Editorial Staff of The New Yorker Unionizes with The NewsGuild of New York

For Immediate Release | June 6, 2018
Media Inquiries: Josh Austin, josh@nyguild.org | 484-269-0158

New York -- Editorial employees of The New Yorker magazine announced today that an overwhelming majority of its staff have joined the NewsGuild of New York, TNG-CWA Local 31003, the union that represents nearly 3,000 media professionals in the Greater New York City area. The NewsGuild of New York is part of the larger 24,000-member NewsGuild-CWA, which represents news professionals across the U.S. and Canada.

With nearly 90% of the workplace signed on to the effort, the editorial staff requested voluntary recognition of the NewsGuild of New York as their collective bargaining representative in a letter presented to Editor David Remnick on Wednesday morning.

To ensure that the vitality of the 94-year-old publication, New Yorker employees believe that unionizing for job protection, equitable salaries, improved benefits and, among other items, diversity in the workplace will help rectify workplace inequities and preserve the legacy of the publication. The New Yorker’s announcement comes on the heels of a number of successful organizing drives in newsrooms across the country  -- from The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic and Mic.com -- that are demanding a collective voice in their workplace.

“The New Yorker Union is the product of a brilliant editorial staff that has grown tired of inequities in our workplace,” said Natalie Meade, Fact Checker. “This organizing drive has been incredibly empowering, and we look forward to negotiating improvements in our working conditions that will allow us to maintain long, fulfilling careers at The New Yorker for years to come.”

“What sustains The New Yorker is the love and care its staff puts into the work,” said Sharan Shetty, Associate Editor. “Protecting that culture is a shared responsibility, and we believe that a union helps us fulfill it, especially in an increasingly precarious industry. We’re excited to make our workplace stronger, and to secure the future of this magazine.”

“The NewsGuild is so proud to welcome the editorial staff of The New Yorker to our union and to the larger labor movement,” said Grant Glickson, President of The NewsGuild of New York. “The New Yorker is such an important journalistic institution, and union representation is a natural extension of the values articulated in the pages of the magazine.”

More information can be found at newyorkerunion.com.  

The full mission statement of The New Yorker Union is below:

The New Yorker has been a vital force in American journalism for nearly a century. Its deeply reported, clear-eyed, and principled stories have consistently challenged power and exposed injustices and abuses in communities of all kinds. We, the editorial staff of The New Yorker, are very proud of this legacy, and of our place in it. But we believe that the publication must work harder for its employees; the values that run through its pages should be better reflected in the culture of its workplace.

Behind each New Yorker story is a team of editors, fact checkers, designers, producers, and social-media strategists. We bolster and polish the reporting and writing of our authors, and do the granular work of upholding the magazine’s high standards.Yet we lack job security and, for the most part, receive no overtime pay. Salaries often vary significantly among people who hold the same position, and we have seen a steady stream of our colleagues leave for jobs that provide more tenable wages. Some of us have worked for years as subcontracted employees, without health insurance and other basic benefits, though we do the same jobs as the staff members who sit beside us. There is no clear system for tying compensation to performance, no codified method of evaluation, and few opportunities for career development.

To protect our rights as workers and to safeguard the future of our publication, we have chosen to form a union with the NewsGuild of New York, which represents our peers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Nation, and a rapidly growing number of newly unionized publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The New Republic.

Our decision to unionize comes at a moment when much of what defines The New Yorker—its atmosphere of deliberation and care and its devotion to factual accuracy, careful prose, and expert design—is vulnerable to competing priorities from our corporate parent, Condé Nast. We are determined to do everything we can to protect the health and the integrity of our publication from staff cuts and reorganizations handed down by corporate management without warning or transparency.

We believe that the ability to collectively bargain is the best way to secure a fairer workplace and to insure that the people who produce The New Yorker can continue to do so far into the future. We are asking Condé Nast to recognize our union, and we look forward to beginning an amicable collective-bargaining process.

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About the NewsGuild of New York
The NewsGuild, Local 31003 of the Communications Workers of America is a labor union representing nearly 3,000 media professionals and other employees at New York area news organizations, including The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, The Nation, The New Republic and The Daily Beast.