Employees of digital and direct response marketing agency MissionWired have announced the formation of a union. It is the latest shop to be swept up in a labor organizing drive by digital, media and communications workers.
Staffers at the company went public with the move on social media on July 20 after approving it by what is believed to have been a supermajority of at least two-thirds of the 266 employees, though the exact percentage could not immediately be verified. Managers of MissionWired told The NonProfit Times the union will be voluntarily recognized rather than contested, which would have triggered a formal election to be held under supervision of the National Labor Relations Board and likely only delay the process.
It is unclear if working conditions, pay or other factors at the agency might have prompted the move. Employees plan to affiliate with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Workers have not publicly identified a specific set of grievances or demands they intend to press when they begin collectively bargaining on a contract. For now, both sides are playing nice, at least publicly.
“MissionWired proudly plans to voluntarily recognize (the union),” said MissionWired CEO Anne Lewis. “We are in conversations with the Communications Workers of America and hope to formalize our decision quickly. It’s our priority to make sure we’re set up to retain the industry’s best talent and drive exceptional results for our clients, so we’re excited about the conversations to come, grateful to our incredible team, and confident that the steps ahead will make MissionWired an even better partner to the campaigns and organizations we serve.”
Leaders of the newly formed union, who are calling themselves “MissionWired Workers United,” put out a similar statement following the announcement. The statement was forwarded to The NonProfit Times by MissionWired digital strategist George Clark, one of several employees who cheered the announcement on LinkedIn.
“We are proud to announce that a large supermajority of employees at MissionWired have joined together to unionize with Communications Workers of America as MissionWired Workers United,” the leaders wrote. “We announced our decision publicly to management on July 20th and preliminary discussions with management have been positive. Right now, we are eagerly awaiting management to voluntarily recognize our unit so that we may begin bargaining in good faith for a fair contract.”
Still to be determined is who will be eligible to belong to the new union, which will exclude members of the management team but likely include everyone else. Lewis said company and union leaders have jointly begun the process “of identifying the collective bargaining unit as defined by the National Labor Relations Act.”
CWA has been actively promoting unionization in the media and tech industries to fight consolidation and layoffs and push for greater workforce diversity. It also launched a campaign expressly for that purpose, called the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA).
MissionWired, a portfolio company of private equity firm Stone-Goff Partners, originally launched as Anne Lewis Strategies in 2007. The company has since raised what leaders say has been more than $3.1 billion for nonprofit clients and Democratic political campaigns, among them the Biden-Harris campaign, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Americares, Sandy Hook Promise.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., MissionWired has additional locations in New York, Denver., Oakland, California and Arlington, Virginia.
