“We're not afraid to push back, because journalists have been beaten up in this country.” An Interview with Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild-CWA.

by Sean Collins

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership and the news was not so good. Union membership continues to decline across most industries and across both the public and private sectors. But one industry in particular bucked that trend - publishing. Led by the furious pace of organizing set by the News Guild-CWA, there was a 144% increase in union representation in publishing. The NewsGuild now believes it represents more than 50% of the industry, through a combination of new organizing and industry consolidation. It was a rare instance where the data actually aligned with the noise on social media–it didn’t just seem like every week the NewsGuild announced another newsroom going public with their organizing drive or another newsroom winning a historic first contract. It really was scoring win after win.

Over the past four years, the NewsGuild has organized approximately 6,400 workers into the union and now represents journalists, media workers, and other employees at nearly 400 news outlets, nonprofit organizations, and more. This week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) sent ballots to approximately 650 tech workers at the New York Times after months trying to bust their organizing effort. If a majority of those workers vote yes, the NewsGuild of New York will represent nearly 2,000 workers at the New York Times. At the same time, recent organizing victories continued to increase the Guild’s density and bargaining leverage at the major newspaper chains, Gannett, Tribune Publishing, and MediaNewsGroup. 

We spoke with Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA and a member of the organizing committee that successfully unionized the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that resisted unionization for nearly 140 years. We last spoke with Jon in 2020, but with all the recent developments, we wanted to sit down and do a deeper dive into what’s driving this impressive organizing pace.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Strikewave (SW): Thanks for thanks for taking the time to talk with me this evening. To start things off, 2021 was the fourth year of dramatic organizing gains for the NewsGuild - nearly 6,400 new union members in newsrooms and non-profit organizations nationwide in the last four years. How many newsrooms does the NewsGuild represent now and what is driving all of this new organizing?

Jon Schleuss (JS): Last year was a record year of organizing for the Guild because there were 2,128 workers joining from 42 different workplaces, which was like…I can't even tell you when, looking at Guild history, we organized that many workers. It's definitely not in the last twenty years. Across the U.S. and Canada, there are about 400 bargaining units now, 348 in the United States. We represent 208 newsrooms now. Some of them include other departments. For instance, we just won our first contract in December with the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which includes some circulation and advertising folks. If you look at the breakdown in terms of total newsrooms organizing, it's 94 since 2018 with 26 organized last year alone. That includes Politico and The Atlantic. I think the year started out with about seven people in Loveland, Colorado, just a small newspaper outside of Denver. 

And I think the issues are still the same. You benefit in journalism because a lot of people are on Twitter, right? There's this nice correlation of journalists on Twitter talking about their stories but then when they're talking about unionizing, they get on Twitter and they talk about it. And then people who are not a union are like, “Huh? Well, if the Atlantic just did it, maybe we could do it. If Politico just did it, we could do it!” It creates this wave. Journalists also talk with each other. When we move to a new newsroom, you talk with them and then you realize, “Oh my God, these issues - we haven't gotten a raise here, the cell phone reimbursement is bad, or, in general, the company has no direction or they’re asking you to work and pressuring you to work unpaid overtime - these issues are so bad!” But then you start talking about them and you're like, “Can we deal with them? Yes, we can form a union and we can collectively bargain over these issues!” 

We're also seeing an interesting trend since we last spoke is more pay equity as an issue, pushing for contract language that requires that the company at least interview a certain number of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. Nice correlation on our end of holding our employers accountable by saying, “Here is the demographic data for our newsroom. Here's the demographic data for the community that our newsroom covers.” They are way out of balance. So you'll see things like in Los Angeles, working with management, they were able to advocate for a new journalist to cover Asian-American issues in Los Angeles. Also in places like the New Yorker or New York Magazine, getting strong language that prevents the worker from being forced into signing a nondisclosure agreement if they're the recipient of unwanted, illegal harassment. There’s a nice argument on that front about how not being able to talk about a harasser in the workplace is a health and safety issue. It’s similar to not being able to communicate that there's a broken machine in the factory. So we've won really amazing first agreements and then the organizing just continues at a rapid, wild pace.

SW: On top of huge new organizing gains, the NewsGuild also secured important first contracts in the newly organized newsrooms and workplaces. These first contract campaigns are instrumental in creating a solid foundation for the future in the workplace. How many of these 6,400 new union members are working under these new contracts? What are the some important gains they’ve secured in these new contracts?

