Unions are Becoming Ubiquitous in Digital Media
"Gawker Media made history five years ago for being the first digital news company to ratify a union contract, kicking off a wave of labor organizing at digital outlets that has yet to recede. On Thursday, staffers at the online publishing platform Medium announced their intention to unionize... ‘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,’ said Hamilton Nolan, a labor reporter for the magazine In These Times who worked at the now-shuttered Gawker and helped spearhead the union efforts there. ‘One thing that the unions have done across the industry in many, many places is just to put in place a basic safety net for workers.’"
“Medium Workers Union represents about 140 employees across departments including editorial, engineering, design and product. A strong majority of those staffers have signed union cards with Communications Workers of America, one of the country's largest unions, which represents staffers from tech companies like Alphabet (GOOGL) and Glitch and those at media companies like The New York Times (NYT) and the Wall Street Journal.”
“While many newsrooms have unionized to address immediate concerns such as mass layoffs, lack of pay equity or glaring diversity issues, Medium staffers said they are not seeking to bargain over specific changes, for now. ‘Medium is a workplace like any other where there are imperfections, there are issues, but we're not running to this initiative with a set of established demands,’ said Kelli María Korducki, senior editor at Forge, a Medium publication. ‘The priority is really to unite the workforce.’ Lyra Naeseth, a principal software engineer at Medium, told CNN Business that the union's goal is ‘to alleviate the systemic imbalance in our workplace.’ Management gets ‘to stand together, talk about values, talk about our plans,’ Naeseth said. ‘Our union is an opportunity for the broader workforce to do the same.’"
CNN Business, February 11, 2021: “Unions are becoming ubiquitous in digital media. Medium is the latest,” by Kerry Flynn
Medium Workers Union Website
Photo Source: (2021). [Screen Capture]. Medium Workers Union. https://mediumworkersunion.org/