The staff at Truthout make a little history by becoming the first-ever workers at an online-only news outlet to join together in a union:
On the night of Thursday, August 27, a small group gathered in a quiet, bare room in Pacific Palisades, California, preparing to sign off on the future of an organization and spur the momentum of a movement. Though the meeting was brief and inconspicuous, it made history.
A member of Truthout’s board of directors had signed a recognition statement, granting Truthout employees membership in The Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America. Earlier that evening, Truthout had held the country’s first “virtual card check,” verifying union cards with faxed PDFs of each employee’s signature. We became the first online-only news site to successfully unionize…
“It points to what is possible going forward,” said Truthout’s union representative, Shannon Duffy, of the St. Louis Newspaper Guild. “For other employee groups who are scattered around the country, this is a model that organizers may want to attempt. It made the Internet a tool of organization that it had never been before.”
As more and more of the news business moves online, it’s critical that the voices of workers in that industry not get lost in the shuffle. It’s encouraging to see e-journalists out there leading the charge to make sure that doesn’t happen.