Truth Comes Out: Online News Workers Join Union

by James Parks, Sep 9, 2009

In today’s global society, people in different cities and continents meet, talk and take actions on the Internet. Now, the employees of Truthout.org have shown how you can join a union all online without ever seeing each other or coming face to face with an organizer.

Late last month, the Truthout workers became the first online-only news service to join a union. The new members of The Newspaper Guild-CWA (TNG-CWA) joined using the country’s first “virtual card check.” Union cards were verified with faxed PDFs of each employee’s signature.

With tools like Skype and Google Documents, organizers spent long hours on conference calls, “meeting” at night, each in their own living rooms, kitchens or backyards.

Virtual majority verification (also called “card check”) holds great promise for helping workers join unions in far-flung, online operations in which workers are not located in one central location.

The Truthout recruitment, meetings and strategy sessions all were done online, TNG President Bernie Lunzer says. Members of the Truthout organizing committee were based in New York, Sacramento, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Truthout’s union representative, Shannon Duffy of the St. Louis Newspaper Guild, adds:

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.

Internet-based employees share many of the same concerns that prompted workers to start joining unions in the first place, Lunzer said, although these concerns may look different in a virtual context. He pointed to the issue of work hours as an example of a workplace problem that takes a new form for online workers.

The myth is there’s this group of young, digital-savvy workers who live all day on the Internet. The truth is, all workers need a life. Online workers are beginning to say, “We need to sort this out. Work is a part of life we enjoy, but it’s not our whole life.” In a way, they’re just like the textile workers in New England who worked long hours every day and didn’t get Saturdays off.

The Truthout workers were determined to join a union, said Sari Gelzer, Truthout’s newly elected unit chair.

Even though the people who were organizing together never met during the process, their belief in Truthout helped them bond and trust one another. The workers really felt this was the right direction, so they decided to take that leap.

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