JS: The reality is that it's really hard. Some of the groups have been bargaining for a long time because companies have no legal obligation to reach a first contract so they do barely any negotiating. They send these high-paid attorneys [to drag out the process]. For instance, one of the nonprofit groups that organized in 2020, the ACLU affiliate in Kansas, their executive director immediately hired Ogletree Deacon to bargain the contract. These lawyers are being paid more in one hour than some of these workers are making in a week. It was so absurd. We ended up getting a first agreement there, which was really great but challenging. We won a first agreement at the Daily Hampshire Gazette. They're the only publication in that chain, Newspapers of New England, that's unionized so there's like a leverage issue there. They ended up hiring the same lawyer that works for Gannett, who also refuses to engage with the common sense proposals. We'll throw tentative agreements that have been agreed at the Arizona Republic on the table at the Austin American-Statesman, all owned by the same company. A bargaining committee member in Austin, Katie, said, “It was like steam came out of his ears.” He just refused to agree to language that had been agreed by the same company in a different place. They just don't care. They really just want to fight. They really want to burn people out, which is frankly so embarrassing that you would want to do that to journalists who are trying to tell stories in our communities. To fight them…it's like a crime against democracy, right? You don't really care about this thing that we have in this country if you're going to fight those folks. So that's been tricky. 

The folks at Condé Nast–New Yorker, Ars Technica and Pitchfork–had been bargaining for about two and a half years before they secured their first agreement last summer. They did a series of escalations. That’s the key! You can't just ramp up to a strike. You have to actually set up the pieces along the way and you have to do a lot of education and make sure that people are aware of what's going on. You do packed bargaining sessions, which have been frankly way easier to do on Zoom. You wear your T-shirt on a particular day, you wear a button on a particular day, then you’re presenting at bargaining regarding the issue affecting you. At the New Yorker, one of the final escalations was massive amounts of community support. With subscribers saying that they were supporting the workers in a large petition. They had this great website that had a photo of all every member and why they were ready to go on strike. We were really close there, like really close. The Guild has not had a strike in a long time, but we were really close there and then they won a contract that lifted the minimum pay up and  guaranteed a general wage increase for each year of the contract. Instituting a forty hour workweek was something that took forever to bargain on. The company initially refused to acknowledge that there should be a forty hour workweek

Or take a group like Wirecutter [owned by the New York Times] who had been bargaining for more than two years as well. The company there was just offering a one percent wage increase for each year of the contract. Then they did a five day strike over Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend, which is really essential for their bottom line. We said, “don't click.” It was very effective. Right after that, the company came back and offered a better general wage increase. They came off of their limit, but they were really doing it to union bust the New York Times tech workers where ballots just went out today for their union election. 

SW: To my mind, the Wirecutter strike and the New York Times Tech Guild organizing drive represent a pivot with the NewsGuild and demonstrate a fresh willingness of the Guild to bring this increased militancy from these newly organized shops to the doorstep of the Guild’s legacy shops. It represents a serious tone shift and we see how NYT management has responded but how are other employers responding to this at your legacy shops? How are these conglomerates reacting to this resurgence of the Guild?

JS: I think poorly. It's like any organization, any company. Fundamentally where a lot of these executives’ heads are is greed. We see this at Starbucks or REI this week. They don't want workers to have a voice. They use this anti-union language to say that it's a third party. No, it's the workers, but they really don't want to have to give up anything. They don't want workers to have equal footing at the bargaining table or in any of the work that they do. They want to be able to decide what to do on every single level. I think what's particularly interesting about the New York Times tech workers is that they have a lot of power. These are the software developers, project managers, the designers who really are the people who are envisioning the future of media. These people are coming up with iPhone apps and they're coming up with virtual reality systems. They're thinking about better augmenting the software language to fit the website, to make it deliver things faster or take billions of rows of data of COVID case counts and formulate it in a way that can be presented online. So they're like the true innovators and they're also the people who are responsible for the distribution of that content. So the companies are terrified that they'd get a voice because how dare they get a voice and be able to improve their wages, benefits and working conditions and make their workplace more equitable for their colleagues?

The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times have been long anti-union publications. Especially in Chicago, the Sun-Times was unionized for a while and the Tribune was not. One of the ways that previous owners of the Tribune handled that is whenever the folks at the Sun-Times got a raise, they just gave another raise to the Tribune people. So they were benefiting from unionization if they weren't unionized themselves. But across the board, we represent almost every single newsroom at Tribune. Last year it was purchased by Alden Global Capital, which is a vulture hedge fund that owns the Denver Post or the San Jose Mercury News. San Jose Mercury News, there's a ton of potential stories to cover in Silicon Valley but these newsrooms have been decimated by this hedge fund. Losing about 75% of their journalists over a decade, way faster than like the typical industry decline that does exist, which is at 50%. But cuts by 75% are a new, awful devil. These hedge funds really don't care about journalism. 

