Paying My Dues: A Striker Testimonial

Galeux le rat et l'auteur (avec bonnet phrygien, sans culotte)

What do you think could make you turn down the money that secures food, shelter, and medical care for you and your family indefinitely? 

What do you think it would take to convince 236 people to say they’ll do it?

Well, that’s just what I and 235 of my colleagues in the Law360 Union did in August when we signed a pledge to go on an indefinite unfair labor practice strike if necessary, so I think I may have the answer, or part of it at least, and I’ll try to explain it.

Obviously, to oversimplify things, we did it because the Bargaining Committee that sets our strategy in contract negotiations with management asked us to do so to win a fair contract and protest unfair labor practices committed by our employer, Law360. We’ve been at this process for nearly two years, and our corporate parent has been, by turns sluggish and churlish, wracking up multiple labor violations before the National Labor Relations Board along the way, so it seemed about time something changed.

But the emotional dimension that made this escalation worth pursuing was a deep commitment to one another that could compensate us for the risk and the discomfort of going without pay for as long as it takes to win a fair contract.

Speaking for myself, I felt I owed a personal debt to the members of this union because working with them has radically changed me for the better. I am a new man, possessed of a fundamentally different view of other people and of the future than the one I had before I joined their ranks. What I’m about to relate might sound hyperbolic, but I promise you, I am writing to you in total sincerity: Thanks in large part to them, I live with a conviction of hope now that extends far beyond my workplace and was not mine when this all began.

For most of my life, my outlook was pessimistic. I distrusted institutions and other people, and if you had asked me what the basic themes of life and history were, I’d have been inclined to suggest something like decline. I saw a world caught in a cycle of dysfunction.

I won’t burden you with the details, but I had made some progress in lightening up between 2017 and 2021 and was a little less saturnine when I joined Law360. But even then, I’d have said it wasn't clear to me that The Big Picture in life would prove to be a happy one when it finished developing. 

The Law360 Union has changed that for me.

I’d had experience working without a union for Walmart, Kohl’s, and Target. When I want to conjure the feeling, I recall being assigned to climb into a big semi with a broken pneumatic pallet to hoist out the contents by hand and being told I shouldn’t ask if we were insured against injury in the process. And I had a union when I investigated police misconduct for a city agency, but its efforts were … uninspiring. In 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests, we were vying  — with that union’s help — to get police officers to undergo remote interviews and keep disclosing body-worn camera footage to us in a timely way under the new pandemic conditions. As the struggle went on, I remember a feeling of impotence as though the New York City Police Benevolent Association was holding our union down and hanging a loogie over its face. (Let’s just say I came away less than enthused with the potential of organized labor.)

Anyway, joining Law360 in April 2021 was my first chance to sample a satisfactorily zealous, effective union.

I entered the newsroom already in its debt: The union had formed under the stewardship of corporate management, which at the time had the power of at-will employment, which is to say at-will dismissal, over its hirelings, and people were spurred toward unrealistic quotas for unsatisfactory pay and benefits. The union, once established, reformed the newsroom and put in place a collective bargaining agreement that made our unit a byword for the success of labor power in our field. (Journalists and organizers at mixers have repeated my outlet’s name to me with wistful, knowing reverence when the subject of bargaining comes up in a way that has driven home this fact for me.)

I consider myself a valuable employee, but I tell you earnestly that I don’t doubt I have only flourished here because the union made the newsroom a place where I would be secure and encouraged enough to do so. And having made the office hospitable for developing journalists, union members have fought doggedly to maintain the protections and atmosphere they themselves installed in the first place.

Even more obvious to me is all they’ve done to win my appreciation since I’ve joined.

I’ll share with you that I’m not a natural union man. I was a pretty vocal libertarian growing up and, while working retail knocked the teeth of that ideology loose for me, it wasn’t obvious I was going to end up on any union’s picket line.

I’m an idiosyncratic workaholic, deeply grateful for a job, desirous of warm relations with my supervisors and wary of getting talked into anything. I’m not a natural joiner, and people must be prepared to explain fairly, intricately and convincingly any scheme into which they would like me to buy. 

Also, I hate meetings.

Nonetheless, my unionized colleagues have fully won me over, even getting me to join the Contract Action Team that handles outreach for our labor actions (and its many meetings). 

From early in my time with Law360, the union’s stewards (and, subsequent to the inception of our contract negotiations, its Contract Action Team and Bargaining Committee members) have reliably and diligently sat with me to discuss everything from the most basic facts of newsroom life to the fine-grain details of collective actions, bargaining, and labor law. They’ve kept me up to date with what’s happening and entertained more than a fair amount of anxiety-driven hypotheticals and Boolean logic-chopping. When asked, they’ve even supplied me with case law from the annals of the NLRB to let me pore over the foundations of our legal arguments for myself.

