Ryan Dombal was tired of sacrificing basic benefits for the career of his dream. So he and his peers at Pitchfork, an online music blog known for being a hub for music reviews and news, created one of the first unions within the media conglomerate Condé Nast. But Dombal and his unionized Condé Nast peers at Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and Ars Technica are part of the minority, as most journalists who work at the conglomerate aren’t protected by a union.

To understand why only some of Condé Nast has unionized, it’s important to answer some questions. What goes into creating a union? How are journalists organizing? What are they demanding? Who succeeds and who fails?

 

What goes into a union:

There are two different ways to start a union: the first is through voluntary recognition by the employer, and the second is through petitioning the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Lane Windham, Associate Director of Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, recognizes that most workplaces are hesitant to recognize unions. By giving workers a legally binding platform to argue for better working conditions, unions take money out of the pockets of executives and put it into the hands of lower level employees. Unions also often limit the hours that staff can work. 

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The National Labor Relations Board was created to give employees the ability to get their union recognized even when their employer doesn’t want that to happen. In 1935, in the heat of the Great Depression, the passage of the Wagner Act created the NLRB. With high unemployment rates, unsafe working conditions, and hostility between workers and their bosses , the Wagner Act helped redistribute wealth to working class Americans and stimulate the economy..

The first idea of a journalism union predated the Act. In 1933 columnist Heywood Broun wrote a scathing article about the lack of unions in journalism–“The fact that newspaper editors and owners are genial folk should hardly stand in the way of the organization of a newspaper writers’ union. There should be one.” Broun was a well regarded journalist who worked at multiple major New York publications–including the New York World Telegram where he wrote the column It Seems to Me in which he conceptualized the journalism union. Shortly thereafter Broun would  co-found The NewsGuild of New York, a labor union still active today.

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Marybeth Seitz-Brown is currently a ​​Senior Organizer at The NewsGuild of New York. For Seitz-Brown organizing unions for journalists is a job. Seitz Brown works with journalists in New York and loves her job. She’s watched unions blossom as major outlets like the LA Times and Sports Illustrated ousted bosses with histories of harassment and fought for their rights. But she’s also seen failures of unionizing efforts at outlets like Medium.

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Currently Seitz-Brown has been busier than ever as a revitalized labor movement spreads through the journalism world. “It’s inspiring to see an industry go through a complete transformation that builds on itself—the more media companies organize and then win contracts, the more it inspires the next group to follow suit. There’s so much momentum in the journalism world now and it’s exciting to be a part of.”

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What Seitz-Brown does is help workers become informed about the process of creating a union: “building relationships between workers, finding out the issues affecting people’s working lives, and moving people to take action especially since most bosses fight unionization tooth and nail.”

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The rise of journalism unions represents a larger trend in America. Kalmanovitz’s Windham has documented the ebb and flow of the unionization movement over the long run. Nine years ago the rate of unionization was at a 93-year low; where only 11.3 percent of Americans belonged to a union. Those percentages have stayed relatively constant, but since the process of forming a union is so arduous, usually taking about two years, unionization scholars are hopeful to see statistics rise in the coming years, especially with job satisfaction at an all time low. 4.5 million workers in the United States left their jobs in November 2021 alone and as workers become more dissatisfied, approval of labor unions is up, reaching 68%, the highest it has been in decades.

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Many workplaces are so afraid of unions that they “union bust,” which means they do everything in their power to dissuade employees from voting for a union. In the Union Busting Playbook, a resource for employees, there are eight ways to bust a union: hiring a union-busting consultant, telling employees to wait and see, getting a few employees to campaign against the union, sending threatening letters to employees and their families, holding meetings to sweet-talk or browbeat employees, denying rights through delays and law-breaking, springing last-minute surprises, and making supervisors pressure lower level employees into voting against a union.

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Hae-Lin Choi, Political Director of the Communication Workers of America labor union, represents the first district including the major journalism hub of New York City. In her work with journalism unions she’s noticed a trend that even when journalists sign a contract with their employer, the employer will try to hinder progress by slowing down every part of the process.

“If a [huge publication] would just fire a bunch of people for union, I think that would be totally unacceptable, right? That would not fit the reputation of such a prestigious publication. And so what they do instead is just delay everything to death. So you can't actively accuse them of union busting.”

