So-Called “Job Creator” CEO Worth Billions Slashes Jobs for “Financial Reasons”
Last week, workers at two popular New York City news sites, DNAInfo and Gothamist, voted to unionize. This week, CEO Joe Ricketts announced he was shutting down both platforms due to financial reasons.
As much as Joe likes to make it seem as if this was merely a decision about poor profits, a far more sinister picture can be seen as the workers faced pushback from upper management while they were attempting to organize. They were told unionizing might be “the final straw that caused the business to close.” Joe himself even wrote, “As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything, I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.”
Joe, a Trump supporter whose net worth is $2.1 billion, is supposed to be one of those “job creators” Republicans like to put on a pedestal. Yet he is doing the exact opposite by getting rid of 115 hard-working employees whose work is beloved by New York neighborhoods. Worse, he very likely did it as punishment.
Gothamist was also one of the first sites to cover #AuditTheVote and to write about the Russian hacking of the election after Trump won.
The Writers Guild of America East, who those workers voted to join, is vowing to do everything they can for their would-have-been members.
″It is no secret that threats were made to these workers during the organizing drive,” the union said in a statement Thursday. “The Guild will be looking at all of our potential areas of recourse and we will aggressively pursue our new members’ rights.”
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