Two months after two senior staff members of the Better Government Association resigned under duress, all 11 members of the staff they left behind signed a petition to join the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) to unionize. Wage scales are an inevitable subject of negotiation when management sits down with labor, but job insecurity often plays a bigger role when employees decide to unionize in the first place.
Media shops in Chicago have been down this road before. The idea of unionizing the staff of Chicago Public Media was kicked around for years without going anywhere, before CEO Torey Malatia was fired in 2013. Five months later the professional staff voted 40 to 7 to join SAG-AFTRA.
The same day that the BGA announced Reed and Herguth were leaving, it added two new consultants: Doug Longhini, a former BGA, ABC, and NBC reporter, to work with the investigative unit; and Clark Bell, a former reporter and journalism program director of the McCormick Foundation, to deal with strategic initiatives.
