People Union Employees Win Arbitration Over Web Writing

A group of People magazine writers represented by the Newspaper Guild of New York have won an arbitration ruling upholding a 2007 agreement with Time Inc. that allowed all writing for magazine Web sites to be voluntary, Mediaweek reported yesterday.

According to the report, the 2007 agreement between the guild and the magazine publisher said writers would not be forced to write for sites like People.com, and if they did their workload would be “adjusted accordingly.” People writers in the Los Angeles bureau felt their superiors were in violation of the agreement, and arbitrators agreed, although they did not award back pay to the writers who put in extra time on the site.

It seems silly, at a time when print and online coverage seem like one and the same for so many magazines and newspapers, to argue over whether writing for the Web is part of what a writer is getting paid to do. But we applaud the guild for standing up for writers’ rights to get paid for the work they put in, because so many writers today are paid so little (especially when they work on the Web) but go above and beyond without even thinking of asking for additional wages.

People.com Guild Employees Claim Win in Labor Case –Mediaweek

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