Semafor reports that journalists at the New York Times and Reuters are upset about their union:
The journalists have “effectively lost our voice, or any power, in our own union, the NewsGuild of New York,” the Reuters NewsGuild unit chair, Tim McLaughlin, wrote to Reuters union members earlier this month in a message shared with Semafor. He suggested a check on dues increases, and said that the union had spent millions organizing newsrooms that weren’t paying dues or no longer existed.
“The fiscally irresponsible and political activist arm of our union is now firmly in control of how our dues are spent,” McLaughlin said.
Yep, that’s what unions tend to do. That’s a big part of the reason why 94 percent of American private-sector workers aren’t members of unions.
The journalists’ union is publicly undercutting their work, with no repercussions:
Earlier this week, Nastaran Mohit, a high-profile Guild organizer, wrote a post on X: “All these Zionist butchers know how to kill. Children. Families. The next generation. Depraved monsters who will meet their fate one day,” she wrote. Mohit took down the tweet and made her account private. But not before it was screenshot by some critics of the Guild, and reported on by the New York Post. In a post in the Times’ Guild Slack, education reporter Jeremy Peters singled out the tweet, arguing that it would damage the Time’s own credibility.
“When we pay dues, they go toward salaries of Guild organizers. They represent you. This is one of them,” he wrote.
Maybe now that they are on the receiving end of union malfeasance, journalists will remember this instance the next time they want to write a story about the “union resurgence” that isn’t happening, run another puff piece about the corrupt and shrinking United Auto Workers, conflate “pro-worker” with “pro-union,” or cheer on organizing drives that workers reject.