But there is like an animated interest and there is new, exciting interest. At the Tribune, all of the folks are bargaining collectively at the table and they're doing actions collectively. Last week, one of the things that they were doing was doing a work-to-rule action where they wouldn't work past forty hours a week because with the buyouts and the losses of their colleagues, there's more work that is falling on people's shoulders. It's not like we're doing more with less. They're not even doing more. They're just doing less because they can't actually do it. And it's asking people to step up and do it to cover the losses because the company isn't really concerned about investing. 

At Gannett, where we represent about 45 different newsrooms, there's a large caucus of all the different folks across those newsrooms. Some of them have contracts that are decades old and some of them are fighting for first contracts and some of them are only a few weeks old. 

You've got a new interest in organizing. There were about 130 journalists in Southern California at the Southern California News Group, which is owned Alden Global Capital. After they won their election, [Alden] filed an appeal and refused to bargain until the appeal was sorted out, which came back with one line from the National Labor Relations Board saying, “We deny your appeal.”

Back to Gannett, there’s seven journalists trying to organize the Kent Record-Courier in Ohio. They're voting to basically join a larger unit that already exists there. But the company sent three different attorneys to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) virtual hearing to fight seven workers trying to form a union and they're still waiting on a decision from the Board. So it's really screwed up. But the thing that's happening is there's all these connections. So people are either [direct messaging] each other on Twitter or they're meeting on Slack or they're meeting on WhatsApp.

SW: Several Gannett legacy and newly organized shops in Upstate New York, the Hudson Valley, and New Jersey announced they are bargaining at the same table. As you pointed out, these company-oriented caucuses include legacy newsrooms, like the Utica Observer-Dispatch and the Rochester Democrat-and-Chronicle, and newly organized newsrooms like the Poughkeepsie Journal. How did this come to fruition? Is this a concession from management?

JS: Yes, they're bargaining together. I think that is in part there's a benefit, because management can then potentially not spend as much time and money since I don't know how many millions of dollars Gannet spends on union busting lawyers every year. So it's a benefit for them and I think there's a clarifying language so that they can benefit from having the same grievance procedure in every newsroom. But the reality is that if we, as the members of the Guild, want to bargain jointly, we don't actually need management to okay that. We can just show up at every table and give them the same proposals and then coordinate among each other. In some places they're doing that. You don't actually need the agreement from management to do that. I think it's better for them to do that because they're going to save money and get to a deal potentially faster, but you can also just show up at every table with the same proposals and bring whoever you want on your organizing committee. If you want to bring someone from [the Bergen Record] to the Asbury Park [Press] negotiations, you could do that.

SW: As we see more and more consolidation and mergers in the industry, is the NewsGuild’s more localized approach to bargaining changing and, if so, how are locals responding to this? Is the Guild moving away from individual newsroom-by-newsroom approach to bargaining and shifting instead to more regional negotiations like with Gannett?

JS: It’s got to be based on what workers actually want. I can't provide an edict to them to tell them to do a particular thing. But we do know what works and what doesn't work. So it's really dependent on what the workers want to do. In some cases, they'll want to do that kind of collaboration. In other cases, maybe they feel like they should go it alone. At the end of the day, you join a union because you build up your leverage and power by being together. Whether you work for a non-profit organization and join the Guild or your media organization joins as one of 45 different units in the Guild, you're joining it for that leverage and bringing everyone together. I don't know if I've got a specific strategy. I think my goal and dream is that we organize every media worker in North America and we help those journalists because we've seen in the last decade losing 50% of the industry has devastating consequences for our democracy. We can push back and we can fight on that when we're one united voice. So that's been my goal. If you organize every single media worker in the country, you can help protect journalists. You can help protect their colleagues. You can raise the standard for everyone.

SW: Switching gears away from the organizing and bargaining front, when we spoke last time, we talked about the effects of the pandemic on newsrooms across the country. There were thousands of layoffs and furloughs and a reduction in publishing frequency. What's happened since? Has there been any recovery

JS: I think for the most part, for our members and for folks who have unionized with us recently, we argue for the status quo after you win your union certification. You can't do layoffs, that you've got to bargain a whole agreement collectively before you can even get there. That's been key to point that out to employers throughout this process. So we did have some layoffs in the beginning. We had furloughs. A lot of people were furloughed at all different sizes of newsrooms, but they came back. Right now, things are pretty good and our membership has stayed pretty steady. It's grown, we haven't had huge losses. But the industry at large has lost, there have been thousands of jobs lost in the news industry. It's not as bad for unionized journalists. One of the things that was surprising to me with the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics [union membership] data that just came out was the total number of unionized workers by industry and there was one industry that had one hundred and forty percent growth year over year, and that was publishing, which is inclusive of all the things that we're doing. But then if you flip it another way and you look at the actual declines in total, people employed from 2020 to 2021 publishing was second to last, losing about 8.5% of its workforce. Second only to miners. We're losing a ton of people and a ton of jobs in this industry, but the rate of unionization is at a record level.

