Five years ago, the labor movement got an unexpected shot in the arm thanks to a bunch of angry bloggers. When workers at the smart, snarky digital news outlet Gawker went public with their organizing drive and unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East, they set a vital new precedent in an exploitative, unstable industry. The floodgates opened in digital journalism throughout the United States, with shop after shop joining the movement and swelling the WGAE’s ranks by 1,500 new members since the Gawker action. The new organizing also isn’t confined to digital-only workplaces—WGAE organizers are currently mounting a drive at corporate media behemoth Hearst—or to one union, as the News Guild of New York has also helped organized digital shops, including The New Republic’s.

In those early days, recognition came fairly easily. Not long after Gawker’s successful organizing drive in 2015, Vice’s editorial workers unionized in an initial bargaining unit of 80. (Full disclosure: I was working at Vice at the time and took part in this drive.) By 2018, more than 400 workers in the company’s TV and production arms joined the company’s WGAE chapter. It made sense that Vice and its sibling hip, public-facing brands would want to project an image of magnanimity toward their employees, who were paid bargain-basement salaries and worked in conditions that were often chaotic, if not actively harmful. Voluntarily recognizing the union was also something of a P.R. asset for companies such as Vice and Gawker Media: a fairly cost-effective way to burnish a media outlet’s image.

Thanks to these considerations, the Gawker and Vice drives resulted in swift and fairly amicable recognition from management. But that, along with much else, has changed for the worse in the organizing trenches of the media industry. What had been an exhilarating initial surge has now become an exhausting slog. Protracted, hard-fought struggles for recognition have become a rule rather than an exception. Nominally progressive media outlets twisted themselves into knots to avoid recognizing their workers’ right to organize. Management at Slate and Thrillist took months to recognize the union (with the latter spurring the industry’s first strike); MTV News laid off its entire staff mid-negotiations; DNAinfo and Gothamist were spitefully shuttered by their new feckless billionaire owner, Joe Ricketts, shortly after they won recognition. Hearst is currently embroiled in an embarrassing union-busting disaster of its own making.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti drew plenty of scorn for his public anti-union stance—and proceeded to drag out the company’s eventual recognition of the BuzzFeed News Union for months, prompting the workers to stage a four-city work stoppage to force the issue in 2019.

Digital media’s cousins in the tech industry have faced a slog of their own as they’ve sought to organize in the libertarian coding farms of Silicon Valley. Tesla founder Elon Musk swiftly abandoned his benevolent billionaire shtick once his notoriously exploited workforce began to consider unionizing. Google’s attempts to quash organizing on its home turf have been a thumb in the eye to its original “don’t be evil” ethos. Workers at Kickstarter began organizing in secret back in early 2019 but were hardly greeted in a spirit of collaborative enterprise once they went public: Two organizers allege that they were fired as a result, and two others on the organizing committee left in the midst of the turmoil. (They finally won their union on February 18, 2020, but only after the company forced them to undergo a National Labor Relations Board secret ballot election.)