Slate's editorial staff goes on strike as tensions at digital publisher escalate
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Writers and editors at Slate have voted nearly unanimously to green-light a strike, escalating tensions between the digital publication and its newly unionized employees.
Slate’s editorial employees authorized the potential strike by a vote of 52 to 1, according to a spokesman for the Writers Guild of America East, and are now weighing when they may walk off the job. Along with stronger diversity policies and cost of living increases, the union wants the company to back off its insistence on making union fees optional, a policy disdained by organized labor.
“We just feel that it’s a total and absolute betrayal of Slate’s most fundamental values,” said Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern, a member of the union’s bargaining committee. In June, President Trump’s Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch was part of a 5-4 majority that made the whole U.S. public sector “right-to-work,” a ruling roundly denounced on Slate’s site.
