Many editorial and video employees at Vox Media are, at this hour, finishing up a walkout to protest their employer’s stance on a number of wage and other issues — including guaranteed annual raises, better severance, and revenue sharing on derivative works. (They’re represented by the Vox Media Union, which is an affiliate of Writers Guild of America, East.)

Today, hundreds of us are walking out for an hour to urge @voxmediainc management to agree to a fair contract. pic.twitter.com/SFIiqMSRnB

— Vox Media Union (@vox_union) May 29, 2019

Excited to be walking out at 1pm today in solidarity with @vox_union

My demands include:
* Raises that exceed the Fed's inflation target
* Severance longer than management's proposed 2 (!) weeks
* A great steering wheel that doesn't whiff out the window while i'm driving

— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) May 29, 2019

At 1pm EDT today, I and my @vox_union colleagues will be walking out of the office in a show of solidarity.

We need management to buckle down and finalize a contract that protects present and future Vox employees.

— Dara Lind (@DLind) May 29, 2019

walking out* in solidarity with the fight for a fair @vox_union contract

*as soon as the elevator arrives pic.twitter.com/DU1ybZRF1t

— Alanna Okun (@alanna) May 29, 2019

Here's what we're still fighting for and why we're walking out (thread): https://t.co/nWW97S4h7O

— Vox Media Union (@vox_union) May 29, 2019

(One piece of friendly advice from a former Guild member: If you want to firmly distinguish a one-hour 1 p.m. walkout from a lunch break, maybe don’t tweet out photos of the chicken satay.)

hi we walked out of work for an hour to stand with @vox_union and there were quesadillas! pic.twitter.com/TN4s2GbA10

— daniel geneen (@dangeneen) May 29, 2019

Unionization in digital media is a broader trend, and workers are watching how companies in the sector respond. And some new jobs data gathered by Joshua Fruhlinger at Thinknum gives us one look at how Vox Media has responded — by shifting its hiring efforts toward contract, part-time, and freelance employees and away from full-time staff.

The story is told by the two charts below. On November 16, 2017 — the day before Vox Media staffers announced their intention to unionize, Vox listed 102 full-time job openings and just 2 that were part-time, contract, or freelance. That’s a 51:1 ratio.

Fast forward to today and those numbers stand at 57 full-time positions and 25 part-time or contract — more like a 2:1 ratio.

Most of Vox Media’s less than full-time employees — the ones who get a 1099 form come tax time instead of a W-4 — aren’t eligible to join the union.

While full-time openings began a steep decline at almost exactly the moment the unionization was announced, Vox Media didn’t really begin listing contract or part-time jobs in large numbers until last November.

(Note that the Y-axes on these two charts are different.)

It’s very important to remember that Vox Media isn’t operating in a vacuum here. The general outlook for the digital media companies in its class — Vice, BuzzFeed, and so on — is markedly worse today than it was 18 months ago. November 16, 2017 — that full-time hiring peak — was also the day that The Wall Street Journal published news that BuzzFeed was “on track to miss its revenue target this year by a significant amount, the latest sign that troubles in the online-ad business are making it tough for new-media upstarts to live up to lofty expectations.” I think of that story as a useful marker for a shift toward the pessimistic in the industry and realization of what the duopoly hath wrought.

In other words, a corporate shift away from full-time staffing and toward a more part-time, contract, and freelance workforce might well have been something Vox Media would have wanted to do even if the Vox Media Union had never come into existence.

That said…this is also a pretty common way for a company to respond to labor organizing.

How you interpret this will probably depend on your priors. A greedy company pushing full-time staff toward a gig-economy-style existence? A union shooting itself in the foot by incentivizing its employer to shift toward less secure jobs? A corporation showing exactly why unionization is important and that it can’t be counted on to be an altruistic employer? A company in a struggling sector just trying to ensure it has flexibility in how it allocates its resources, at a time when many of its digital peers or shutting down entirely or going at firesale prices?

I await a Vox explainer on this economic Rashomon, whenever everyone’s back at their desks.

Update, May 31: Vox Media publisher Melissa Bell sent me this statement: “We are actively hiring full-time employees and we have not shifted to offering more part-time and contract roles in lieu of employees. We have made no changes to our hiring plans since the formation of the Vox Media Union and an analysis solely based on a scraping of open roles on our website is not a sufficient measurement of full-time hires versus part-time and/or contractor roles. And, we hired more than 150 full-time employees in 2018, and expect to hire about the same number this year.”