SW: I saw that through a combination of new organizing with consolidation and mergers, the NewsGuild has reached majority density in the industry. It sounds like the Guild has been successful in dulling the edges of unionized newsrooms but what about in non-unionized ones? Has there been a bottom yet to these cuts or is it still accelerating there?

JS: Not totally sure. Over the pandemic, we've lost a ton of people in the industry at large. So I don't know if there's been a bottom yet with this current wave. We just haven't seen the same kind of lockdown mentality, so restaurants are still open, events are still mostly happening, so that's kept coverage up and advertising up. But it's definitely still been a real issue. We're all kind of holding our breath for the next one. One of the things that we've been advocating for very aggressively is the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which was included in Build Back Better, which is now just kind of sitting there. But [Senator] Joe Manchin is a co-sponsor on it and so is [Senator] Kirsten Sinema on this piece of legislation. It was a job tax credit for journalists, which is great.

The U.S. underfunds journalism. We don't pay and we don't invest anything like Canada or the United Kingdom does. Any real advanced democracy really spends a lot of money from a government level actually investing in journalism, seeing it as a public good to inform people in a democracy. We don't at all. But the Local Journalism Sustainability Act would provide up to $25,000 a year in a tax credit for every local journalist you employ up to 1,500. That's a huge amount of potential support. I'm optimistic that that actually could get passed this year to really boost the journalists that we have currently. But I could see it as being a place to grow because if you're a smaller, medium sized news organization, you could look at those credits and be like, “Well, we could get $25,000 for every person that we bring in the door - let's let's bring back that reporter that position that we let go.”

SW: The “Local Journalism Sustainability Act” is part of the Guild’s Save the News campaign, the union’s first real public foray into political/legislative advocacy. What’s been the progress and accomplished thus far since the campaign was launched and what’s next for the campaign? Does it have a life and possibilities of its own outside of the Build Back Better legislative package?

JS: I think it does have bipartisan appeal because when you lose local journalism, you lose the community's voice and the ability to cover those issues. Cable news and the largest newsrooms don't cover rural America. They just don't, they don't have the capacity, so they don't know that community. So then you lose that voice of the community. So I'm still optimistic, it was included in “Build Back Better.” We're still pushing for it. Joe Manchin was a co-sponsor on the actual legislation and on the House side, it was bipartisan in nature, with a lot of Republicans signing on. So I'm still optimistic. You've also got a couple of states that have introduced it. In Wisconsin, they introduced the portion that was for local advertising. This is a state legislature that has a majority of Republicans. But it was a tax credit basically for local businesses that were small to get a credit for advertising in local media. So that's going through Wisconsin right now. You've also got in New York pretty much a carbon copy of the Local Journalism Sustainability Act going through that state legislature. So, there's a couple of efforts there to make it local, which was sort of surprising to me. I remain positive about it. 

One of the things that we secured when we launched the Save the News campaign was expanding the Paycheck Protection Program. That was like our big push initially. Small publishers had access to it to save jobs, to actually keep people on payroll, and keep them reporting in their streets. We successfully lobbied and this was during the Trump administration at the end of 2020, we were successfully able to advocate for an expansion of the Paycheck Protection Program so that larger companies that have a lot of local newsrooms could get up to a certain level of relief from the Paycheck Protection Program to keep people on the job. Gannett, in particular, received more than $15 million of forgivable grants to keep people on the job. That was extremely successful.  Philadelphia Inquirer got roughly $10 million, Seattle Times got more than $10 million. We were able to really save a ton of jobs through that effort. So I'm still optimistic about the Local Journalism Sustainability Act because it does have bipartisan support. 

SW: Late last year, Alden Global Capital–the second largest newspaper chain after Gannett which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun–made a bid to absorb Lee Enterprises. That seems to be stalled. What’s the latest with Alden’s attempts to gobble up even more newsrooms?

