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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

> if your boss asks you to do something completely stupid, you can either say no, lose that job... Or you roll with it

You can, and should, unionize. And then you can say no and keep your job.

The fact that you see the employment-at-will mentality as legitimate is a failing of professional journalistic ethos IMHO.

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Unionization is not an absolute defense. Modern internet-era newsrooms have been unionizing recently and in at least a couple recent cases the response to unionization has been a large-scale gutting of the newsroom in order to replace them with non-union labor. Gizmodo, Gawker Media and VICE's news wings have all unionized recently as far as I know and that has not stopped ownership from making questionable decisions.

Of course, labor law violations theoretically are punished by regulators, but that doesn't happen quickly - if at all - and in the meanwhile you have no job.

It's true that unionization is not a solution to every problem; but what you describe is not the situation the GP post was describing: Pressure on an individual journalist to bend his/her professional integrity. With a union - at least, an independent and non-corrupt union (which is not a trivial condition by the way) - the employer would need to "go nuclear" in order to have his way; and the individual employee would not have to deal with it alone.

That's true. Problem I think is that with the way organisations work (high turnover with short term contacts) it's hard to get a feel for this. There's also the problem that, once something is online... It's hard to have it disappear, independently of the media's will.

I can only speak for France but unions have been coming up. But they are reeaally recent. (last year maybe). The unions that were already in place were more adapted to paper journalism and didn't take well into account the online issues. So it's starting but the fact it's arriving so late also explains the current situation that people often feel like they have to do everything to keep their job. Because there's nothing that can protect them.

There's a vicious cycle here: Disorganized employees -> easy to artificially fire people and hire newer, less experienced ones, for shorter periods -> more difficult to organize. If the cycle is broken, then the other difficulties might subside somewhat as well.

But of course, it is not at all easy (speaking from the experience both of starting a union and of being fired for speaking up).

At least it's on the way I think ? People are trying to get medias to be more transparent about their prices, especially with freelancers. Nothing much is happening with short term turnover contracts though... The only organised unions are the ones in very little newsroom - usually specialised medias - where people stay for years and are - by opposition - organized.

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