Journalists like writing about journalism, so the dimensions of the industry’s decline are no secret. Across the country, news organizations are contracting—as of last week, Bloomberg was slated to lay off 100 editorial employees, or a full 4.2 percent of its workforce—and so is the job market for recent graduates. (Especially for minorities, it should go without saying.) Industry wages have fallen below the national average, even as soaring living costs render media hubs like New York and Washington, DC increasingly unaffordable. As Jezebel’s Anna Merlan put it, of the supposedly thriving digital media industry: “We’re in a very good place right now. But we also exist in a bubble. When it bursts, I’d like us to have fair labor practices in place.”

Organized labor in the U.S.—that historical protector of the middle class—is in a similarly weakened position; and, over the last year, the two have entered into a mutually beneficial relationship. In April, editorial staffers at Gawker announced they were considering unionizing, which they eventually elected to do in June. By early August, workers at Salon, Guardian US, and Vice had followed suit. The next week, the founders of Upworthy and BuzzFeed held meetings intended to discourage their employees from organizing. The week after that, Mike Elk, a labor reporter and self-described “union organizer,” was let go from Politico. The union organizers I spoke with tell me they are already engaging workers at other digital outlets; in the coming months, we can expect more stories like these.

According to The New York Times, this unionization trend is a “sign of maturity in a previously anarchic sector, defined by its start-up sensibility and employees’ youth.” In truth, it has less to do with the maturation of digital media than the volatility of journalism in general. Labor in the online newsroom, to say nothing of labor on its fringes, is precarious in many of the same ways as labor in the rest of the globalized—and, now, gig-ified—economy. And this is where the true potential of media unionization lies: Not simply in the power of dues-paying bloggers to influence the zeitgeist from the top down, but in the opportunity the unions themselves have to redefine, from the bottom up, what rights are worth fighting for in the modern workplace.

Labor organizing is still new to digital media, but its sudden emergence isn’t without precedent. “Each time there’s been a technological change [in the economy], there’s been upheaval,” said Kim Fellner, the associate director of Working America, a grassroots community organizing group. The advent of assembly-line auto factories, for example, was a key driver of the 20th century labor movement. The internet, she said, is a similarly groundbreaking advance, “and it brings with it a huge challenge and opportunity for innovation and the restructuring” of organized labor. “Unions tend to, much more than they’re given credit for, innovate and expand their membership over time,” said Fellner, who has also been a longtime organizer with the Service Employees International Union, the U.S.’s second largest, and National Writers Union (NWU), among others.

This latest series of unionization efforts is indicative of that evolution. “What we wanted to do was learn about how digital technology was transforming the way stories are crafted and distributed,” said Lowell Peterson, the executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East, which now represents editorial staff at Gawker, Salon, and Vice. “We reached out to a lot of people—we started going to a lot of conferences and having coffee with as many digital content creators as we could.” Credited with setting off a chain reaction in the industry, Gawker’s organizing campaign was a direct result of those conversations. (WGAE Organizing Director Justin Molito told me that the union had actually been talking informally with Vice editorial staff prior to the Gawker vote.)