Troy Closson

VOICES OF THE PANDEMIC

What We’ve Learned

The disparities exacerbated by the pandemic and highlighted by the protests didn’t start in March, and they’re not going to end with a vaccine.

We need to make sure we’re telling stories through perspectives of people who are living through them.

—Troy Closson

Metro reporter at the

New York Times newsroom representation against the population of New York City, which would leave cis white women out of hiring statistics. The BuzzFeed News Union has employed the same New York City–based metric for the purposes of hiring, but the non-hiring-related clauses of its diversity and inclusion proposal are more capacious, including women of all races.

Unlike affirmative action plans, which target discrimination, this new wave of hiring initiatives is meant to correct an imbalance. Almost all of the organizers I spoke with conceded that it was only a first step. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Reilly-Collins told me. Quotas are designed to make good on the industry’s foundational claim to representation, but won’t necessarily counteract its racism. When used as a placeholder for redistributive justice, the politics of parity will always be winking, holding as its consolation prize the possibility that white people, if they are one day eclipsed by their nonwhite colleagues, will also be able to reap the rewards of “underrepresentation.” And although it remains an open secret that the easiest way to change the makeup of a workforce is for white people to quit, swift wars are not the union’s to wage. It was a freelancer, Tammie Teclemariam, who in June tweeted a photo of Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, in brownface, leading to his resignation. That same month, when the New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton calling upon the military to violently suppress Black protesters—a decision that Bill Baker, the New York Times Union unit chair, called “the straw that broke the camel’s back”—it was the collective speech of Black employees, who took to social media in coordinated action, that forced the resignation of James Bennet, the opinion editor. “Collective bargaining is more harm reduction than solving for the revolution,” ReillyCollins told me.

Historically speaking, it’s not unfair to argue that the professional diversity movement has no specific or singular aim. As a tactic for facilitating representation, it can be deployed to advance the interests of anyone who claims for themselves the feeling of being in the minority. And without a governing politics to determine whose

representation is redistributive, and whose is simply revenge, it carries the danger of advancing nothing at all. “The fact that diversity is not a scary word is part of the problem,” Ahmed writes. “If it is detached from scary issues, such as power and inequality, it is harder for diversity to do anything in its travels.”

Union organizers know this already. The media industry is more precarious than it has been in years. Everywhere you look, someone is losing their job or their health insurance. According to Business Insider, seventy-eight hundred media workers were laid off in 2019 alone; this past April, the New York Times reported that an estimated thirtysix thousand news employees had been furloughed, laid off, or had their pay reduced since the beginning of the pandemic. But everyone is someone’s colleague, and peers are natural advocates. This past spring, the BuzzFeed News and Los Angeles Times unions brokered work-share agreements with management that prevented the majority of proposed layoffs. And across the industry, at-will employees are demanding that management adopt a policy of just cause, a provision that requires an employer to have reason for taking disciplinary action against an employee. (The New Yorker finally granted the provision in October, after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren pulled out of the magazine’s festival in solidarity with the union.) Unions are beginning to introduce managers to the scary language of justice, even if that language is ultimately blunted. Upon bargaining their new contract, which will be ratified later this year, employees at HuffPost proposed trainings devoted to “anti-oppression, antidiscrimination, and unconscious bias.” After negotiations with the company, which has deemed diversity “critical” to its mission, the proposal emerged with sanded edges. The final agreement commits management to conducting “a climate assessment” and “relevant privilege awareness trainings.”

Corporate diversity rhetoric, in other words, continues to overhype its deliverables. After six employees of Bon Appétit resigned in August, alleging homophobia, pay inequity, and a workplace culture that treated nonwhite employees, who weren’t compensated for their video appearances, as a “second class,” Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, issued a public statement reiterating the company’s commitment to “retaining and nurturing a diverse and inclusive workforce.” In the meantime, Lynch turned to his union-busting law firm to undertake an investigation, which found “no evidence that race played a factor in setting compensation” for the video team and that “everyone was compensated fairly.” New committees were assembled, and a “Diversity and Inclusion report” was accelerated. When the report was shared with the public, in late September, the vast majority of the initiatives it introduced, touted as totems of the company’s “excellence,” had been cribbed from the proposals of its unions, which management had repeatedly rejected—including the 50 percent interviewing quota. “It’s much easier to change your mission statement than it is to actually apply that mission within the company,” DeCarava told me. Corporate policies are so favored precisely because they’re flawed: unlike union contracts, “commitments” have an escape hatch—they can always be revoked. When asked whether The New Yorker planned to cement Condé Nast’s percentage goal into binding contract language, a spokesperson said, “We are pleased that Condé Nast has announced this standard across the company, and we plan to pick up this conversation at the bargaining table and, we hope, reach an agreement very soon.” According to the union, however, by the time this article went to press, these conversations had yet to come to fruition, and management has been unresponsive to the union’s attempts to continue negotiations.

Any historically bereft movement will relinquish its potential to the fleeting interests of the present. In the context of corporate media, those interests will always be in service of profit. BuzzFeed, The New Yorker, and the New York Times have all established new councils, committees, and task forces but continue to obstruct or ignore proposals made by their unions. Diversity continues to sell. But if it has a future, it will depend upon the efforts of workers to hitch it to the struggles of years past. Empty words will never be emancipatory. Aimed accurately, they can at least begin to accrue meaning. cjr