April 2, 2019 – Nearly 90 percent of newsroom employees at Wirecutter, a product-review-and-recommendation site published by the New York Times Company, announced April 2 that they are seeking to join the New York Local of The NewsGuild-CWA.

In a mission statement presented to Editor-in-Chief Ben Frumin and President and General Manager David Perpich, Wirecutter staff cited a desire to improve benefits, editorial independence, pay equity, diversity and job security through collective bargaining.

The NewsGuild of New York has represented the staff of The New York Times since 1941, a bargaining unit that encompasses nearly 1,200 members working in the editorial, sales, marketing and security departments.

After acquiring Wirecutter in 2016, Mark Thompson, president and CEO of The New York Times Company, said, “We’re very excited about this acquisition,” the NewsGuild of New York reported. “It’s an impressively run business with a very attractive revenue model and its success is built on the foundation of great, rigorously reported service journalism.”

The union drive brought together workers in the New York and Los Angeles offices with people working across the country, said Erin Price, Community Lead. “I’m proud of my colleagues for organizing to ensure that we have a seat at the table at a publication that means so much to us, and I’m thrilled to stand with my union colleagues at The Times and across the industry.”

For more information, visit wirecutterunion.com.

The group’s Mission Statement appears below.

“Wirecutter makes the best product recommendations through vigorous research, reporting, and testing. After more than a year of applying that same journalistic rigor to investigating and considering all our options, we are certain that unionizing is the best choice for Wirecutter’s editorial staff.

“We join our colleagues at The New York Times (our parent company), New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, Thomson Reuters, and many other outstanding journalistic enterprises in joining the NewsGuild of New York. And we join the tradition of labor movements worldwide in uniting to protect our work’s integrity, our families’ security, and the trust of the readers we serve.

“From our founding in 2011, Wirecutter has been a rarity: a digital-journalistic enterprise funded not by speculative investors or fleeting click-shares, but by the value of our work to our readers. Our writers and editors, our fact-checkers, our deals team, our photographers and videographers, our production team, and our social media team quite literally built this company. And we did so by adhering to a simple maxim: Our best asset is our honesty.

“Wirecutter has also fostered a work environment that put the mental and physical well-being of its employees and their families above profit, notoriety, or immediacy. We love Wirecutter because it merged these twin pillars—editorial integrity and a compassionate workplace—into a successful business that served us and our readers equally well.

“We’re organizing to protect the things that have always made Wirecutter great: Our commitment to rigorous journalistic ethics and editorial independence in deciding what topics we cover, what picks we make, and what deals we share; our commitment to allowing our geographically and culturally diverse staff to work from (almost) anywhere; and our company-wide commitment to work-life balance.

“We’re also organizing to solve issues getting in the way of us doing our best work for our readers. We seek transparent communication from leadership about strategy shifts and layoffs, and a seat at the table when these matters are under discussion. We seek to correct disparities in pay and to set clear, consistent overtime expectations and disciplinary procedures. We seek an official policy to protect the mutually-beneficial remote work culture Wirecutter was founded on.

“We also seek to protect our benefits where they are strong, and improve them where they could be stronger with more affordable and comprehensive health insurance, increased parental leave, and vacation rollovers and payouts. We seek more opportunities for career development, and more resources for diversity training—we can’t make the best recommendations for most people if our staff doesn’t represent all people.

“We recognize that editorial doesn’t stand alone in making Wirecutter great, and we will actively support our other colleagues at Wirecutter if they choose to unionize.

“We built this company by demanding the best instead of accepting the good. That’s why our readers trust us. That’s why The Times bought us. And in unionizing, we look forward to working with management in our shared commitment to make Wirecutter the best place to work.”