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.”

At the time, the possibility of a robust, profitable, and organized podcast industry was palpable. Workers at these companies organized rapidly, dramatically raising salary minimums; guaranteeing severance and healthcare; and codifying parental leave, gender-affirming care, and DEI practices — feats accomplished through hard-fought contracts and emotionally intense work from people such as Driscoll and Bridges. What followed was devastating.

In February 2019, Spotify announced that it had acquired Gimlet for $230 million and would acquire Parcast for approximately $56 million in March 2019. In October 2022, 38 people were laid off across the Gimlet and Parcast unions. Another 200 employees, including Driscoll, were laid off in June 2023, effectively shuttering both podcast outfits and absorbing the remaining staff into Spotify Studios. Pineapple Street Studios was also acquired in 2019, but by Entercom, now Audacy, for $18 million. Bridges was also laid off in March 2024. She was one of 200 people let go. By June 2025, Pineapple Street Studios had shuttered.

Despite these hardships, interest in podcasts hasn’t slowed. As of 2025, there are roughly half a million active podcasts worldwide, according to research from Demandsage. The same research shows that over the past year alone, the number of podcast listeners globally increased by approximately 6% from 546.7 million to a projected 584.1 million. But the landscape has undergone significant changes. The rapid evolution of the podcast industry means that the fertile ground for original scripted shows from podcast studios — which defined the industry just a few years ago — no longer exists in the same way. The more labor-intensive reported shows have been replaced by faster and cheaper-to-produce unscripted options, with industry giants like Spotify declaring it would focus on “always-on programming” to satiate listener appetite.

“Big companies [made] a very profit-oriented calculation: Narrative shows are expensive and chat shows are not, and it seems like everybody’s listening to chat shows,” Bridges said.

‘The absence of an organizational chart and issues of pay and severance were far from the only concerns facing those early organizers. There were also serious questions about creative control, intellectual property, and editorial integrity.’

No matter the type of podcast, the people creating it are part of the industry, which now includes among its workers every side-hustling celebrity and grifty influencer who bought podcast equipment in anticipation of a payday. Additionally, there are full-time producers, editors, sound mixers, writers, hosts, talent bookers, and marketing teams. Then there are part-time, contract, and freelance workers who do the same labor. It is difficult to calculate the exact number of people who work in podcasting, let alone organize them all. Yet one of the most important aspects of organizing a labor union is identifying who can be organized. 

“The organizing we were doing was a very particular kind of organizing, right? It’s like, you have to be a W-2 employee in order to be in the union,” Driscoll said. “That’s really not the way that most people are working in this industry, [so] you’re not in a position to organize a collective bargaining agreement through your company because you are not recognized fully as an employee.”

Part of what drove unions to form at workplaces in the first place is this conundrum, which results in a lack of clarity around titles, pay, benefits, time off, standards, and workflows. “The entire history of the podcast industry is just littered with people who are working part time,” one former staffer at The Ringer said. “People who just don’t have a full-time job, don’t get benefits, don’t really make that much, but they’re working on a show that’s being produced in perpetuity. They’re just on a six-month contract, forever.” 

A commonality among Gimlet, Parcast, and Pineapple Street Studios is that all three — plus Crooked, iHeartRadio, Pushkin Industries, and The Ringer — are, or were, organized under the Writers Guild of America East. This is no accident. Both current and former union members reported that WGAE was the most enthusiastic labor union they encountered when they began organizing their workplaces. 

“WGAE came in with a certain kind of strategy and a vision,” Bridges said. “They were talking to us in this way where the timeline was so fast with them. They were like: ‘We want to organize you. We want to do it quickly.’ Versus, I think the other unions that we talked to were like, we’ll be ready to organize with you at this later date.”

The absence of an organizational chart and issues of pay and severance were far from the only concerns facing those early organizers. There were also serious questions about creative control, intellectual property, and editorial integrity.

‘As organizing continues, individual unions bargaining individually might already be an outdated strategy. The crop of unions that emerged in 2019 was an exception.’

“Some of what I was most interested in organizing around was bigger conceptual stuff,” Bridges said. “Intellectual property, our control over what kinds of things we make, and editorial decision making.” At Spotify, attempts to include intellectual property rights in the contract were rejected. IP is considered the next major frontier of all media organizing. 

To its credit, WGAE hasn’t just been swift; it’s successfully addressed some of these issues. With its help, for example, iHeartRadio Union got nearly half a million dollars in immediate pay increases across all members, the right to bargain over the implementation of AI in the workplace, and guaranteed annual salary increases. 

“Through it all, the workers have stayed united to demand the salaries, benefits, and working conditions they deserve,” Jocelyn Krause, a field representative at WGAE, said. “Audio is a vital and visceral form of news and storytelling, and the WGAE is committed to organizing the workers who make it possible, no matter the direction media executives take the industry.”

Wins like this were built on the contracts won by Gimlet, Parcast, and Pineapple Street Studios. But like those studios, iHeartRadio workers also faced a series of layoffs both during and after the negotiation period. If the contracts did nothing else, they helped secure severance for laid-off workers. If podcast unions can’t always successfully organize against the rampant mismanagement and greed that threaten their jobs, they can provide a sort of aftercare in the event of layoffs.

Initially, Bridges recalled, Pineapple Street Studios offered only two weeks of severance pay. But through the union’s bargaining, she received 15 weeks of severance. “It was so life-altering to receive severance. It kept me in my home,” Bridges said. “I just fundamentally have no idea what I would have done without it.” 

WGAE is not the only place where people working in podcasting are unionized. The NPR Union — which recently suffered the loss of Susan Stamberg, a pioneer in unionizing public radio, fighting for the sustainable livelihoods of her colleagues, and creating a labor-friendly environment at the company — has its collective bargaining unit under SAG-AFTRA. Representing over 500 public radio employees, including podcast workers, it’s another example of where people can build union power, even while the future of public radio hangs in the balance due to federal funding for public broadcasting, which included support for NPR and PBS, officially being eliminated by Donald Trump.

As organizing continues, individual unions bargaining individually might already be an outdated strategy. The crop of unions that emerged in 2019 was an exception. Now that bell can’t be unrung, even if the model of shop-by-shop bargaining agreements struggles under the current gig economy structure favored by profit-oriented executives. The next generation of podcast labor organizers will just need to think creatively. 

Fighting for a future where podcasters have a minimum bargaining agreement, similar to what screenwriters have, instead of exclusively depending on W-2 jobs, could offer hope for a fruitful path forward.