Summary
One hundred fifteen newsroom workers learned that they’d lost their jobs the same way the rest of the world did yesterday, when the New York Times reported that local-news websites DNAinfo and Gothamist would be shuttered. Owner Joe Ricketts announced the shutdown just one week after writers and editors in the New York offices successfully unionized. All of DNAinfo’s and Gothamist’s offices—including those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., which were not part of unions—are now closed.
Ricketts’ decision seems to be a response to the labor organizing at the New York office. As the Times reported, when the journalists first tried to unionize, Ricketts wrote to them: “As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything, I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.” Meanwhile, Chief Operating Officer Dan Swartz wrote: “Would a union be the final straw that caused the business to close? I don’t know.” American labor laws normally protect workers from retaliation for unionizing, but Ricketts seems to have used a dramatic exception: A business may always close its operations entirely.
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Statements from Ricketts and other members of his organization, though, suggest they’re confident their shutdown is complete and that they won’t be dinged for retaliating against their employees. Besides their initial threats, a spokeswoman for DNAinfo called out the union in a statement to the Times: “The decision by the editorial team to unionize is simply another competitive obstacle making it harder for the business to be financially successful.” Such a statement would normally be a “smoking gun” for a union-retaliation argument, says William Gould, an emeritus law professor for Stanford University and a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, which decides unfair labor-practice cases. In addition, saying that the decision was financial, not retaliatory, may not help: The law makes it difficult for companies to make such arguments unless they’ve already sat down to negotiate with a union, Estlund says. Unions aren’t considered automatic harms to businesses.
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