Winning by a wide margin 💪
In an historic move, the editorial employees of el Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald and Miami.com newsroom voted overwhelmingly in favor of creating a union. One Herald Guild will advocate for better conditions in our workplace and fight to protect our ability to produce award-winning journalism for years to come.
On Wednesday, Nov. 20, 66 of 90 staffers voted in favor of One Herald Guild. The union will be certified by the National Labor Relations Board in Miami to represent all newsroom employees, including reporters, photographers, copy editors page designers, translators, growth editors, and other staffers. McClatchy, the Herald's parent company, continued to fight against five journalists' rights to be part of One Herald Guild. The union will not rest until they are included.
Shortly after the federal officials announced the final tally, employees broke into loud cheers. Back in the newsroom, journalists hugged each other.
“The effort to unionize has already made the El Nuevo Herald and Miami Herald stronger by bringing reporters, copy editors and producers together in support of journalism and each other,” said David Smiley, senior political reporter for the Miami Herald. “With today’s results, we can continue that work in cooperation with management.”
The union allows workers to have a stronger voice in the newsroom on issues related to hiring, wages, leave, as well as editorial and financial decisions that have a daily impact on their lives.
“The spirit of brotherhood between el Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald journalists emanating from this initiative is unprecedented in the long shared history between the two newsrooms, which in the past lived in tacit antagonism. No one who was here in 1999, when I started at the Spanish paper as a reporter for the Metro section, would have imagined that a journalist at the Miami Herald would speak up in defense of an el Nuevo Herald colleague. It's so beautiful to witness this generational change that, although it has steadily developed in recent years, is culminating now with this collaborative project,” said Daniel Shoer Roth, a former Metro columnist for el Nuevo Herald who is now a web producer.