Slate Staffers Vote to Unionize in Defiance of Stiff Management Resistance
Slate editorial employees voted to unionize on Tuesday after a 10-month battle that saw staffers at the magazine run up against stiff resistance from management.
Voters from the proposed 54-person bargaining unit voted to organize by a margin of 45-7. Their union, Writers Guild of America-East, also represents Gizmodo Media Group, which includes Splinter, and several other digital outlets.
In a statement announcing the news Tuesday evening, the Slate Organizing Committee said it was “thrilled by the result of today’s vote proud to join the growing number of digital media workers invested in collective action.”
Slate’s bargaining unit includes all but six senior newsroom employees, as well as about a half-dozen podcast staffers who produce shows like the Political Gabfest and The Gist. It does not count staffers at Panoply, a podcast network that is part of the Slate Group but produces programs for other media outlets, such as Vox.
The online vote Tuesday marked a compromise between the Slate organizing committee and management, which had for months insisted on a paper-ballot election administered by the National Labor Relations Board. A joint statement from the two sides to Splinter said only that they had “worked together to determine how to assess editorial employees’ desire to join a union.” A source with knowledge of the organizing effort declined to elaborate much further.
The unionization has been a long time coming. Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg declined to voluntarily recognize WGAE in a March 2017 letter to staff obtained by Splinter. He warned of a future “filled with bureaucracy and procedure”—a world that “is just not Slate-y.” He continued: “All a union can guarantee is a conversation about a contract.”
Slate staffers, a group known for their contrarianism, will now begin testing that thesis in earnest.