ILPC 2027

The use of digital technologies is transforming the work of producing journalism. As born-digital news organizations mature and print-based organizations adapt to a digital context, journalists face new labour challenges. From the use of algorithms and big data to generate news content to incorporating audience participation and outsourcing work to freelancers, journalistic labour in a digital age is characterized by automation, interactivity, and deepening uncertainty. While labour researchers have carefully documented deteriorating material conditions of media work in a digital age, less scholarly attention has been devoted to collective responses to these challenges. This paper grapples with the implications of digital transformations of media work processes through an empirical case study of the successful union drive at one of the largest and most profitable digital media outlets, Vice Canada, an arm of US-based Vice Media.

The Vice organizing campaign brought to light many of the issues faced by media workers industry-wide: low pay, long hours/overwork, time pressure to produce large amounts of content, a lack of labour protections, and the threat of being fired with no cause. Vice workers were also unhappy with what they perceived as declining autonomy and journalistic standards and the poor treatment of freelancers, which is becoming standardized in digital media outlets. Our paper begins by examining the specificity of labouring digitally. That is, we ask: how are the challenges digital journalists face specifically related to the digital transformation of journalism? We go on to examine Vice workers’ response to such challenges, which was to unionize with the Canadian Media Guild (CMG), a 6,000-member union. Our analysis is informed by a political economy and labour process framework and draws on in-depth interviews conducted in 2016 with CMG and Vice organizers and Vice staff opposed to unionization, as well as communication material produced by workers and management during the organizing drive.

The paper examines the way Vice workers overcame the prevalent anti-union attitude in journalism and high-tech, including the way professional ideology, techno-libertarianism, entrepreneurialism, and stock-option programs serve to discourage collective action. We analyze the Vice Canada campaign, linking the overcoming of anti-unionism to the gap between the conditions of Vice workers and the high-profile profitability of Vice and similar digital media platforms; the inspiration of and communication between successful organizing efforts elsewhere in the digital sector; a commitment to journalistic integrity; and concern for spreading precarity in media industries. Finally, recognizing that Vice is an anomaly in a largely unorganized digital media sector, we consider lessons the CMG campaign might hold for digital workers and organizers elsewhere to contribute to understandings of the potential for collective organization and resistance in the context of digital work.