I didn’t think it was as important for us to be unionized, but over time, I came around. I’ve been writing about labor stuff for a long time, and every time I’d write something about unions, somebody would say in the comments, “Why don’t you have a union?” I’d always felt like it was more important for blue-collar workers at, say, McDonald’s or Walmart to have a union. You’re bringing a new way of looking at unions to the attention of vast numbers of people there’s more to the story than just the size of the company. Also, the media loves to write about the media. In that sense it was more “newsy” than a standard union campaign, even though it might have less real-world impact than a bigger campaign that doesn’t have that novelty. Our union had a novelty factor, in that we were one of the first places of our kind to do it. How do you explain that? Is it just because they’re somehow not as sexy as Gawker unionizing?
Later, I talked with some union people who said yeah, we’d just organized like 2,000 sanitation workers on that same day, and nobody would write a story about it. There were New York Times stories about it, and we’d unionized, like, a hundred and some employees. Maybe the biggest value of our union will be symbolic. There was an enormous amount of coverage of this story.
California Teachers Association - a case that Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan writes, “could do more to damage public employee unions than anything the Republican party has done in decades.” Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Friedrichs vs. As Bloomberg News reported about a year ago, “ Unions are poised for a comeback.” Young people around the country are joining in. The new labor movement recalls the rhetoric of Norma Rae rather than The Sopranos: gaining fair employee conditions from a management class obsessed solely with maximizing shareholder value, no matter the cost. Interest in unions is beginning to heat up in other industries as well, arguably in response to rising income inequality, stagnant wages and decreased job security, even as the economy bounces back from the 2008 recession. Just yesterday, the Huffington Post’s management ‘recognized’ its employees’ union. The decision attracted the notice of major press outlets across the country, and in subsequent months, several high-profile digital media companies followed Gawker’s lead and voted to organize - including Salon, VICE and the Guardian U.S.
Gawker Media moved to unionize this past June, voting 80–27 to join the Writers Guild of America East (WGAE).
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