Candidate for Vice President, Online Media Sector
I’m Jessica Schulberg and I’m running unopposed to be the Vice President of Online Media on the WGAE Council. I have served on Council as an online media representative since 2022, and currently co-chair our Organizing Committee. I have been a HuffPost Union committee member since 2017, and have helped negotiate three of our collective bargaining agreements.
During my last four years on Council, I’ve had the privilege of learning from my fellow members in every sector of our Guild, watching as they found creative ways to eke out wins for our members amidst what feels like an ever-collapsing floor in our industries. We’ve compared notes, sharing what worked, and which roadblocks we haven’t figured out how to overcome. Together, we have built on one another’s successes, and supported each other through times of struggle.
As the co-chair of the Council’s organizing committee, I’ve worked closely with the Guild’s organizing staff to help sustainably grow our union, bolstering the power of our union, while expanding protections to as many workers as possible.
I write this statement as I prepare to get laid off from my job as a senior reporter at HuffPost, my professional home for the past 11 years.
It is thanks to my beloved HuffPost Union, and the 30-day layoff notice we negotiated in our CBA, that I have this unique opportunity to prepare. My colleagues who laid off before 2023 had only a few panicked hours to scramble to save their work, their contacts, and maybe forward a few emails. They were unceremoniously locked out from the workplace they had devoted much of their adult lives to, without even a chance to send off a goodbye email.
I’ve had time to cry and to vent and to plan. I’ve gotten to wrap up my last story, work with my union committee colleagues to negotiate the terms of our layoffs, save my past work, notify sources, transfer my passwords from a work-linked password manager to a personal one, and to write a very long goodbye email. In short, I’ve had time to prepare my exit with dignity and closure.
Thanks to the union, I have 19 weeks of severance, with full healthcare at no cost to me, along with payout for my 37 days of unused paid time off — a considerably greater safety net than what management is offering my non-union colleagues. Because of this, my fears and anxiety about what’s next are accompanied by relief at the chance to take a paid break, to catch my breath. And then, to dive more fully into union work, because I want every worker to have the protections that I’ve had.
HuffPost was my dream job, in no small part because of the newsroom the union helped create. I had the privilege of helping to negotiate three of our four CBAs and to serve on our enforcement committees over the past nine years. Together, we negotiated salary minimums and annual wage increases that afforded me the ability to stay in journalism, codified many of our ever-diminishing benefits, fought for overdue promotions, protected our severance from efforts to slash it, averted layoffs through voluntary buyouts, and raised money for people whose jobs we couldn’t save. Along the way, we transformed our once-factionalized newsroom into a community where an injury to one is an insult to us all.
In our last round of contract negotiations, management made an 11th hour offer: we could keep our severance in exchange for future hires moving to BuzzFeed’s inferior policy. Our members, 100% of whom had signed a strike pledge, didn’t blink. In one of the proudest moments of my life, we told management we had no interest in making it cheaper to lay off any of our members, including the ones we did not yet know. Today, our CBA provides the same industry-leading protections to each and every member.
I don’t know all of you, but as Vice President, I will stand in solidarity with all of you, and continue working to keep the WGAE a member-led, fighting union.
Endorsements
Kevin Cortez, Lisa Cullen, Sara David, Christopher Gethard, Elizabeth Godvik, Jared Greenhouse, Liz Hynes, Sanjana Karanth, Opheli Lawler, Zachary Lennon-Simon, Zito Madu, Sarah Montana, Allan Neuwirth, Hamilton Nolan, Mary Perkins, Susan Rinkunas, Sharyn Rothstein, Erica Saleh, Matt Shuham, Sasha Stewart, Suzanne Weber
Endorse Jessica Schulberg for Vice President, Online Media Sector
Note: WGAW members who wish to endorse a candidate may follow the process outlined in section G.1.B of the 2026 Election Policy.
