For Immediate Release: July 2, 2024
Media Contacts: Asya Pikovsky, communications@nyguild.org, 207-522-2442
BOSTON – Members of the Reviewed Union will go on strike from now until Monday, July 8 in protest of bad-faith bargaining and low wage offers from their parent company, Gannett Co. Inc., ahead of one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year. The Reviewed Union is one of more than 50 Gannett bargaining units represented by The NewsGuild-CWA.
The walkout comes after Gannett began demanding workers at the site begin taking on additional work responsibilities without a corresponding increase in pay. Gannett has also refused to provide a meaningful wage offer at the bargaining table, providing only a status-quo wage offer that doesn’t even include all of the job titles included in the unit, and would represent a pay cut when combined with Gannett’s other proposals, including its proposal to increase health insurance costs for employees at Reviewed.
“Gannett has consistently come to the table with bad-faith offers, while forcing all of us to do the job of multiple people for the same pay. As of the last month, they want us to do work outside of our job descriptions, with no associated pay increases. We’re fed up. We’re going on strike until Monday to send Gannett a message: Until you pay us what we deserve, it’s no longer business as usual,” said Madison Durham, Senior Staff Writer.
The more than 40 writers, editors, art, community, lab, and operations team members at the Gannett-owned e-commerce and product review outlet voted to unionize with The NewsGuild-CWA in a supermajority vote in March 2023.
Almost immediately, Gannett began a series of union-busting tactics that have continued to this day. Weeks after workers announced their intent to unionize, management revoked overtime pay for hourly employees and laid off several members of the union. In June 2023, members walked off the job after management revoked their transit reimbursement – an illegal disruption of the status quo. Gannett began reimbursing for transit pass expenses almost immediately post-walkout. Last September, workers filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge over Gannett’s unreasonable delay in providing requested information needed for bargaining.
In October of last year, Reviewed staffers staged a walkout during Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days event in protest of management’s failure to schedule bargaining dates and revocation of overtime pay from hourly employees after the announcement of the union last year. Days later, the company finally set bargaining dates, after failing to hold a single bargaining session in the seven months after staffers first unionized.
But two weeks after that, the company began deploying consumer reviews seemingly written by AI, with halting, repetitive language and “authors” which didn’t seem to exist. The posts received widespread condemnation and, after employees launched a reply-all action, the posts were updated with disclaimer language. Subsequent investigations seemed to confirm the union’s suspicions regarding Gannett’s contractor’s use of AI.
Gannett newsrooms around the country have been raising the pressure on the company after years of bad-faith bargaining, cuts, and unacceptable wage offers. Two weeks ago, unionized journalists at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and Canandaigua Daily Messenger unanimously ratified an agreement on a two-year collective bargaining contract after two and a half years of bargaining and a 19-day strike that forced Gannett to scramble to find coverage for a series of major news events, including the total solar eclipse in the Rochester area.
At the beginning of March, journalists at the Gannett-owned Desert Sun launched an open-ended strike to protest the company’s bad-faith bargaining, and reached an agreement on their first contract.
###