On the morning of July 20, journalists at the Dallas Morning News announced they were forming a union, a historic move in a state that hasn’t had a union newspaper in nearly 30 years. If successful, the Morning News employees would join the NewsGuild, a fast-growing union representing more than 24,000 media workers around the country.
On Tuesday, however, Morning News Publisher Grant Moise sent a letter to organizers saying the paper’s parent company, the A. H. Belo Corporation, is refusing to voluntarily recognize the union. That means the workers will have to pursue a federally conducted election, a process that can take weeks or months. Organizers say a strong majority of the more than 100 potential members in the newsroom support the union, and they’ll file a petition for election with the National Labor Relations Board in the coming days.
The union push in Dallas is part of a recent wave of newsroom unionizations—including traditional papers like the Los Angeles Times and all-digital outlets like Vox—as journalists fight against declining working conditions in a struggling industry. In many cases, to maintain profits, corporations and hedge funds have slashed benefits and wages, bought out or laid off scores of veteran reporters, and shuttered outlets altogether. Nationally, more than 11,000 newsroom jobs vanished in just the first half of this year.