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Leslie Dickstein, a reporter-researcher at TIME and the TIME Union chair can attest to the unique union busting techniques that she encountered  working at a major media outlet.

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“Nothing comes without a fight and even the most basic proposals—such as giving the union a monthly list of members, which the company has been doing for years, took months and months of back and forth. 

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“We made some progress until December 2020, when management brought in a new labor lawyer. Since then, things have slowed to a crawl or a standstill. Management's strategy is to wear us down.” Dickstein said “They think that if they drag negotiations long enough, we'll agree to anything. But they're wrong. The process is exhausting and tremendously time-consuming, but we'll keep fighting until we get the contract we deserve.”

 

The Condé wave

At Condé Nast everything started in 2018 when staff at The New Yorker began organizing their union, quickly followed by their colleagues at Ars Technica, Pitchfork and WIRED. By 2021all four were officially recognized  through the method of voluntary recognition, since there was an approval rate among employees of 99%. 

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But getting recognized was just the first step in the arduous process to get protected by a contract, especially during a global pandemic. What a contract does is set in place legally binding contracts to provide benefits and baselines for the employees. The Wall Street Journal has had a longstanding union, and union point person John West cited that after the management argued in bad faith with its employees over pandemic support, the union members were able to sidestep management by going to the NLRB. “We settled and Dow Jones had to post notices that they would bargain in good faith with us.”

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The instability of the journalism industry adds to the difficulty of negotiating a contract. Ryan Dombal is the current chair of the Pitchfork Union, but he got there indirectly. “So when we started it, I was the vice chair. And then in 2020, the person who was our chair was laid off and I became chair of the Union.” That summer was spent battling for their first contract and learning legal information about how he and his peers would be protected. “It was actually pretty difficult for me, because there were a lot of lawyerly, legally legalese type of interactions. There is a reason why I didn't go to law school.”

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One of the most important things a union can do is increase pay for the employees. Within the industry there’s a common sentiment that Dombal explains. “I was underpaid for a long time. I started a Pitchfork when I was maybe around my late 20s, 27 or something like that. And at that point, I just didn't really know better. No one was really talking about journalism unions at that time. And I was just like, oh, I guess this is how it is. I bought into that. I'm just lucky that I have a job.”

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But it takes more than luck to be at Dombal’s level, it took years of hard work from getting into the prestigious Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, having prestigious internships, and becoming a skilled writer and editor in order to score his dream job working in music journalism. Given his skills that landed him a career in music journalism, a field that is incredibly competitive, Dombal and his peers deserve to be treated with the respect and prestige they deserve.

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The New Yorker Union has also been open about the benefits of unionization for their employees financially and socially. Along with a new salary floor of $55,000 and promising stable healthcare costs, they also got protection of a work-life balance and a ban on workers signing NDAs that would prevent them from reporting workplace harassment.

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All for one and one for all

As exciting as it was for Pitchfork, the New Yorker, WIRED and Ars Technica workers to achieve unionization, there are more than a dozen Condé Nast publications that don’t have the same protection. 

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One of the outlets within Condé Nast looking to unionize is Bon Appétit, the cooking magazine that started over seventy years ago. Recently, the magazine experienced fame and infamy.  During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, its YouTube Test Kitchen series went viral only to be followed by a massive scandal about racism in the workplace that led to a mass exodus of workers. 

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Writers of color at Bon Appétit reported about how they were mistreated. People of color who were featured on Test Kitchen were not paid while their white counterparts were, and recipes by food writers of different ethnicities were gentrified and republished by white authors. The few people of color who were featured by the magazine felt tokenized.

But one of their YouTube sensations and food writer of color, Christina Chaey, has stayed in the hopes of improving the workplace by unionizing. “I am Asian American and I am a woman and I have spent my career feeling the effects of prejudices that come with those identities.” By becoming the face of Bon Appétit’s efforts to unionize, Chaey hopes to combat the stereotype that Asian women are submissive. 

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According to Chaey, one of the major reasons her fellow Test Kitchen peers of color left was that they were not able to negotiate contracts that gave them the benefits and representation that their white peers had. Even as a Test Kitchen star, Chaey still felt disappointed with her treatment. “At the time, I had probably more leverage than most of my colleagues and even still, I wasn't able to kind of get what we wanted from management, we weren't able to harness the power, we needed to have our demands met.”

