ThinkProgress Staffers Unionize With Writers Guild
Source: Huffington Post
"We believe having a union will help us protect and elevate the good conditions we currently enjoy in our workplace, both for ourselves and for all who come after us," staffers said.
The editorial staff of the progressive news site ThinkProgress has joined the Writers Guild of America, East, making it the latest in a string of Web-based publications to unionize.
The union said in a statement late Wednesday that management at the site had chosen to voluntarily recognize the employees' decision, allowing them to forgo a secret-ballot election.
“We support and recognize the move by ThinkProgress staffers to join the Writers Guild of America, East," Judd Legum, the site's editor, said in a statement distributed by the union. "Our shared goal is to make ThinkProgress' exceptional team of writers and editors even stronger and continue our cutting-edge work covering the issues that matter most.”
Support for the move was unanimous among staffers, according to the union. A highly trafficked site for left-leaning political news, ThinkProgress is part of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a political arm of the Center for American Progress think tank.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/think-progress-union_560351c7e4b08820d91ba093?fnp3z0k9
The news website ThinkProgress said on Wednesday that it would unionize with the Writers Guild of America, East, becoming the latest digital media outlet to organize in recent months seeking better pay and working conditions.
“For us it just seemed like a really natural step both for ThinkProgress and, especially as we looked around, for the digital journalism industry in general,” said Alice Ollstein, 27, a politics reporter at the site. The site’s management has recognized the move, said its editor in chief, Judd Legum.
ThinkProgress will join the websites Gawker, Vice and Salon, which have recently organized with the Writers Guild of America, East, and the American arm of the British newspaper The Guardian, which has done so with the NewsGuild-CWA, as part of an expanding movement.
“We’re a very young newsroom, most in 20s or early 30s, and a lot of us started our careers in the depth of the recession,” Ms. Ollstein said. “We were hearing this message constantly: ‘You’re lucky to have anything.’ We learned you can’t eat exposure, you can’t pay your rent with experience, as valuable as those things are.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/business/media/thinkprogress-to-unionize-with-writers-guild-of-america.html?_r=0
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Go Unions!!
I know my dad would be happy and smiling too
