The Post union is exploiting one factor that no other union in journalism has.
The whole business of the Washington Post’s writers having a union and staging a one-day walkout today is faintly ridiculous to me. While I’m generally pretty skeptical about private-sector unions (let alone public-sector ones), I get why people in some industries join them, and why they once played an important role for workers. My grandfather, who started as a coal miner and ended up as a longshoreman, was a big union man, and I can’t very well blame anybody in those lines of work for thinking they want the protection of a collective. But try as they might, writers can’t turn a news room into a coal mine or a dock.
Newsrooms are being hit by layoffs even at prestige places such as The New Yorker and, for that matter, the Post itself. And in recent years, unionized workforces have often been the precursor to the outright failure of journalistic enterprises. It does, however, strike me that the Post union is exploiting one factor that no other union in journalism has: Jeff Bezos. Any other publisher could take a much harder line, but consider: Bezos is simultaneously identified with the Post and with Amazon. The Post is a high-profile outlet in government and media, doubtless read by most labor regulators. Amazon is the nation’s third-largest private-sector employer and deeply engaged in avoiding unionization drives in its facilities. When you put that all together, Bezos has an unusually strong interest in not being seen as some sort of union-buster in his approach to the Post.