I’m about as dogged and particular a man as ever split a hair, and they have met me at each step with grace and thoroughness. In doing so, they’ve displayed a deep and versatile knowledge of labor law, they’ve been clear and often eloquent, and, it bears repeating, very patient. (At this point I’d like to append a special thank you to Emma Cueto of the B.C. whose ability to field my questions about labor law and bargaining strategy is formidable.)

They really act on the idea that if you are transparent, tolerant, informed and in the right, people, even skittish or prickly people, may one day hear you out and find themselves satisfied. 

They do not give up on people, even me.

And the union’s B.C. is thorough at the bargaining table, not to mention alert, savvy, and tough. They ask insightful questions, and a lot of them; they pry loose misrepresentations and excavate the undisclosed; they shame incompetence; they don’t shrink from management’s insults or intimidation; and they hold the line.

I’ve been regularly amazed at how fluidly and with what nuance they can parse proposals and navigate precedent, rhetoric and hard data. I am the more amazed because of how this has contrasted with the turgid, opaque responses from the team of highly-paid lawyers, executives, and middle managers assembled by our corporate parent. (The difference is so stark, in fact, that it’s led me to believe we could better govern ourselves and that maybe LexisNexis had its approach backward when it illegally fired so many of our co-workers during this prolonged negotiation — perhaps they could have saved the same money and excised more deadweight if they’d started by cutting from the top.)

If you haven’t been to bargaining yet (and, boy, have you missed something if you haven’t), tune in as soon as you can. I would say they give as good as they get at the table, but, friend, I tell you, that wouldn’t do them justice. Our representatives on the B.C. are vigorous, inquisitive, and quick to anticipate and outmaneuver management’s gamesmanship. 

And, in all of this, they are applying the skills and talents that abound in our unit, a corps of experienced legal journalists. 

In this wider body of the union, I’ve also had occasion to be moved by the compassion and spontaneous organization of my colleagues, who have opened the purse for and advocated on behalf of our illegally terminated co-workers. To work with people like this and see them evolve autonomous responses and perform collections for one another has been a privilege I won’t soon forget. 

I hear people make fun pretty often of the idea that a business might pretend it's a worker’s family, and rightly so, but I have seen this union act like one for its members. It’s the only thing supporting an indelible sense of community in our workplace and the only group of people in the newsroom truly and finally committed, as family should be, to the well-being of all involved. As in a healthy family, I would do much for them and they for me. 

I spent my 29th birthday on their picket line and considered it a gift.

I would extend support and endure privation on their account. 

It would be its own reward.

I care strongly for them, and observing the rolling internal deliberations that have shaped our bargaining process — to have witnessed this unit’s transparency, judiciousness, scrupulousness, and democratic discipline — has been legitimately life-changing for me.

That the unit has been so successful without sacrificing this open, democratic approach has given substance in my heart to the refrain, “When we fight, we win.”

For most of bargaining, organizing with them has been the most fulfilling part of my life at work. (I hope, along the way, I’ve endeared myself to them as well.)

Together, we have won important contract language regarding our remote-work status and the use of AI-generated material in our newsroom; improved the lot of news apprentices, who are the backbone of our outlet; significantly increased parental leave; and driven management off of dangerous proposals to strip job security and excise the guaranteed wage increase. 

These are only some of the achievements we have won by a joint effort, each contributing in the name of all. To see it done has affected me greatly. 

Only the smallest expression of this is my confidence that our union will win a contract that better reflects our worth and sees us more justly compensated. I have seen collective action here in a light that has amended how I see other people, not just at work, but everywhere, and how much faith I feel I can put in institutions to do right in time.

As ostentatious as it sounds, joining my friends in this fight for a better contract has really, sincerely enhanced my belief in the promise of democracy. It has felt like seeing a glimpse of a healthy republic, alive to the virtues of good citizenship and public service.

I have not just gone from an unlikely union man to a vocal advocate for organized labor; I have gone from a pessimist to a radical optimist in their care. I feel I can trust in the future as a place where our better nature will, in the long run, prevail because of how I have been able to trust the people of this union. 

I am grateful to them for that at a level that is hard to express.

That is why I would walk out for them. 

That is why I would forgo my pay and put aside the career I love.

That is why I would risk the security of my housing and my well-being in the effort to close a better contract and resolve the unfair labor practice charges.

Because they have given me hope, and it is time I returned the favor.

—Editing by John Campbell, Covey Son, and Philip Shea.