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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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