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DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize
A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City's leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.
On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.
At 5 p.m., a post went up on the sites from Mr. Ricketts announcing the decision. He praised them for reporting "tens of thousands of stories that have informed, impacted and inspired millions of people." But he added, "DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure."
[...] in the financially daunting era of digital journalism, there has been no tougher nut to crack than making local news profitable, a lesson Mr. Ricketts, who lost money every month of DNAinfo's existence, is just the latest to learn. In New York City, the nation's biggest media market, established organizations such as The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily News have slashed staff or withdrawn from street-level reporting. The Voice stopped publishing its print edition in September.
What about The Daily Planet and Gotham Globe?
Gothamist's NY Writing Staff Votes to Unionize; Owner Shutters All *ist Sites
Deadspin reports:
Joe Ricketts, TD Ameritrade founder, billionaire, and father of Chicago Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts, shut down the local news network of DNAinfo and Gothamist sites today, a week after the writers voted to unionize.
[...] With the sites' articles functionally locked, the reported 115 newly jobless writers now have no clips [to which they can refer potential employers] as they search for work.
Deadspin has scathing comments about Ricketts's explanation for his action.
The Los Angeles Daily News reports:
Angelenos hoping to read the latest local reporting from LAist.com [on November 2] were instead greeted by a letter from the news site's CEO, announcing he had shuttered the parent media company and all of its local news sites.
[...] [Ricketts bought news company DNAinfo in 2010 and, in March 2017, DNAinfo] purchased Gothamist, which ran news sites in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.
[...] Julia Wick, editor-in-chief at LAist, [...] said she and her Los Angeles team supported the New York staff's decision to unionize. Originally, she said, all five Gothamist sites planned to join the union, but the Chicago newsroom dropped out, ending the collective effort.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Tuesday November 07 2017, @05:33AM (4 children)
The union is no more and no less than a group of workers choosing to negotiate as a group to level the playing field. Unless you reject the right to freely assemble, unions are fair enough. If we're going to allow corporations to exist, it's only fair to also support unions.
(Score: 0, Troll) by jmorris on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:08AM (3 children)
Nope. A union in the United States is legally (but not morally) seizing the means of production. If workers want to form a legal entity and have that entity offer to supply labor as a block to their former employer as some sort of outsourced thing, more power to em. Can't see where things improve for the workers, meet the new boss, same as the old and all that but free country and all.
Where I define it as theft is when they use the power of the government to tell the nominal owner of the plant the union is now legally the only entity who can supply labor at that location and the management will accept their terms or else. If any number of "unions" could bid on the contract it would be an improvement but still a theft if the option to say "no your overhead is greater than keeping our own personnel dept and we like the ability to quickly remove defective employees" is legally removed.
It is the force that makes it theft. Where do you get the right to seize someone's property? Working somewhere does NOT confer an ownership right. If I hire you to work in my machine shop we agree on a specified amount of work for a set price. If we continue that relationship for a period of time you do NOT begin to accrue ownership of my property unless we agree to become partners and YOU either directly invest some capital (example cash or contribute some machinery) or some sort of allocation of some of your wages into a share of ownership. If you decide to work elsewhere at some point neither of us owe the other anything. When I pass on the shop is part of my estate, the only way you inherit it is we have developed such a relationship that I'd put that in my will and give it to you instead of next of kin. In exactly the same way that if you kick off I don't get your house just because you were working for me. We are not partners and I'm not your feudal Lord. Working together for our mutual benefit doesn't make us family.
And nothing changes if I hire a thousand people. Because they decide they want it doesn't mean they can morally seize the workplace some fine afternoon and dictate the terms of their future employment. But legally they can do exactly that in many places in this so called "free country." And a total shutdown of all business operations at the afflicted address is the only recourse the black robed tyrants left available.
Typically the location is simply allowed to rot because nobody wants to restart any business there for fear they will be declared somehow tainted by the previous entity and instantly declared a union shop by a judge. It takes years and many burnt offerings to the lawyers to cleanse the taint. Or enough blight in one area that the government moves from "if it moves tax it, if it keeps moving regulate it" to the final "if it stops moving subsidize it" phase and declares the area a "development zone" to lure in new businesses.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Tuesday November 07 2017, @08:30AM
This here balderdash is why America is broken.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday November 07 2017, @09:06AM (1 child)
Got any examples? Because I am not aware of any case where a union has managed to acquire the company they used to work for under anything but amicable conditions. I am unaware, for example, of the UAW owning the Detroit auto makers now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 07 2017, @10:26AM
jmorris is triggered. Best to not respond to him for a period of at least 24 hours. Same for TMB. They have suffered serious trauma, mostly by having completely batshit ideas and having to face the contradiction with reality those ideas entail. But as I say, just help them calm down by not responding. Of course, you probably should mod them down, in the nicest fashion possible, so as to hide their outbursts from the general internets public. Soylentils have to take care of our own, especially when they act up like this.