Vox Employees Walk Out in Hissy Fit Over Contract Negotiations

  |  
Jun 6, 2019

Amidst a week of media attention for being a proponent of tech censorship, “reporters” at Vox walked out of work Thursday, striking in order receive a contract from Vox’s parent company, Vox Media.

“Our unit members are taking their sites dark today to show management how important these issues are to us. Contract now,” Vox’s official union Twitter account said. “The Vox Media Union has walked out today. Here’s what it looks like in the New York office.”

The group is bargaining for competitive wage scales, strong guaranteed raises, better severance, and subcontracting work according to an earlier Tweet. Union members promised not to show up to work until their contract issues are resolved.

The strike is not going so well for some. Reporter Dylan Matthews became enraged when Vox published a story that he wrote, despite the walkout.

“I did not schedule this tweet of my article. Please do not click links from the tweets management is forcing folks out of unit to do while we walk out,” he said.

https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1136674462911422465?s=12

Vox has been in the news this week primarily for its “reporter” Carlos Maza’s attempt to get right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder banned from the platform.

Big League Politics reported:

After five days of whining about right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder’s “offensive” T-shirts, a Vox journalist has goaded the video platform giant into de-monetizing Crowder’s channel until he removes the link for his store.

It started on May 29, when Carloz Maza, a gay Vox “journalist” who runs a newsletter called “Strikethrough” began whining about Crowder’s videos aimed at debunking his newsletters.

The next day, he complained that Crowder was making “overt attacks” against him for his sexual orientation and race. He posted a clearly – in the parlance of our times – doctored video mashup of Crowder using a high-pitched voice to mock him.

“So, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to online harassment, but something has been really bothering me,” he said. Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video ‘debunking’ Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity.”

“You’re being given a free pass as a crappy writer because you’re gay,” Crowder said in one of the videos. He also uses the word “queer” in reference to Maza several times.

Maza began lobbying YouTube to remove Crowder’s videos, based on the fact that Crowder is mean and that he sells a shirt which says “Socialism is for F*gs.” (I did not add the asterisk. That is what the shirt says).

Six days of solely focusing on Crowder, and whipping up a mob of left-wingers – including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) – into a frenzy over Crowder’s content, YouTube finally responded.

Tuesday, YouTube said that Crowder’s videos did not violate their policies.

“Our teams spent the last few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us, and while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies,” the tech giant said in response to Maza.

That message enraged Maza and his supporters, who doubled down on their indignation.

“I don’t know what to say. [YouTube] has decided not to punish Crowder, after he spent two years harassing me for being gay and Latino. I don’t know what to say,” Maza said.

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