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from the look-for-the-union-label-hyperlink dept.
The Center for American Progress reports:
[June 3], Gawker Media voted to unionize. The stats: 107 of 118 eligible voters cast secret ballots, 80 of whom voted yes. Just like that, Gawker will become the first digital-only news site to have a union.
Hamilton Nolan, longtime Gawker writer, announced the editorial staff's decision to organize in a post this April. At the time, he listed the motivations: that a union "is the only real mechanism that exists to represent the interest of employees in a company," the continued pursuit of fair and transparent salaries, and the ability to make a little history as the first major site of its kind to organize.
According to Gawker senior writer Sam Biddle, who answered questions via email, "The origin of the union isn't any particular grievance or crisis---we all love our jobs and our workplace, and thought a union would be a great way to protect that, and make it even better for ourselves and our colleagues." In his five years at Gawker, he doesn't recall unionizing being "seriously discussed."
"I think it happened now because the [Writers Guild of America, East] was so enthusiastic about making this happen for us," he said. "It didn't take very much convincing, to be honest."
[...] Both [WGA and Gawker] insist the desire to form a union arose from a desire for the perks of organization, not as a reaction to poor working conditions.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:06AM
Sure it was, Gawker. And by the way, how's that unpaid internship class action lawsuit [yahoo.com] going for you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:29AM
in that particular newsroom. Purely concidentally, management decided to shift most reporting and editorial positions overseas...
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:32AM
Here's a story submission for next year: so how did that work out for you?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:44AM
I bet the work continuity of employees will go up. and I'm 100% behind them; unions ARE the only thing that speaks for the employees. the last 20 or even 30 years have been BRUTAL to worker's rights. we have lost, maybe half of what we won in our grandfather's day (or, maybe that's your great grandfather, at this point). my GF had weekends off, time and a half for overtime, double time and even triple time for holidays. they had to allow you time to eat every 4 hours (or maybe it was 5; it was a long time ago when my GF was telling me these stories). he had a pension, he had a big retirement party and he worked there for over 35 years.
that (all of that) does not exist anymore, for the most part. I will be lucky to work for the same place for even 2 years. I won't be offered fulltime with benefits, I'll get contract 'you pay your own sick and vacation and HC costs, buddy!' work or nothing at all. no one offers us 50+ guys f/t jobs anymore, at least not in the bay area and not for engineering work. I won't have a pension, I won't have even social security (many think this is going to be the case) and I get NO overtime, no matter what. and yes, I'm still asked to work extra hours; that is when I'm actually employed (which I'm not, right now).
you folks who think you are too good for unions and who are 'supermen, young and strong' - you'll have a fucking RUDE AWAKENING in no time flat. it will hit you like a ton of bricks and you will say 'gee, I was doing SO WELL until I was 35!'. but there won't be a union to speak up for you and some new young hotshot will have taken your place.
you will work till you die and you'll be glad to flip burgers and ask 'you want fries with that?'.
because, WE SOFTWARE PEOPLE ARE STRONG! WE DON'T NEED UNIONS! THOSE ARE ONLY FOR THE WEAKLINGS. NOT ME! I DON'T WANT TO BE HELD BACK BY SOME SLACKER. I'M A SUPER CODER!
think about that in a decade or two.
but also think about what could stop the imbalance of power that the US employers all seem to have right now. they are unified against you. why won't you unify against them?
the old bad unions had issues but you think things are BETTER now that companies can abuse you and dispose of you and get away scot-free like they do now?
even a bad union is better than nothing. I'd rather see 2 big guys (who are not me) fight than one big guy mopping up the floor with ME.
think about it. do you truly believe there is a balance of power in today's workplace?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Tuesday June 23 2015, @05:00AM
Are you in a union? I was for years. It was one of the bad old ones and you have no idea how bad it was. (corrupt)
I identify with the concept of unions but why don't we check in a year from now and see what the reality is in this case.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pogostix on Tuesday June 23 2015, @05:05AM
And I hear your pain. Enforced minimum employment standards perhaps. My experience with the reality of unions is they don't work.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:53AM
MY fuckin Union works. Mostly it keeps ass kissing bastard like you out of the ranks. You will get promoted to admin with talk like that, and you will end up working 60-80 hour weeks thinking you are furthering your career! GO! Lundberg! We are all pulling for you! Yes, someday you will be able to live off your investments, like the people you work for now! Until, they decide to retroactively reduce your retirement, like is happening in Greece. You see, a contract is a contract, until it is made to a pathetic bastard standing all by himself with no union to back him up. That would be you, then.
