More than 200 employees of NBC represented by the NewsGuild of New York plan to walk off the job for 24 hours on Thursday to signal frustration with the company’s decision to lay off seven union-covered journalists last month.
The Washington Post reports the NBC News Digital union has filed an unfair labor charge with the National Labor Relations Board over the cuts, which it described as abrupt and illegal, as well as a claim that some digital staffers for MSNBC were told by management that they were no longer part of the union.
A letter was delivered to NBC management stating the reasoning for the walkout on Wednesday morning. Soon after the action was announced internally, guild-covered NBC and MSNBC staffers began changing their statuses on an internal messaging system to “ready to walk out.
The NBC Guild — comprising digital reporters, editors, designers, video journalists, animators and social media strategists — has been locked in contract negotiations with company management ever since its 2019 founding.
Tate James, a video editor for NBC News who serves as chair of the unit, said the decision to walk out was borne out of a growing belief that NBC management is excluding the union from key employee matters, such as the process of negotiating layoffs and the terms of severance agreements. NBC management did not follow the correct steps before last month’s layoffs, the union has charged.
The union has filed six separate charges of unfair labor practice with the NLRB, but James said that process can take several years to resolve a complaint. “People are fed up with waiting two years for someone to tell us that something was illegal that we already knew was illegal,” he said.
Some 30 employees covered by an MSNBC-specific union were also laid off last month as part of the same round of company cost-cutting that affected the NBC Guild staffers.
The MSNBC Union, which is represented by the Writers Guild of America, East, said it was “stunned and outraged” by the layoffs, which mirrored cuts at other companies in the industry, including The Washington Post, Vox Media and CNN.
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