Report from the Hill Rag
In Brief – More than two hundred of the over three hundred tech workers at the Washington Post, including engineers, product designers, and data analysts, have voted to establish the Washington Post Tech Guild (WPTG). The final vote was announced as 171 for and 38 against. Washington Post tech workers first announced the formation of their union in April, and the effort earned support from staff at the Washington Baltimore News Guild, The NewsGuild-CWA and the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. The Post Tech Guild, which claims they were subjected to aggressive union-busting tactics by Post management, said that they would immediately turn to planning to begin bargaining with the company for its first collective bargaining agreement.
Context – Reports of tech worker union organizing often generate media cheerleading. It’s important to first filter out efforts to organize non-professionals in tech companies. For example, Apple retail store employees, ongoing labor strife at Amazon fulfilment centers, Tesla “image analysts” who label video to help train the car company’s AI vision systems, and game-testers in game development studios, especially within Microsoft’s video game business. In each case, the workers were generally earning around $20 per hour, not highly skilled and highly paid programmers or developers. In fact, the largest union in the US of true digital professionals is in the media industry, at the New York Times Company. There, approximately 600 technology workers, including programmers, developers and data analysts, voted to create the New York Times Tech Guild in 2022. The content side the New York Times Company was already fully unionized, like at the Washington Post. Nevertheless, New York Times management, which was traditionally very pro-union on labor policy issues, strongly opposed the effort. And even after the union prevailed in its vote, the sides spent two years negotiating a collective bargaining agreement that was not settled until after a one-week strike around Election Day 2024.