The fight over unionization at Gawker Media highlights the conflicting struggle of two longstanding institutions — journalism and organized labor — to adapt and thrive in the digital age. But this experience says more about the evolution of union organizing than it does about the impact of unions on emerging media.
The role of unions in the news industry is a relic of a bygone era and an impediment to the legacy institutions that are struggling with adaptation to digital models amid a titanic paradigm shift. Digital media, by its very nature, is dynamic and constantly evolving. The rigidity introduced by unionization is particularly onerous when traditional news models are in a desperate fight for survival.
Journalism in the digital age thrives on innovation, agility and disruption. Start-ups from Politico to Vox to Bleacher Report flourish through models that would be alien to a newsroom editor of the past. Indeed, much of the to-be-unionized Gawker’s success can be traced to its ability to adjust on-the-fly to create and blend new models.
At the same time, hindered by archaic restrictions like those imposed by unionization, hundreds of legacy media institutions have been forced to shut their doors in the last ten years. Many of those left standing have gone through bankruptcy to reorganize, and most have had to slash jobs in the face of competition from other new media sources.
This isn’t strictly about 21st century media, either — traditionally union-dominated industries are increasingly having a difficult time staying alive operating within the confines of a unionized workforce. The crony auto company bailouts initiated by both President Bush and President Obama did nothing to reform the union problem afflicting the car-making industry in America. In the restructuring of the auto industry that took place, the United Auto Workers union maintained a favored status, with the debts owed to the union and its workers taking a much higher priority than other debtors of the companies.
President Obama used the government’s bailout abilities to push General Motors and Chrysler through a government-managed bankruptcy process, where federal bureaucrats made sure that unions would come out the other side of the bankruptcy just as powerful as always. James Sherk, a labor economist at the Heritage Foundation, wrote that “the UAW fared fare [sic] better than unions typically do in bankruptcy cases.”
Workers themselves are beginning to recognize that unions are becoming outdated in the modern American economy. In Chattanooga, Tenn. last year, the UAW lost a huge vote in an attempt to unionize a Volkswagen auto plant. The UAW continued agitating for a union and actually succeeded in forming a “minority union” that represented a small percentage of the auto plant’s workforce. A group of workers then formed what’s been described as an “anti-union union” in competition with the UAW minority union, because workers were so adamant that the UAW’s power at the plant remain small.
Membership in unions has fallen by almost half over the last 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 20 percent of the workforce to 11% of the workforce. Even that is driven strongly by government labor unions; only 6.6 percent of the private-sector labor force is unionized. This is the environment in which unions are fighting to stay relevant, and it’s why big, symbolic moves like the one being undertaken by Gawker, one of the biggest players in the new media industry, are something that might have outsize effects.
Unions tend to become entrenched interests — this might mean senior staff become threatened by these new, faster, younger, hungrier journalists. As the Washington Post found, its own unionized workforce struggles to recruit from some of the new journalists who join the paper. Not surprising in an age of technology that provides a multitude of real-time performance measurements, prioritizing merit over seniority.
The Daily Beast, an online outfit which in the last few years went through a merger and then divorce with traditional print Newsweek, had to maneuver the labor issues involved with that complex evolution. In the online era, when the Web runs 24/7 and nontraditional hours are a requirement, not an exception, Daily Beast management had to fight to keep its journalists salaried, rather than as hourly employees. It won that fight, and its continued success will require similar flexibility.
Unions may have made sense in a pre-television, pre-online era in which print deadlines meant traditional hours and workplaces. The challenge that new media has given to traditional journalism means that unions are still fighting those same battles in a media landscape that has moved past them.
Kevin Glass is director of policy and outreach at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
