Marathe433/Wikimedia Commons
Former Reply All co-host P.J. Vogt at Gimlet Media’s Brooklyn offices, in January 2016
The artisan and socialist William Morris famously identified three hopes that make work worth doing: hope of rest, hope of product, and hope of pleasure in the work itself. The last one and the first one are fairly self-explanatory, but the middle one is a question that still remains central to many of today’s creative workers. Will they, in fact, have any control over the thing they create?
As workers at Gimlet Media, a narrative podcast production company based in Brooklyn and owned by the streaming media giant Spotify, labored over the past two years to unionize and then bargain a first contract, that question has been central to their struggles. This week, they’re in marathon bargaining sessions, trying to get to a deal by a Thursday deadline that will, importantly, include frameworks for the workers to own some of the rights to derivative works made from the podcasts they create.
“We are pushing as hard as we possibly can to try and get a deal,” said Meg Driscoll, a producer at Gimlet and member of the bargaining team. The derivative works question, she said, is the biggest issue that they remain stuck on. “It’s the idea that people might get to … not own their work, but have a say in when something is made from their work or get some of the earnings from that.”
Driscoll has been at Gimlet for nearly five years, and she’s witnessed a lot of changes in the company. The idea of unionizing first came to her attention nearly three years ago, she said, but at first it didn’t really amount to much. By summer 2018, however, the company had expanded, and the workers, she said, felt “a recognition that we didn’t have a say in that, and came to recognize that they wanted to have a say in it.”
Podcasting has become big business. A Business Insider report last month estimated that “weekly podcast listenership has more than doubled since 2016” and that podcasts would be a billion-dollar industry by 2021. Gimlet is known for shows like StartUp, Conviction, Uncivil, Mogul, and Reply All (about which more shortly), and many of its workers have radio or television backgrounds. Driscoll left TV to work for Gimlet; another worker the Prospect spoke with, who preferred not to be named, came from public radio and had been a member of the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA).
The union drive began before Spotify purchased Gimlet in part of an acquisitions binge that also included podcasting companies Parcast and The Ringer, both of which have also unionized. Gimlet’s union ultimately held off on going public until after the Spotify deal went through; they then announced their move to join the Writers Guild of America, East in early 2019. Management voluntarily recognized the union that April, and since then the 60-member bargaining unit has been bargaining.
Gimlet management did not respond to a request for comment.
The Gimlet workers were inspired to unionize by other media companies, but as attention grows to union drives now within the broadly defined “tech” industry, from the Alphabet Union at Google to the union vote ongoing at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, it is worth noting that they are some of the first to negotiate with a major tech platform in Spotify. And fittingly, their organizing has drawn from both worlds—including, this December, a work stoppage live-streamed on the platform Twitch.
The two-hour action, the unnamed worker noted, “not only allowed us to unite with listeners and to let them know what we’re doing, but to also include our colleagues at The Ringer and Parcast.” It was in part a way to hold a job action safely and remotely during a pandemic, but in part a recognition of the reality of digital media. Gimlet workers, and their audience, are often Extremely Online, and done well, a work stoppage can be its own kind of compelling digital content. According to the WGAE, 2,365 unique viewers watched the stream.
“That was a really amazing day, an amazing feeling,” Driscoll said, particularly the solidarity across the three podcast companies. “Everything we are all doing is with each other in mind.”
It’s true that the image of workers at media companies like Gimlet can be glamorized. People have asked these workers what more they could want from their jobs. Yet, as the unnamed employee, a longtime worker in radio and podcasting, said, “I’m recognizing that so much of what we’re doing, the idea is to change things for people coming into this industry and for people starting their careers.”
The employee added, “We sincerely love our job.”
THAT LOVE HAS BEEN TESTED over the last couple of weeks. At the end of February, former Gimlet worker Eric Eddings posted a Twitter thread criticizing two of his co-workers, Sruthi Pinnamaneni and P.J. Vogt of the Reply All podcast, for creating a toxic environment for him and other colleagues who were involved in the union drive. The experience had been painful for Eddings, particularly given Pinnamaneni and Vogt’s prominent role as faces of Reply All’s miniseries “The Test Kitchen,” which was an investigation into the workplace dynamics and complaints of racism at Bon Appetit.