Why have so many of GenX bought the corporate anti-union propaganda? It's like they would vote for mother-xxxxxing Republicans that would pass laws to f*** them over, knowing full well that they would. Frogs with a scorpion on their back, I say.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @02:47PM
Why do you think we were 'latchkey kids'? It's because it took two parents working their asses off to keep even basic food on the table. (My own hate of Hamburger Helper, Meatloaf, and Lima beans means even seeing it on a table for human consumption is outright rage-inducing)
I grew up in an era - the 70's and 80's - where the Steel Workers Union had made so many demands on US Steel at a time when the entire economy was in the shitter and the entire steel industry was fighting off Japanese Steel imports. US Steel couldn't accede to Union demands and the Steel Workers Union refused to concede *anything* that they were forced to close the Fairless Hills Steel Mill and 20,000 jobs were lost overnight because of the flat out ignorance and refusal of the Unions to cooperate with management to keep the mills alive when the Japanese were kicking their collective bargaining asses. Over and over we've watched unions in labor negotiations at the bargaining table with outrageous demands and committing employment suicide as a result - and in the case of Detroit, turn *an entire city* into an apocalyptic wasteland.
I've been a member of two unions and what it taught me was that if you're a total rock star and B.A.M.F. in what you do, it doesn't matter because no matter how good you are the slug in the next cube gets the same pay. Unions discourage real success and personal achievement by punishing them for doing so - you can't make more for being the best at something - so it encourages de facto lazy behavior. Union leaders complain about corporate 'fat cats' while living in multimillion dollar mansions and flying in private jets while they take money from members pockets. In the end, the workers get screwed by the Union but eat, live, breath, and mouth the propaganda so much that they are blind to the hypocrisy of it all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:41PM
And you think that *without* the union you'd be getting paid better for better performance? What fantasy world do you live in?
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:24PM
>> MY fuckin Union works. Mostly it keeps ass kissing bastard like you out of the ranks.
Are there no problems in your union... no *serious* problems? Or are you just blind to them with all your ra-ra-ra?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:37PM
And when that happens, they'll get to be on the receiving end of all the victim-blaming. "You wouldn't be poor if you had learned to save your money", "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!", etc. And nothing will change for the better.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday June 23 2015, @10:34AM
Between Unionization, GamerGate and the Hulk Hogan trial there's a good chance that PoS media company is going to burn. Even if Gawker is successful in defending their "right" to host Hulk Hogan's sex tape their liability insurance will be shot. What friggn double standard garbage they denounce the "fappening" and Jennifer Lawrence nudes, which is good, but then they're 100% against removing Hulk Hogan's sex tape even after they were already ordered by a judge to do so.
It's a miserable blog conglomerate (Jezebel, io9, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Gizmodo, Kotaku) that just needs to go away, especially Jezebel and Kotaku. We don't need crap sites pushing clickbait gossip trash agendas than actual news.
The majority of real news sites isn't even real news anymore it's almost exclusively opinion pieces filled out with assumptions and poorly checked or misrepresented facts.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @11:29AM
especially ... Kotaku
I like the idea of a containment board for insane-tier SJWs and hope they don't go under for that reason. Could you imagine a horde of Kotaku refugees descending on us? Ugh.
The other sites in their pig sty serve a similar purpose for clickbait. Now you can look at a clickbait headline, look at the gawker in the url, and skip it. But smear that kind of outlook across the entire internet and its going to lower the quality of life for everyone.
I agree with your evaluation of the quality of their "product" but thats precisely why I hope they stay over there in their own dedicated cesspool instead of corrupting everything.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Tuesday June 23 2015, @02:32PM
I feel so short sighted now. I hadn't considered what it'd be like when Kotaku goes off like a stink bomb and they spread over the rest of the net... Well there's always Polygon ^_^
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:06PM
goes off like a stink bomb and they spread over the rest of the net
Feels like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiningen_Versus_the_Ants [wikipedia.org]
An 80 year old story turned into a Charleston Heston movie about 60 years ago, not bad.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Aichon on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:29PM
Yeah, my first thought when I heard the news: <sarcasm>couldn't have happened to a nicer company.</sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:55PM
Hey, io9 is decent sci-fi reporting (not great but okay), and Jalopnik is pretty good (Foxtrot Alpha and Flight Club in particular, but even their regular car bloggers are good).
