Labor reporter asks for contributions to prevent being laid off

Mike Elk is an In These Times staff writer and a regular contributor to the labor blog Working In These Times.

Elk is trying to save his job by having people contribute to a GoFundMe account to keep from being laid off. So far, he has raised $765 of his $1,500 goal.

Elk writes:

On Friday evening, shortly after landing in Chattanooga to attend a meeting of injured Volkswagen workers, I got the news that all 5 of the unionized staff writers at In These Times, including myself, are getting laid off in June.

Layoffs don’t stop labor reporters from covering tough fights though. This is my third layoff – my second at In These Times. If my readers knew what my bank account looked like half of the time that I have been on out picket lines, they would be horrified.

However, this time if I am going to keep getting the scoops on the Volkswagen story, I am going to need your help as readers to do it. And if you give enough, you might even get a bottle of homemade Tennessee moonshine out of it.

Elk is a Pittsburgh native and labor journalist for In These Times. His investigative work has been cited on the front page of the New York Times and debated by Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters on ABC’s The View. Elk won a Sidney Award for his coverage of how corporations crafted legislation to exempt prison labor from U.S. minimum wage laws. A regular guest on MSNBC and Democracy Now!, Elk has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, and The Nation.

He lives in Washington, D.C. but is often on the road. On Monday, he was in Chattanooga covering the efforts of Volkwagen workers to unionize.