JS: Lee Enterprises owns a lot of midsize to smaller newsrooms, probably the largest of which is we represent the workers at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That is the newsroom that Joseph Pulitzer came out of, so it's sort of an iconic grounding organization in our industry and our craft. Late last year, Alden made an offer that was considered quite low. The stock value is way higher and they offered like a third of where the stock is right now to try to buy it. They also try to put members on the Board of Lee. Lee refused them, said that they didn't follow proper protocol on that front and Alden actually sued. So that that lawsuit is making its way through the court system. It is kind of stalled out there. But we've seen this before. Alden basically looked at Tribune as a place that they could acquire because Tribune had no debt, which was very rare for something in this industry, largely because of the sale of the Los Angeles Times to Patrick Soon-Shiong. So that sale basically allowed Tribune to wipe out all of its debt, getting a half billion dollars.

It's really dangerous because Alden is just…I don't know what it is. Their fascination with newsrooms. Like there’s some secret plot to basically try to eliminate local news. I don't know if that's what it is, but it's a weird fascination because they took money out of their company, MediaNewsGroup, and invested it in places like Payless Shoes, which they ultimately ran into bankruptcy because they couldn't even operate the thing. Then they just walk away, wash their hands, and thousands of people across the country are now without a job. Same with Fred's pharmacy. It's just a terrible, terrible, villainous hedge fund that really is out to destroy local news.

SW: What’s motivating this refusal by Lee Enterprises against Alden’s takeover bid? Is it just that the price isn’t right?

JS: Well, you know, there's what's publicly reported and what they can and can't say. With Tribune, you already had Alden on the board by the time. They were already sort of controlled. And those people on the board had nothing to do with journalism. They were just hungry Wall Street people. I think with Lee, you have people who legitimately care about local news and are trying to do as best they can. Lee made a bad bet right before the last financial collapse in 2007-2008 and ended up taking a lot of debt. So they've been kind of struggling with that since then. But I do think that they legitimately care and do consider Alden a threat. But so do our workers. The folks in St. Louis are joined by the folks at the Omaha World Herald and the Buffalo News, which Warren Buffett sold to Lee last year. That's about a dozen different unionized newsrooms who again, like the others, come together as a caucus so that they can be active and ready at a moment's notice. They pushed back pretty aggressively on social media, got state and federal legislators involved to push back as well, and really made a show of it. 

SW: Finally, what’s in store for 2022? Obviously there’s the New York Times Tech Guild vote that’ll be happening this month and next. What are some particular flashpoints that our readers should keep their eyes peeled for? 

JS: First, a win at the New York Times but then organizing even more. You know, last year was 2,128 workers joining the NewsGuild. That's just an insane number and I want to see something like that again. I want us to eventually organize and represent every single media worker in North America, because then we can actually have true power and really protect our democracy. This is a small tangent but last October, we unveiled a new logo for the NewsGuild and brought back a symbol that was in the original American Newspaper Guild in the 1930s. It’s this never-blinking eye. I don't know what the creators of the original logo thought it meant. Maybe it was a sort of holy reference to like an all-seeing power, but for us, I really see it as our ability to hold power to account. Journalists, media workers and frankly any union activists always have to be the unblinking eye watching over our democracy and making sure that we root out corruption and we hold power to account. So I think, more unionization is key and more contract wins. We had a slew of them really in the last three months:  Sports Illustrated, New York Magazine, VTDigger (a nonprofit news organization that is the largest newsroom in Vermont), the Daily Hampshire Gazette, to name a few. There were just a lot of really amazing contracts and they were hard fought. You actually have to escalate actions to put pressure on the companies. Journalists are smart. We go to the bargaining table, we have smart ideas, we have intelligent proposals. We provide a very fact-based point of view.

That does not win companies over. You have to couple that with showing them you mean business. In some cases, that means leading up to and executing a large scale work stoppage. Now we've seen that we have the ability to do that. Places like New Yorker, Ars Technica, Pitchfork, and at Wirecutter. I think employers are aware that we're not afraid to push back because journalists have been beaten up in this country. Workers in general have been beaten up in this country now for far too long. And we have tools and we have power. We had this saying when we were organizing at the Los Angeles Times that we would say to inspire each other. The saying was, “we have more power than we know,” and we do. We have to use it, you have to actually use that power and build on it because we have even more power than we think that we might have. So I see us closing a lot more contracts. And I also see us raising the bar and I see us organizing record numbers. And that's because workers are fed up and they want to have a say.

Sean Collins is Secretary-Treasurer of the Strikewave Board. He is a staffer with SEIU Local 200United in Upstate New York and also serves as the Treasurer for the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Editor’s Note: Sean Collins and a majority of Strikewave Editors are members of the NewsGuild-CWA.

Admin