Newsroom staff at the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest newspaper, have voted to unionize, according to election results published Tuesday by the National Labor Relations Board.
The vote was 13-4 in favor of unionization, with two eligible voters not participating.
The Anchorage News Guild, which will represent newsroom staff, had requested that management voluntarily recognize the union, but the newspaper’s ownership declined and requested the federally managed election.
Anchorage Daily News owner Ryan Binkley did not have an immediate comment on the result.
The successful vote gives the ADN the only unionized newsroom in Alaska. Union members have said they intend to advocate for fair wages, financial transparency and a sustainable workplace environment.
The new union will be part of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, a member of the AFL-CIO.
Megan Pacer, an employee who voted in favor of the union, said the next step will be for union members to meet, elect officials and create a bargaining committee charged with negotiating an employment contract.
Pacer said union members will decide their requests, which could include raises, access to ADN financial information, changes to the employee health plan, and time off.
She said that union members haven’t yet heard from management, but she expects that a contract negotiation could take from one to three years, at the longer end of things.
Photographer Bill Roth, who has worked at the Daily News for more than 40 years, said he cast one of the “no” votes because while he doesn’t oppose unions, he doesn’t feel a union would benefit him so late in his career.
Kyle Hopkins, a longtime ADN reporter, is paid by the journalism organization ProPublica as part of a cooperative agreement. He voted in favor of the union to help newer reporters.
“My generation of reporters, I feel like we just kind of expected to be doormats, and my professors told me — they’re like, look, you’re taking a vow of poverty when you start this career,” he said.
He doesn’t want new journalists to feel that way when he’s recruiting for a job opening or encouraging someone to enter journalism.
“Nobody expects to get rich or even be anything beyond kind of middle class or even lower middle class, but I just want the people I work with — and myself, if I lose the ProPublica connection — to be able to pay for child care and health care. Just the bare minimum,” he said.