In recent months, we’ve been wondering how journalists are getting any work done, what with all the Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs they’ve been singing. In January, workers at Slate and Vox Media—which includes the websites Curbed, Eater, Recode, SB Nation, the Verge, and, yes, Vox—announced they were joining the Writers Guild of America East. In addition, WGA East has now “organized shops including Vice Media, the Huffington Post, Gizmodo Media Group, The Root, Thrillist, Salon, and others,” reports the New York Post.
There’s also a renewed effort underway to bolster the union at the Washington Post, which had been dwindling thanks to several rounds of buyouts of the paper’s veteran employees. The Post’s union drive has been covered as dispassionately as one might expect from other media outlets. “Jeff Bezos Screws Over Workers at Amazon. Now He Wants to Do the Same at the Washington Post,” reads one HuffPost headline.
While HuffPo’s overt pro-union politics aren’t surprising, this logrolling in support of the Post’s union raises a fair question: Since unions are one of the most dominant forces in Democratic party politics, at what point do newspaper unions compromise claims to objectivity? Should readers of the Post’s reporting on labor policy under a Republican administration be blamed for wondering if it’s being filtered through a pro-union sensibility?
While the Post these days trumpets its new motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” darkness can in fact be a useful protection in the voting booth. Vox employees accused the owners of Vox Media of “union busting,” because their employer insisted on a vote to recognize the union, citing the fact that they had heard from employees who were fearful of speaking out publicly against unionizing.
Indeed, unions oppose secret-ballot workplace elections precisely because they make it harder to pressure workers into voting yes. (The Vox union gleefully noted that Vox founder Ezra Klein, when he was a blogger at the Washington Post, had endorsed so-called “card check” elections, which are the very opposite of a secret ballot.) Unions, meanwhile, cloak many of their own internal practices in darkness. Members wishing to find out how their union leaders are spending their dues quickly discover it’s hopeless. Union financial disclosure laws are intentionally weak. Journalists who join a union are throwing their lot in with one of the biggest opponents to transparency in American life.
We don’t doubt that the workers at many of these media enterprises have grievances. It’s not rainbows and lollipops churning out digital content around the clock for low pay and even lower prestige. But organized labor has a knack for accelerating the demise of sclerotic, unprofitable industries. The scribes may hope the union will protect their jobs and score raises, but recent history isn’t on their side. After the WGA East organized Gothamist and DNAInfo last year, the two websites’ billionaire owner Joe Ricketts promptly shut them down rather than deal with the headaches.
