Employees of satirical news site The Onion have unionized. Onion Inc. includes publications The A.V. Club, The Onion, ClickHole, and The Takeout.
From the A.V. Club:
We’ve decided to form a union here at Onion Inc., home of The A.V. Club and our sister sites The Onion and ClickHole. First, all of The A.V. Club staff, along with an overwhelming majority of Onion Inc. staff, signed cards signaling our desire to unionize. Then we made it official on Monday when we requested formal recognition from our management. The new union comprises all of the creative staffs at Onion Inc.: The A.V. Club, The Onion, ClickHole, The Takeout, Onion Labs, and Onion Inc.’s video and art departments.
We’re joining an impressive cadre of other digital media shops that have unionized in the past few years under The Writers Guild Of America, East. The WGAE represents our corporate sister sites of the Gizmodo Media Group (which includes Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, and all of the other sites you see in the navigation bar at the top of this page), in addition to media outlets including Vice, Vox, HuffPost, Salon, MTV News, Thrillist, and ThinkProgress. It also represents writing staff at comedy shows like Saturday Night Live, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.
Pasted below is the letter we sent to Onion Inc. and Univision management. (Univision Communications Inc. acquired a minority stake in Onion Inc. in 2016.) Please note that tweets and comments structured “Not a joke: The Onion has unionized,” “Area satire site unionizes,” and so on have been done to death.
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Will L.I. be next?
And we don’t even have to ask if this is from the Onion….
President Trump has congratulated The Onion for taking such a brave step forward.
Maybe, someday, a politician or two will correlate the dramatic halt in middle class wages to the war on unions by the Republicans. As CEO pay skyrocketed, the workers wages and benefits were reduced. Without the leverage of a union, the workers were left to compete as individuals. Collective bargaining is an essential part of equitable wages. Without it, the boss is always right.
Sadly, too many unionized workers only see their union dues and fail to see the need for their union.
When unions were strong the white collar workers also benefitted as they generally got what the union workers got. Now they are screwed too.
Wake up workers of America. Don won’t help you, you need to help yourselves!
Yeh….that’s not good.
“(which includes Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, and all of the other sites you see in the navigation bar at the top of this page), in addition to media outlets including Vice, Vox, HuffPost, Salon, MTV News, Thrillist, and ThinkProgress. It also represents writing staff at comedy shows like Saturday Night Live, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.”
Impressive cadre of far left progressive group thinking.