Gimlet’s union drive, Eddings tweeted, was a way for him and other workers of color to change power dynamics at the company, and bring diversity to the bargaining table—a position echoed by the workers the Prospect spoke with. The Reply All team, Eddings tweeted, “used their weight as a cudgel against our efforts at voluntary recognition. Sruthi personally held an anti-union meeting, trying to rally people against it.” He continued, “I’ve personally seen harassing messages sent by PJ to other Organizing Committee members. Heard him denigrate other colleagues. He and I had a meeting, where I begged him simply not to attack the union.” Pinnamaneni, he tweeted, “had ‘called me a piece of shit and asked [Vogt] to tell me.’”
Brittany Luse, another former Gimlet employee and Eddings’s co-host on The Nod, told The New York Times, “There were so many days where I just woke up crying” during the union drive, and that some co-workers “like to seem in favor of a more equitable workplace, but privately were just behaving in a completely different way.”
After the tweet thread, Reply All announced that “The Test Kitchen” would no longer air, that Vogt was leaving the show, and that Pinnamaneni was also stepping back. Vogt tweeted a public apology, saying, “I deeply failed as an ally during the unionization era at Gimlet.”
But, of course, that unionization era isn’t over. Gimlet managing director Lydia Polgreen noted that in her statement on the situation, writing, “These events are also a reminder that we are in the midst of a collective bargaining process that is by its nature confrontational … I know that the people who organized the union are motivated by a desire to make Gimlet better. We may disagree about the specifics of how to achieve that goal, but we are united in wanting to make Gimlet the best place for the most ambitious creators of audio to work.”
Driscoll noted that there had been a group within Gimlet trying to work on diversity since 2016. Management has not addressed proposals to improve the situation. Diversity is one of the items in the current bargaining talks. “The thing that has been very rough for a lot of people over the last few weeks is feeling like these problems that we’ve been trying to address for a really long time still exist,” Driscoll said, describing diversity standards as “one of those things that we really feel would go a really long way towards helping with morale, helping to sort of adjust some of our internal power structures, trying to right the wrongs of the past.”
Several workers at Gimlet made the decision to come from established media to a podcasting startup because of the opportunity to shape the culture in a way that older institutions often resist. Yet, the unnamed worker noted, they’ve seen many talented people of color leave the company and don’t want to see a new industry wind up replicating the racist hierarchies of old media. In a way, the meltdown at Reply All and the attention paid to it just underscores the reality: Podcasts are big business now. “We’re seeing Spotify make these big deals with big names, in the same way that we see happen in a similar way in TV. That’s definitely a big difference from the way it felt five years ago,” Driscoll said.
“The idea is to change things for people coming into this industry and for people starting their careers.”
It might be a bubble and it might burst, but for now, workers at Gimlet are concentrating on setting standards for the industry, knowing that what they win will be watched closely by other podcast companies. They’re negotiating minimum salaries for each role, guiding the diversity proposal, pushing for across-the-board minimum annual raises, and more.
But the big issue remains the derivative works question, and to Driscoll it is itself an issue of diversity and staff retention. “It’s not just work that people spend a tremendous amount of time on and are so committed to that they’re always willing to work the extra hours and go the extra mile for. It’s been very much work that is often about people, voiced by people,” Driscoll said. “What we’re asking for is just that someone might then be able to have a say if someone wants to make a movie of that. We also feel a really strong commitment to our sources, to the people that we make things about.”
It is an intellectual-property issue, of course—who made the work and has rights to say what gets made from it? But it is a bigger question that on some level goes all the way back to Morris and Marx, who noted that such worker alienation from the product of their labor is at the heart of capitalism. It is not, in other words, simply symbolic to give the workers some ownership. “I think we understand Spotify’s business [model] and we understand why it has bought podcasting production houses and made the types of show deals it has,” the unnamed worker noted. “For companies like Gimlet and podcasts and Ringer, how valuable that IP is, and how it allows a much different model than what they have to do with musicians.”
That kind of literal equity is important in an entertainment industry that does not grant equal power to workers of color, and does not treat their creativity as equally valuable. “Diversity isn’t just one section in our contracts,” the worker continued. Economic fairness is also a way to ensure it.
“We’ve been in bargaining for a year and a half,” Driscoll said. “Just listen to your employees. Addressing these problems in a concrete way would go so far in terms of trying to regain trust.”
