Last updated on June 21, 2022
Labor unions in the United States are experiencing a resurgence, including in the media industry. A recent Poynter Institute report said that employees at the nation’s news outlets have initiated more than 200 unionization drives in the past decade, with more than 90% succeeding.
The trend included universal success both in 2020 and 2021. All 37 pushes for collective bargaining agreements in newsrooms launched last year succeeded, as had at least 29 begun during the first six months of 2021.
“I think it comes down to, at this point, a matter of a few things,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, a media industry union with more than 32,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. “A lot of it is having a voice [and] trying to build a sense of job security in an industry that has very little job security [and] building up better benefits, whether they’re retirement benefits or healthcare or maternity or paternity leave.”
Labor organizing dates to the era before the nation’s founding. In 1768, the first known example of collective bargaining in the territory that later became the United States occurred when a group of tailors objected to a reduction in their wages.
By 1794 the first American labor union formed when the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers was set up in Philadelphia.
During the industrial revolution, the rise in factory employment drove an explosion in unionization, including in the news business. The International Typographical Union, a collective bargaining organization for newspaper printers, was established in 1852.
By 1934, according to a Columbia Journalism Review report, 70 American newspapers were unionized.
The American Newspaper Guild, now known as The NewsGuild-CWA, was formed in 1933, and, by 1937, the Supreme Court rejected publishers’ arguments that collective bargaining drives in their companies could be punished.
Consolidation in the news industry is a significant factor driving the current unionization trend. “Rapidly, we’ve seen a massive amount of consolidation,” Schleuss explained. “Hedge funds in the industry are destroying jobs. Journalists are unionizing to try and stop the massive amount of job losses and ultimately save their own publications.” A July 2021 Pew Research Center report found that newsrooms shed more than half of their journalist jobs since 2008.
Persistent deterioration in working conditions for journalists also drives growing interest in newsroom unionization. Pay and benefits have stagnated. For example, in Denver, where the average starting salary for a journalist is more than $51,000 per year, according to Glassdoor, some employers fail to compensate even highly experienced journalists at that level. O
Other equity, diversity, and inclusion issues, such as fair access to promotions, opportunities to learn from colleagues at conferences, and recruiting of talent from underrepresented demographic communities also proliferate in the industry.
“I think a lot of people perceive media as this white-collar profession, but the reality of working in a lot of media jobs was really low salaries, bad benefits, very little job stability,” labor reporter Hamilton Nolan of In These Times told CNN in February 2021.
A 2018 Columbia Journalism Review study showed that racial and ethnic minorities make up only 17% of print and online newsroom staff around the nation, despite accounting for about 40% of the U.S. population.
The American Press Institute emphasized that addressing this demographic imbalance is not enough to solve media companies’ failure to pay adequate attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities.
“[W]hile discussion in this space often focuses on newsroom hiring, attention should also go to what happens next – the empowerment, advancement, and retention of diverse employees,” according to an API web page.
Denver labor lawyer and University of Denver Sturm College of Law adjunct professor Joseph M. Goldhammer said the problem of “terrible working conditions” is not limited to large media companies and commonly afflicts small, online publications. “This has been going on in your industry for the past few years,” he said. As a result, Goldhammer continued, journalists “want to get more power in the workplace to confront” employers.
The widespread decline in media companies’ workplace environments driving may have reinforced, for many journalists, a commitment to apply the profession’s obligation to fight against the opaque and unjust exercise of authority or influence by those in control of government and the economy to their own place of employment.
“Journalism, the cliches tell us, gives voice to those that don’t have one; speak truth to power; comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” wrote journalist Josh Sternberg in a February 2021 Substack post.
Schleuss explained that journalists, who are often inherently skeptical toward persons and entities that hold any sort of power, often see collective bargaining as the only way to bring that professional ethic into practice at work. “These institutions that employ journalists also need to be held to account,” he said.
Journalists frequently may hold a concern among journalists that their bosses are simply unaware of or unconcerned with the duties of the profession and the importance of a consistent direction and focus. That includes a desire to prevent advertising sales from interfering with the editorial missions of outlets, Nicole Cohen, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology, told Poynter.
Media employers, though, are not often receptive. “[W]hen newsrooms, often made up of low- and mid-level staffers, try to organize to make their workplaces better, management views it as an attack on the company,” Sternberg continued. “It’s one of those cases that highlight how convoluted our thinking is, but also how our industry is built on a foundation of lies.”
“A lot of times what we’ll see on the front end of a union effort are these meetings that the top editor and maybe the publisher or the CEO will have with the workers and try to convince them not to unionize. They’ll say things like ‘we’re a family’ and ‘we’ll do better’ and ‘we’ve got an open-door policy here and you can tell us anything,’” Schleuss said. “At the end of the day, a lot of journalists are pretty smart people. They want to see not only confirmation that they’re being heard and that their issues are being addressed but they also want to see it in writing in the form of a collective bargaining agreement.”
The National Labor Relations Act provides the legal foundation for union drives. Section 7 of the law provides that “[e]mployees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
Goldhammer, who has nearly a half-century of experience in labor law, said that NLRA strongly favors unionization. “It’s designed to help unions,” he said. “In section 1 of the Act, the legislative declaration by Congress is basically that individual workers lack power, [which is] disruptive to the workforce. It produces low wages and bad conditions unless they can amplify their power by engaging in concerted or group activities.”
Goldhammer said that Congress originally codified this policy in the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, but that law “really didn’t have any teeth in it or an enforcement mechanism.” The NLRA, enacted in 1935, “established employer unfair labor practices, which occur if employers interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of their rights under section 7,” he continued. “If an employee suffers that kind of interference, restraint, or coercion, he or she can file an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board.”
The right to collectively bargain is not limited to employees of large media companies. Schleuss said that even journalists in a tiny newsroom can form or join a union. “If you’ve got at least one colleague who is not management, you have the ability to form a union,” he said.
Recent successful union drives have occurred at Bustle Digital Group, BuzzFeed News, Gawker, Hearst Magazines, HuffPost, Medium, Salon, Slate, The New Yorker, The Ringer, Vice, Vox News, Wirecutter, and Wired, as well as at numerous local news outlets. In 2018, Schleuss said, about 5,800 workers at 129 media companies joined The NewsGuild-CWA.
“What has driven the unionization in [the] media is just the power of the idea itself,” Nolan said in his comments to CNN. “People that work in this industry recognize that this is clearly a good idea: to unionize and to be able to bargain collectively against your employers.”
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