Writers who worked for free for Huffington Post figure they’re owed a pretty big slice of Arianna Huffington‘s slice of the online publication’s sale to AOL in February for US$315 million. Said writers have been carping—presumably also for free—in virtually any online forum that will listen and now they’ve upped the ante by filing a class action lawsuit demanding US$105 million. That’s one-third of the Huffington Post sales price.
The lawsuit is spearheaded by Jonathan Tasini, no stranger to the courts when lots of writers are concerned. Tasini was president of the National Writers Union, 1990-2003; I was a member of the union during part of that time and found it to be singularly ineffective in a dispute with a publisher. It was discovered during Tasini’s tenure as president of the union that Employers Mutual Insurance, the union’s health insurance provider, was operating fraudulently and wrongfully denying insurance claims. Tasini was also the lead plaintiff in New York Times Co. v. Tasini. In 2001 the US Supreme Court found in favor of Tasini and other plaintiffs who had challenged the republishing of their work in electronic databases without permission.
Somehow Tasini and these writers have come to believe that they’re entitled to some portion of the proceeds of the Huffington Post sale to AOL. Near as I can tell these writers willfully agreed to provide articles to the Huffington Post without compensation—no one chained them to a desk and forced them to write—and now they want a piece of Huffington’s pie.
In a press conference earlier today, Tasini said, “In my view, the Huffington Post‘s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation. She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’ We are going to make Arianna Huffington a pariah in the progressive community. No one will blog for her. She’ll never [be invited to] speak. We will picket her home. We’re going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell.”
Some pretty heavy hitters in journalism circles have sided with Tasini and the unpaid writers: Tim Rutten, writing in the Los Angeles Times, compared the Huffington Post‘s business model to “a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.” Dan Gillmor—whom I admire greatly—called on Arianna Huffington to “do the right thing: Namely, cut a bunch of checks to a bunch of the most productive contributors on whose work she’s built a significant part of her new fortune.”
Jesse Strauss, an attorney for Tasini and the other plaintiffs, told Jeff Bercovici, who was once an AOL employee, writing for Forbes, “the suit is based on a claim of unjust enrichment…. The legal theory we’re going on is one based in common law. This is not a statutory claim…. This is not a contract claim.”
Indeed, AOL has been in court for using unpaid labor previously. In 1999, two volunteer moderators brought suit under the Fair Labor Standards Act. That lawsuit ended with a reported US$15 million settlement after the court refused to dismiss the case against AOL but similarly refused to move the case to trial.
Should Arianna Huffington share her payday with the people that made it possible? Of course; it’s ethically and morally the correct thing to do. Should Huffington be legally required to share the spoils of her sale? Not a chance. Presumably, these writers had neither contracts nor assignments from Huffington Post. Any writer who writes without compensation—especially in an age where anyone can start their own publishing platform at no cost and reach a global audience—is a fool, having only herself to blame.
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