Unionization is appropriate for a factory setting but not right for a “global” and “new economy” company like BuzzFeed, founder and chief executive Jonah Peretti told staff this week.

“I think unions have had a positive impact on a lot of places, like if you’re working on an assembly line, and if you’re negotiating with management it can make a huge difference, particularly when labor is more replaceable,” Peretti said on Thursday, according to a BuzzFeed report with his remarks. “For a flexible, dynamic company, it isn’t something [that] I think would be great for the company.”



BuzzFeed’s piece on Peretti’s comments reported that “there is currently no active unionization drive underway at BuzzFeed, based on an informal internal survey of writers in the New York and San Francisco newsrooms on Friday”.

Perreti said the relationship between management and staff in a unionized workplace “is much more adversarial”.

“A lot of the best new-economy companies are environments where there’s an alliance between managers and employees,” he told staff. “People have shared goals. Benefits and perks and compensation are very competitive, and I feel like that’s the kind of market we’re in.”

He compared BuzzFeed to companies like Google and Facebook, which compete for a small pool of available talent by offering better salaries and benefits.

“That’s how I see BuzzFeed as well,” he said. “We need to provide amazing benefits, we need to provide as much incentive for people to pick BuzzFeed over any other company.”

His comments were made in a staff meeting in response to an anonymous question from an employee which read: “Several media outlets have recently unionized, do you consider that an option for BuzzFeed? What’s Jonah’s position on unionization?”

Staffs at several online media organizations have recently voted to organize, including Gawker, Salon, Vice and the Guardian’s US office.

When news of Gawker’s unionization conversations first broke, Nick Denton, the company’s founder, said he was “intensely relaxed” and that it was the “natural order of things”.

After Peretti’s comments become public on Friday, union leaders pointed out that whether a workplace unionizes or not is ultimately up to the workers.

“The current law in the US makes it clear that the decision to have a union is one for the employees to make, not the managers,” Bernie Lunzer, president of News Guild-Communications Workers of America union, told the Guardian. “And the fear that somehow a union is about being adversarial is outmoded. It’s really about having a democratic workplace. It actually makes the organization stronger.”

Justin Molito, director of organizing at Writers Guild of America, echoed Lunzer’s remarks.

“It is not up to the CEO of a company whether or not staff join together to form a union. It really is a choice for the staff to make and frankly the respectful thing for a CEO to do is to stay out of that decision and allow for democracy to extend to the workplace without interference,” he said.

“We have been heartened to see the executives of other digital media companies allow employees to unionize without any intimidation and we would hope for the same from BuzzFeed executives.”

Gawker, Salon and Vice have recently voted to unionize under Writers Guild of America. On 29 July, Guardian US unanimously voted to unionize under the News Guild.

Not all efforts to unionize digital newsrooms have been smooth. It took a month for Salon management to recognize the vote by its staff to unionize.

Earlier this week, Re/Code reported that BuzzFeed is now expected to be worth $1.5bn after a new deal in which NBC Universal invested about $200m in the company.

“In general, I don’t think it’s the right idea for us,” Peretti said. “The only thing about BuzzFeed is that we’re global, most unions are national. We have people who move between different roles and in general unions do a lot of defining clearly what individual roles, and what the job function, is.”