At Vox Media, Workers Win a Voice Beyond Wages

Vox Media Union organizing flyer

The collective bargaining agreement between Vox Media and the Writers Guild of America East puts an end to one of the more contentious unionization battles that have gone on in US digital media. Vox management took longer to voluntarily recognize the union than other outlets, and workers recently staged a walk-out to protest Vox’s intransigence in bargaining.

The agreement that was finally ratified on June 14 covers 350 workers; Vox Media publishes Eater, Curbed, Polygon, SB Nation, The Verge and Recode, in addition to its namesake political news and explainer site, Vox.

In the end, it broke the workers’ way. Economically, the union won generous wage floors, 16 weeks of paid parental leave, 10 days of bereavement leave, other leave provisions, cost-of-living increases and, perhaps most interestingly, a provision granting workers a cut of the profits on media they produce that Vox later sells to third parties. There are even new protections against the laying off of staffers in order to replace them with freelance labor—a common and well-grounded fear in the media industry.

Vox Media staffers walked off the job in protest of the slow pace of contract negotiations.

The news of the wage agreement already has a resonance; workers at BuzzFeed plan to stage a walk-out similar to the one Vox workers held.

But it’s really the non-economic provisions the WGAE won that should grab the eye. The union said in a statement:

The company commits that 40 percent of the people in the applicant pool to make it beyond the phone interview stage in the hiring process will be from underrepresented backgrounds. This number will be 50 percent for the highest-paid, most senior positions…. Each vertical will maintain and regularly distribute a policy to promote diverse sourcing and freelancing bylines.

This is a continuation of the kind of initiative that made headlines last summer when the union reached a contract with the Intercept that contained similar diversity provisions, and is a refreshingly blunt declaration that wage justice in the workplace must go hand-in-hand with racial and gender diversification. It’s striking that there is language mandating diversity in freelancing hiring, something that doesn’t directly benefit the union.

The statement such efforts make is this: It’s not just important that media companies have diverse hiring for the sake of putting more money in the pockets of more people, but because the mainstream journalism world is often and rightly regarded as being too white, too male and too Ivy League, news consumers would be better off if outlets had voices from more backgrounds—and voluntary commitments to more inclusive hiring don’t work.

This is part of a broader trend we’re seeing with WGAE’s drive for unionization in digital media, in which the union is looking beyond bread-and-butter provisions in its wage agreements and attempting to give workers more control over the editorial voice.

“Branded content” brings you tips on buying a car from a car-buying website.

For example, the WGAE statement about the Vox deal notes that the new agreement includes “enhanced editorial standards that state that editorial content creators will never be forced to work on anything over which advertisers have approval.”

Read that again if you must. For those of us who have worked in the world of ink and butcher-paper news writing, this might seem foreign—reporters of a former generation understood that there was supposed to be a wall between the editorial and business sides of a newspaper, and that the work of one side should have no bearing on the work of the other.

But digital media doesn’t earn money from subscriptions or newsstand sales, and when it comes to advertising, the money increasingly comes from what’s known as “branded content”—advertising that’s meant to look and feel like the outlet’s own reporting. Yes, such content is usually identified somehow, but such ads earn a premium because in the fast-clicking world of digital media, the lines for readers get blurry—and from a media workers’ perspective, that traditional wall between editorial and business work gets blurrier as well, or even eliminated.

Hamilton Nolan, who led the WGAE organizing drive at the now-defunct Gawker empire, told FAIR that protections for editorial freedom, as well as payments for reuse, are key concerns for the union. In the first Gawker contract, he said:

We had editorial freedom protection, in the form of a clause that says only the head of editorial can make editorial decisions—a contractual guarantee that no editorial decisions can be made by the business side or others.

Getting writers paid for reuse of our work has also been a big issue at a lot of places—I think it’s been approached differently in several different contracts—but in the big picture, it’s great that these contracts are helping the people who do the work capture more of the money being made off of our work.

The provisions in the Vox contract don’t fix everything—for example, someone can still be exploited while receiving payments on resold content, and the contract doesn’t end the dubious practice of branded content—but it is some concrete recognition for Vox Media workers that they are journalists, and not public relations hustlers. Inclusive hiring is testament to a type of unionism that doesn’t simply protect incumbents, but seeks to open the shop up to a broader range of workers, and gives the staff a progressive say in how management makes new hires. On the whole, that’s a far more holistic vision for a union than simply just winning wage increases and severance packages. The recent deal at Vox indicates that the WGAE wants to win power throughout the media organizations they’re organizing, not just winning more dollars in paychecks.

Featured image: Vox Media collective bargaining committee.