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“I learned a lot from that time in my life, because I was trying to negotiate for things with management that either I was on my own, or I was with maybe one or two or three other people. 

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Within Condé Nast, the poor working conditions have led to high turnover rates within publications. Staff writer at Glamour Jenny Singer cites this as one of the reasons unionizing has been so difficult.

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“We would get the signatures of people who are excited to unionize, and then we would announce that they were leaving. Then there would be a new person and you want to give the new person a few days or weeks to settle in before you talk to them about what the situation is like, let them enjoy the job they just worked so hard for.”

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But even with high rates of turnover, organizers have the sentiment that helping their peers is worth it, even if they don’t end up staying to reap the benefits of the union. Dombal knows that his efforts to organize the union will have a ripple effect to change the future of Pitchfork.

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“​​I've been in journalism for almost 20 years, so I'm in the middle of my career, but it is inspiring to me, because a lot of people who work at Pitchfork are younger, like in their 20s. And just the idea that they don't have to deal with a lot of the bullshit that I did is also just one of those, if not the most rewarding thing, in my career, beyond anything I've written there.”

 

Turning Pop Culture Into “Real” News

Pop culture coverage is deemed less valuable than traditional news related content, but pop culture can make waves in the realm of economic and political news. Creating a culture of journalism creates a new industry standard. Watching the culture change was important for Dombal; pop culture related blogs and outlets unionizing was a huge reason why he and his peers chose to pursue the change. He cited Gawker’s push for unionization as the one that inspired his activism. “Unions kind of became back in fashion in the mid 2000s.”

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And along with low rise jeans and bright colors, unions are another facet of mid-2000s fashion coming back in Vogue–pun intended.

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Even at a magazine like Teen Vogue that hasn’t unionized, author Rainsford Stauffer is speaking out through her monthly column “Work In Progress” that is all about workers’ rights. Currently she’s written about how to set boundaries in the workplace, what workplace retaliation looks like, and what recent grads should look for as they search for jobs.

In her article “What Is Retaliation in the Workplace? Here Are Your Rights and What to Know,” Stauffer is open about her support for unions and the necessity to a healthy workplace. “Organizing is central to navigating workplace retaliation and to combating the power dynamics that come with attempting to defend yourself to the people who sign your paychecks.”

In that article she also gives advice on what to do to effectively retaliate in the workplace: contact a union (even if the workplace doesn’t have one), document everything, organize a union, look at rules within the workplace, advocate for the passage of the PRO Act, and seek legal help.

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Solidarity

Journalism is such a competitive field, and the allure of working for a huge journalism outlet makes jobs at outlets like Condé so competitive. But as journalists from outlets big and small unionize, a new spirit of solidarity and collaboration is spreading.

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What has made Chaey so gung-ho about unionizing is to work with her peers to make the workplace better for all. “It's never just about one person or one team's concerns, it is a worker-led democracy, in which decisions are made together with the considerations of the entire body of workers involved. And that is really powerful to me, because I feel that there is no other scenario in which you can have a conversation like that between an employee and an employer.”

Watching certain parts of the Condé Nast empire unionize has inspired more and more journalists to view unions for journalists an expectation not a bonus. Glamour’s Singer said “I think we're really indebted to the many, many media companies that unionized before us. It's significantly easier to unionize when we think unionizing is really normalized in the media.” 

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Change can be as simple as a new profile picture. “Originally the thought of changing my Slack avatar to a pro union symbol, it seemed crazy like how can I rock the boat that hard. And then I realized, it’s so easy for me to do that, knowing that almost every media company has done this. I am just doing what is the industry standard.” said Singer.

The unionized and non unionized workers at Condé Nast have cultivated an environment. “There are hundreds of workers at Condé Nast who need and deserve the same protections and workplace improvements that we have secured.”

At Vogue's Met Gala, Choi worked with multiple politicians to have them wear pro-union buttons to the event. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was honored to wear the pin. “As in the Gilded Age, so too now, workers are organizing in the face of economic inequality… at Condé Nast where writers, editors, videographers are working together with the NewsGuild.”

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The irony that this year’s theme was “Gilded Glamor” while staff at the publication work to form a union guild wasn’t lost on Lander: “This is how we build a G-U-I-L-D Gilded Age.”