Truth Comes Out: Online News Workers Join Union
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.
LabourStart: TNG-CWA on the Future of Journalism
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At today’s LabourStart conference, the writers and union communicators present got to hear from The Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America (TNG-CWA) about how the union is responding to the crisis facing the newspaper industry.
In the lunchtime discussion, TNG-CWA President Bernie Lunzer said the union is working hard to try and protect the journalism that’s critical to America and reach out to blogs and new media. Lunzer said the challenge is not to try and preserve print as a format in and of itself, but to preserve the craft of journalism and the vital function of newspapers in society:
If you don’t have an informed society, you can’t have a functioning democracy.
Court Backs Workers in E-Mail Case, Slams Union Buster
It took nine years, but workers at the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard newspaper finally won the right to use company e-mail to discuss union business.
In a sharply worded ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision that the company did not break federal labor laws in 2000, when management disciplined the president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA (TNG-CWA) Local 37194 for using the company’s e-mail system to send three e-mail messages about Guild business. The messages were sent after work hours.
The Guild filed unfair labor practice charges, but the then Bush-dominated NLRB sided with the company regarding two of the e-mail messages. The appeals court overturned that ruling.
CWA Delegates Back Employee Free Choice, Health Care and Unity
More than 2,500 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) delivered a message to their representatives on Capitol Hill yesterday: It’s time to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and real health care reform.
The Capitol Hill lobby day is part of the union’s four-day convention in Washington, D.C., which ends today. Delegates will go back to the Capitol today to join thousands of workers in the mass rally in support of health care reform.
