One of the most anxiety-inducing days of Meg Driscoll’s life was when Gimlet management discovered the staff was unionizing. Until that day, the union drive had been a secret, and the 10-person organizing committee was incredibly committed to keeping it that way. 

Meetings were held off-site after work, and extreme caution was taken to keep them confidential. “We were all leaving the office and walking in separate directions,” Driscoll said. For months, the committee met to determine potential members and pressing issues. “That, for me, was when it was extremely nerve-wracking, and you could feel the thing getting bigger and more difficult to manage, and taking up more of our time,” Driscoll said. After much consideration, they prepared to petition the National Labor Relations Board for a unionization vote.

But before they were ready, one day in early 2019, management asked about the union, a word that, before that conversation, no one had dared utter at the office. It turned out that Spotify was in the process of purchasing Gimlet, and a union could complicate the sale. Driscoll and the rest of the organizing committee rushed into action in an effort to prevent any potential union-busting activity. What happened next was no easy path to victory.

“We descended upon our coworker’s apartment, where we used to meet,” Driscoll said. Within an hour, union members took the first step in petitioning the NLRB by collecting signed authorization cards, which indicated that employees wished to be represented by the union for the purpose of collective bargaining. 

What happened next was no easy path to victory. Still, it inspired other podcast companies to fight for recognition and secure first contracts, establishing a baseline for wages, benefits, and working conditions. Within a few years, unions sprang up at Pineapple Street Studios, Parcast, Crooked, iHeartRadio, Pushkin Industries, and The Ringer. Sophie Bridges, who started working at Pineapple Street Studios as an intern in 2019 and later became a producer, began organizing with a few coworkers after the Gimlet staff union went public. 

“The Gimlet unionization effort was something that I had followed, probably even before I had a job in podcasting,” Bridges said. “It was so cool to see people sticking up for themselves and also putting forward this vision of what working in this industry should look like.”