Progress Report: The ProPublica Guild’s First Year

We launched our union one year ago. Here’s what we’ve accomplished — and where ProPublica’s management is fighting us.

When we launched the ProPublica Guild one year ago, we made our intentions clear: We wanted a fairer and more transparent workplace, protections for our staff and a seat at the table with management.

Since then, our members have continued to produce hard-hitting investigations that have changed laws, spurred funding for important issues and shed light on overlooked abuses of power — they’ve even been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

We have already succeeded in building a strong union. From the beginning, we committed to including our full unit in bargaining. Investigative journalism can easily create a disconnected newsroom with pockets of isolated employees, but never has there been so much communication across departments and teams at ProPublica. And put simply, it feels different to work at a place where you know that your colleagues have your back.

We have been forced to call on that strength from our very first negotiations with management. After we announced the formation of our union in June 2023, management said they would recognize our union but also sought to exclude many eligible employees from the unit, including IT and Finance positions and all fellows and time-limited employees. We negotiated for weeks, and after more than 100 members signed a letter demanding those positions be in the unit, we secured a place for those members.

More recently, we had to advocate for something that is customary in unionized workplaces: the presence of a unit steward in a disciplinary meeting. We believe our members deserve the right to representation in meetings where the threat of discipline or termination is raised — not only because the law can require it, but because stewards provide necessary transparency and accountability. So it was alarming to us when management denied a member’s request for a steward in such a meeting. Such a denial is rare, according to our counterparts at other leading newsrooms. Our unit again came together to demand that management reconsider, and in the next meeting, a steward was allowed.

We didn’t think negotiating our first contract would be easy, but it’s been significantly harder than we expected.

Now in our eighth month of bargaining, we’ve submitted more than 20 proposals to management. So far, only two proposals have been agreed to.

One of our core proposals would ensure that members can only be disciplined or fired with due process, after a fair investigation and for just cause. We introduced this as our first proposal last December, using the same framework as contracts from The New York Times, Reuters and the Los Angeles Times. We’ve discussed this proposal in nine bargaining sessions, but we’re still no closer to agreement. We will keep fighting for this fundamental protection.

Our proposals have often been returned to us with large sections deleted with no meaningful substitute. This resembles a common delay tactic that law firms like the one management has retained have used against other newsrooms’ unions. 

In general, management’s proposals have shown an aversion to being constrained in any way:

• They have struck much of the language meant to protect our members from being replaced by freelancers

• They deleted a mission statement from our diversity proposal that has long guided the actions of the company’s existing and management-approved Diversity Committee

• They have objected to giving unit members the ability to challenge their performance evaluations and nixed the idea of members reviewing their managers’ performances

One of our main goals for this contract is to enshrine longstanding commitments and important protections in a binding document. But too often, management has changed our proposed “shall”s to “will endeavor to”s.

We wish we were closer to a contract. But we will keep pushing until we have the agreement we deserve. When management sends us counter-proposals with language that’s more restrictive than current policy, as they did recently with a clause on outside work and volunteering, they are delaying meaningful negotiation. This month, we’re going back to the table for longer sessions, and we’ll be on the lookout for signs that management is serious about getting this contract done. We won’t accept anything less than a strong contract that gives us the confidence to do our best work.

We are grateful for the readers and donors who support our work, and we encourage you to follow us at @ProPublicaGuild on X, Instagram and Threads so we can continue to update you on our progress toward a contract. If you’d like to share messages of support on social media, please tag us! And we encourage you to continue to read and support the work of ProPublica during our push to improve working conditions.