Lowell Peterson, the executive director of the Writers Guild, East, who has organized both blue-collar and white-collar workers in his career, said that organizing skilled workers might be easier in today’s economic climate. “If you’re a semiskilled or unskilled worker, your leverage is a little different,” he told me. Skilled employees are hard for employers to replace, and they know it, he said. While employers think they’ll be able to hire another worker off the street to stock shelves for Amazon or work on a car assembly line, they worry about being able to find enough skilled and educated workers to do the white-collar jobs they’re trying to fill. “[Managers in media] can’t just say, I don’t care who does this job, as long as someone does it,” Peterson said.

White-collar workers may also have an easier time doing the work to organize a union. Many Gothamist workers were young and didn’t have children, so were able to go to meetings after work, Scott Heins, 29, who worked full-time as a photographer and reporter for Gothamist for two years and was on the Gothamist organizing committee, told me. Blue-collar workers are often older, and have families to support. And, since white-collar employees don’t work on the factory floor all day, they are less physically exhausted at the end of the day. Additionally, the access to information technology that white-collar workers have can make it easier to communicate with other employees throughout the company.

Of course, white-collar workers still risk losing their jobs if a union forms—that’s what seems to have happened to 115 employees of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two websites owned by Joe Ricketts, a billionaire who founded TD Ameritrade, after 25 New York staff members voted to join the Writers Guild of America, East. But many of those employees have since found other jobs, and Peterson told me that the people who lost their jobs didn’t regret organizing. Heins told me that’s how he feels. “If forced into the same situation, I would do the same thing again,” he said. Heins said he and others knew the risks when they organized, especially when Ricketts, who is vocally anti-union, purchased Gothamist.

But Heins also landed on his feet. He is now working as a freelance photographer in New York, and said that it was going pretty well, in part because of support from groups like the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which established a $5,000 fund to help laid-off reporters from Gothamist and DNAinfo. “I am very fortunate in that photography lends itself well to freelancing,” he told me.

In contrast to Heins’ ability to find work after losing his job, many blue-collar workers can’t afford to risk such a change. They are more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck, and tend to have less savings because their salaries are lower in the first place. “People were really terrified that they were going to lose their job,” Robert Hathorn, a pro-union worker at Nissan in Mississippi, told the website Labor Notes in the aftermath of the UAW’s organizing loss in August.