The staff of the liberal news site Salon.com announced on Thursday that it plans to unionize with the Writers Guild Of America (East), a month after Gawker Media staffers voted to organize in a win for organized labor in digital media.
“We’re especially proud to work for a media organization that has championed progressive values for nearly twenty years,” Salon staff wrote in a press release. “We believe this organizing campaign is a positive and public way for us to put those values into practice, right here at home.”
The release cited the Gawker union drive as an encouraging precedent. The staffers said that a system of collective bargaining would “solidify Salon’s position as a progressive leader, generate tremendous employee goodwill, and transform the workplace environment in positive ways.”
For the moment, Salon’s chief executive Cindy Jeffers was approaching the drive with a light touch.
“Salon has, from its very inception, proudly embraced progressive values and a commitment to our workers and to labor,” Jeffers said in an email to TPM.
“We look forward to discussing this initiative with the editorial staff and learning more about their objectives and goals,” she added.
To recognize the occasion, the splash on the Huffington Post’s media page read simply, “BLOGGERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!“
In June, Gawker’s editorial staff voted to unionize by a margin of 80-27.
The staff is now in the process of drawing up a contract with the guild to negotiate with management before voting on it as a union.
Good for them. I was always sort of dismayed that most newspaper reporters, often belonging to a union of one sort or another, never spent nearly enough time reporting on the greater union movement in this country, at least without some dig attached. So long as they got their representation and their own union rep. they didn’t seem all too concerned about anyone else’s lack of representation in the work force around the country. Less time is spent reporting on labor and unions in any sort of positive light, than almost anything else the media covers…and has been a long ignored thing for some time. We talk a lot now about income inequality, but less discussed are the ways to rectify the problem…which includes imo worker protections that unions have always fought for and succeeded in getting for workers in major industries.
Also the corporate news media on tv has most of its people represented by a union…but fuck if the public gets any attention on ways to form a union in other walks of life. They just don’t cover that much anymore.
Will this make their articles less annoying?
I like Salon. I skip the fluff and always go straight to Digby. Lots of good writers there. Also a lot of silly psychobabble and true confessions of sorts I can do without.
The articles here at TPM on any given day are far more annoying that anything at salon.com. Unless you enjoy big fat steaming piles of Fox news articles and stories from right wing world.
Joan Walsh is my go to writer at Salon.