Gizmodo, however, is worthless, and Kotaku is 30% tolerable reporting buried under 70% crap.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:00AM
io9, bwahaha. This is kind of offtopic, but in a strange cosmic coincidence I'm watching a The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode where Sarah Connor comes across a trans woman. So Sarah Connor chews her out for being “fake” and some bullshit about wombs (q.v. her blowing up on Miles Dyson in T2). Hey, I watch it for the explosions! (And Summer Glau playing a kick-ass female terminator!)
So, I go off to the internet(s) to see what other folks think about Sarah Connor's obvious transphobia and cisgynocentricism. (Is that a word? I know I've encountered the phenomenon before.) Lo and behold, it's an io9 article that completely misses Connor's obvious transphobia and what that might mean in the larger themes of consciousness and being that the series explores (or pretends to at least).
(If anyone cares to duckduckgo it, I'll somewhat cede the article's points about the importance of having a even minor character who's a trans woman and who's not also some psychopath or man-in-a-dress-looking-for-gay-sex, but eh, that's not the point!)
SJWs… what can you do? They keep missing the target!
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday June 24 2015, @10:40AM
You can never make some people happy.
It's like women in video games. I love games that have leading women Xenosaga, Final Fantasy (Several of them), Parasite Eve. In one breath someone will tell you there aren't any good female characters in games, in the next they'll tell you women are too sexualized. It's like, so which is it, do they not exist or do you just have a problem with them. When developers do put women in their games they get criticized for it, when they leave them out they get criticized for it BY THE SAME PEOPLE (I'm looking at you Jonathan McIntosh & Anita Sarkeesian)
And the f-ed up media plays it all up for clicks and agendas.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday June 24 2015, @11:16AM
Yep. Along those lines, my pet peeve is that if you point out strong female characters like Xena, Janeway, or Carter (Stargate) from shows that pass the Bechdel test with flying colors, then you'll get someone telling you that they don't count because they were written by people who can't write women.
It's like they simply cannot understand what a strong woman is. All though, it's probably a difficult concept in the SJW mind, which starts from a philosophy that victimhood is honorable and virtuous (as far as I can tell).
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Wednesday June 24 2015, @12:05PM
^ this ^
The issue with "Strong women" is that's something different to everyone. In the interest of equality, I wish we could get away from that. No one seems to ever question whether a male character is written well. Male characters can be anything, drunks, abusers, victims, bullies, worriers, assassins, peasants, muscles, scrawny, ugly, beat up, hansom. You can literally litter a battle field with male bodies and no one will bat an eyelash.
Throw in a women and people lose their minds. This is the reason there aren't *more* females or why the default is almost always male, no one cares about men, but you cannot make people happy when it comes to women. You're always going to offend someone, which is why the female characters that do exists almost always have specific traits. Abnormally strong (for a women, often stronger than male counterparts who are larger), badass doesn't care what people think of them, often a loaner, almost no character flaws, really shallow back story, almost always "beautiful" (no scars, bruises, scratches, thin, hour glass shape).
I don't really like the term "SJW" because it's kind of a catch all for "I don't like that person", but I do see some very specific behaviours from people that seem to always be offended by something, even when they get EXACTLY what they were bitching about. Again, Jonathan McIntosh and Antia Sarkeesian come to mind. In the new Dishonored 2 game you have a choice to play as either a man or women and Anita bitched that the developers should have made it a female ONLY lead. What's worse is they have the funding to make what they want themselves, to demonstrate what should be done, but would rather complain about other people not doing it right.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday June 23 2015, @02:20PM
Gawker Becomes First Online Media Outlet to Unionize
So they're claiming to be electrically neutral?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:31AM
If that means effectively neurally inactive, then yes.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:12PM
Gawker will become the first digital-only news site to have a union
Really? There's a long history of dying magazines doing "online only" for a year or two on their way out. Surely some of them must have been unionized? Surely can't be the first?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:40AM
What's interesting to me is that despite the unsubstantiated harassment claims, #Gamergate was in support of this (as fully as one can gauge any amorphous group). #Gamergate helped and helped spread the word and ran mass email campaigns. Something to do about promoting ethics in game journalism.