Vox Media is the latest digital publishing company to agree to bargain with unionized editorial workers.
About 400 creative professionals employed on the company’s online publications will be covered by a collective bargaining agreement to be hammered out with the Writers Guild of America East, the union said Thursday.
The sites include Curbed, Eater, Recode, SB Nation, Racked, Polygon, The Verge and Vox.com.
“The company decision affirms what we have known since the start of our campaign,” wrote the Vox Media Union Organizing Committee. “Across eight verticals, our colleagues overwhelmingly want the benefits and protections that come from union membership.”
Vox said it will be sitting down with union representatives “over the next week to finalize and sign a recognition agreement to voluntarily recognize the Vox Media Union.”
WGA East now has organized shops including Vice Media, the Huffington Post, Gizmodo Media Group, The Root, Thrillist, Salon and others.
But it has not always gone smoothly. WGA East also organized the unprofitable DNA Info and Gothamist. The union vote of those operations prompted its billionaire owner Joe Ricketts to promptly shut the publications based in New York and Chicago rather than negotiate. All the union managed to negotiate in that process was severance pay.
Other shops have been organized by the News Guild of New York, which counts the Daily Beast and all digital US editions of The Guardian among its membership today.
