האגודה הישראלית לחקר יחסי עבודה

could address a list of concerns ― and not necessarily about pay. Some reporters, for instance, felt pressure to write uncritical articles about big law firms and their partners.

So management’s reaction to the union effort struck a few of those staffers as ironic. Law360 quickly retained the services of Jackson Lewis, a law firm well known for its pricey “union avoidance” work on behalf of employers. As it happens, Jackson Lewis gets plenty of nice coverage in the pages of Law360. Last year, the site put Jackson Lewis on its top ten lists for “most charitable law firms” and the “mightiest employment practice groups.”

Many Law360 staffers hope to become the latest in a string of digital news outlets that have unionized, shaking up what has generally been a union-free area in the journalism industry. The list includes Gawker, ThinkProgress, Salon, Vice, The Huffington Post (whose employees joined the Writers Guild of America, East, earlier this year) and the dismantled Al Jazeera America.

But the case of Law360, which is owned by the research firm LexisNexis, differs in a key way: Management strongly opposes the union effort and appears to be putting serious resources into stopping it. Many employees have already been urged to attend what are commonly called captive audience meetings, HuffPost has learned. These are meetings in which consultants deliver an anti-union message to employees in the hopes of eroding enough union support among the workforce that the union loses an election.

“It was inevitable,” said Nastaran Mohit, an organizer with the NewsGuild, noting that captive audience meetings are common in other fields. “We knew at some point we would see the opposition that falls in line with other industries.”

Most digital outlets so far have agreed to voluntarily recognize their staffers’ union after a majority of employees submitted union cards. Al Jazeera America declined to go that route, instead requesting that employees vote in a secret-ballot election. (Any employer has the right to demand a vote.) But Al Jazeera America did not go so far as to pay for outside consultants to deliver an anti-union message. Employees there voted in favor of the union but were soon laid off when the network folded.

Law360 employees in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, along with remote employees, will vote in their election later this month, with roughly 130 employees eligible to cast ballots, according to the NewsGuild. Workers in all those offices have been told to attend anti-union meetings, and remote workers were told to call in, Mohit said.

Chris Giganti, a Law360 spokesman, said in an email that the company wanted to give every worker the opportunity to make a personal decision in private. “Everyone should have a voice in this important decision and we respect that right,” Giganti said. “That’s why we insisted on a secret ballot election the [National Labor Relations Board] will conduct.”

As for the consultants speaking to employees, “we just want to make sure they make an informed and educated decision after getting both sides of the story,” Giganti said. “Since we don’t have internal expertise on this subject, we’ve arranged for people with more experience in these matters to share their knowledge with our staff.”

According to one employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the site’s journalists were told that they would sit through as many as four such meetings before the election. Although they were not explicitly called mandatory, employees were “strongly encouraged” to attend the meetings.

“There is a strong anti-union backlash coming from management,” the employee said. “The message is coming through the anti-union consultants.”