traditionally found in union contracts are absent from these negotiations such as requiring layoffs to happen according to reverse seniority.
The impact of this wave of unionization is limited by the small number of journalists who work for digital media companies as well as the large amount of people who freelance for these companies (and as such are not covered by the union contracts). However, these pushes for unionization changes perceptions about who unions are for, shows that unionization is possible, and creates journalists who can better report of labor issues having lived through them.
