Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the co-author of "Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy" and co-editor of "New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement."

What happened at Gawker suggests that there may be more potential for successful union organizing in the 21st century than conventional wisdom suggests.

In part because new organizing has been at a low ebb in recent years, especially in the “new economy,” young workers are less likely to be unionized than their older counterparts. But that doesn't seem to reflect workers’ own preferences. In fact recent surveys show that millennials — the dominant demographic at Gawker and other digital media companies — are far more often pro-union than their baby boomer counterparts.

Young workers are less likely to be unionized than their older counterparts, but that doesn't seem to reflect their own preferences.

Although millennials are also famously wary of bureaucratic institutions, many unions no longer fit that stereotype.

Decades ago the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers won recognition with a campaign whose main slogan was “It’s not anti-Harvard to be pro-union!” The Writers’ Guild East, the union that now represents Gawker’s employees, has explicitly embraced this non-adversarial approach as well.

To make a real difference in today’s economy, unions need to meet the needs of young, college-educated workers like those at Gawker as well as workers struggling at the bottom of the labor market, in industries like fast-food and retail. As inequality between the haves and have-nots continues to widen, organized labor is the one surviving institution that systematically pushes in the other direction. The union movement is struggling to reinvent itself in a more hostile political and economic environment than the nation has seen since the early 1930s.

Intransigent opposition to unionism has become standard business practice. An entire industry of “labor consultants” (also known as union busters) systematically assists companies in squashing any budding organizing campaigns that crop up. Many of the standard anti-union tactics are perfectly legal, but a large number of employers don’t take any chances: Firing workers for union organizing — illegal under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act — is five times as common today as in the 1950s.

Gawker is an exception among U.S. employers since its C.E.O., Nick Denton, did not appear to oppose the union campaign. Survey after survey suggests that a large majority of workers would vote for a union in their workplace, given the opportunity. Sadly, few get that opportunity these days, and when they do, employers typically go to great lengths to intimidate them into voting no.

And yet there are a few hopeful signs. The Gawker election is one of them, along with the fast-food workers’ campaign that has been building momentum over the past couple of years. It’s too soon to herald a labor comeback, but those who have written off unions as obsolete and irrelevant should think again.



Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

