Three years after unionizing, the journalists and photographers of the Daily Herald in Everett, Washington, have ratified a first contract.
For months, the Everett NewsGuild has made a simple argument at the bargaining table: good journalism requires good working conditions. Now, the workers of the Daily Herald have a first union contract to secure working conditions, improve wages, and resist story quotas.
Everett Daily Herald workers first started to organize in 2019 and officially formed a union in 2022. Since then, the newsroom has seen rapid turnover.
“I remember when the push to unionize started in 2019,” said Olivia Vanni, a Herald photographer who’s worked at the paper for seven years. “I was looking back at the list names of everyone in the newsroom, twenty-two to be exact, that signed our official announcement about forming a union in 2022. I am the only one left in the newsroom that was on that original list.”
Carpenter Media Group acquired the Daily Herald in 2024, and soon after handed down layoff notices to nearly half of the newsroom staff, including 10 of 18 union workers. Against that backdrop, workers continued to push for a contract that would protect jobs.
The contract sets a wage floor of $20.50, with increases for each year of experience and annual raises of 2%. Significantly, the contract does not impose story quotas on the workers. Defeating the employer proposal to tie wage increases to story quotas — which encourage churning out content rather than engaging in the kind of in-depth local journalism the community relies on — was one of the journalists’ top priorities. While management could still try to implement quotas, the union notes that workers now have just cause protections and are better able to push back should management take that step.
Everett NewsGuild is part of NewsGuild, a division of Communications Workers of America.
Republished from The Stand, Washington State Labor Council’s outstanding online publication.
