Editorial workers at Charlotte’s WFAE (90.7 FM) have officially formed a union with SAG-AFTRA less than a month after voting to do so.
The union is a first for a public radio station in the Carolinas, a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson said in a statement sent to Radio Ink in November. A neutral third-party verified that over 70% of WFAE’s content creators favored unionizing with SAG-AFTRA, the organization said on Friday.
The bargaining unit will comprise editorial staff at the station, including producers, on-air hosts, digital support workers and other content creators at WFAE.
“This union will be key to WFAE’s continued success,” a spokesperson for the employee organizing committee said. “Voluntary recognition ensures that we can begin the collective bargaining process as soon as possible to make our station stronger than ever.”
“This is a huge win for WFAE employees and for the larger Charlotte community,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, said on Friday. “It’s also a historic win for organized labor, demonstrating that it is possible to successfully organize in so-called ‘right-to-work’ states. I applaud WFAE management for voluntarily recognizing the will of its content creators to form a union.”
The organizing committee said the next step is to work with WFAE’s management on a collective bargaining agreement.
“Our goal is to ensure that WFAE is a safe, equitable place to work,” the committee said. “With our union, we will have a seat at the table and be able to help shape the future of WFAE and better serve the Charlotte community.”
