New York-based Gawker Media has become the first major digital media company to unionize after an overwhelming majority of employees voted on June 4 to form a union with the Writers Guild of America, East.

The editorial staff at Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin and other Gawker Media properties voted 80 to 27 in favor of forming a collective-bargaining unit.

The workers chose to organize in part to ensure an equitable pay scale that reflects individuals’ length of service at the company as well as their particular responsibilities.

Their vote drew predictions that staff at other digital media may also consider joining a union.

“As Gawker’s writers have demonstrated, organizing in digital media is a real option, not an abstraction,” said Lowell Peterson, the executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East.

The campaign was spearheaded by longtime Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan and was unusual in that it largely played out in public, with writers encouraged to discuss the issue openly on the Gawker news site.

“Every workplace could use a union,” Nolan wrote in a post in April announcing the unionization drive. “A union is the only real mechanism that exists to represent the interests of employees in a company.”

Gawker workers are now in the process of forming a committee to negotiate their first contract.

Gawker, June 4, April 16

Huffington Post, June 4