Watch: Payday’s Civil War-Themed #OrganizeTheSouth Summer Fundraising Drive Video

Help Us Reach Our Summer Fundraising Goal of $10,000. So far, 100 people have donated $3,700. Join them.

$3,700 / $10,000

Donate Here!

A little more than a year ago, we launched Payday using a $25,000 investment from Payday Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk’s NLRB settlement from being illegally fired for union organizing at POLITICO.  Since then, we have raised more than $20,000 dollars directly from our readers.

In just one year of existence, Payday has been able to:

This past winter, we asked our readers to help us raise $5,000 and instead we raised $6,000. Those donations helped us be on-the-ground to cover some of the most important political moments in the South.

Just look at what we have published in the last three months alone (some of which has even been published by The Guardian):

  • In Nashville, Tennessee, we garnered national attention to the story of the electrocution death of a 30-year-old Guatemalan immigrant in what was recently dubbed the most dangerous major city for construction workers in the South.
  • In March, we traveled to Canton, Mississippi, where we covered the historic 5,000-person “March for Mississippi” against Nissan.
  • In Woodbridge, Virginia, we scored an exclusive interview with former Congressman Tom Perriello, who is running for governor of Virginia, and talked about race, pipelines, unions and building a new populist coalition.
  • We traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, where we covered the effect that Indivisible activists in the Deep South were having on the fight to save Obamacare.
  • We went to Durham, North Carolina, to cover the growing Fight for $15 movement and the fight against pre-emption laws that try to block local municipal wage ordinances.
  • In Louisville, Kentucky, Payday scored exclusive interviews with Senator Bernie Sanders and DNC Chair Tom Perez on the need for Southern Democrats to embrace unions.
  • In Atlanta, Georgia,  we covered the Southern Worker Assembly and the growing minority union movement in the South.
  • We captured the story of how Trump’s crackdown on undocumented workers has hurt the Kentucky Derby.
  • In Chattanooga, Tennessee, we covered how the UAW is starting to get more aggressive in its seven-year fight to organize Volkswagen.
  • Also, we traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, and are currently working on a story about a minority union struggle of black nurses at the Medical University of South Carolina. (Look for this story next week.)

In addition, we have done in-depth investigation that no other publication has done:

If we are able to raise $10,000 this summer, we will be able to do even more.

We want to do a year-long series dangers in Nashville’s construction industry and what Nashville government is doing to change the culture of workplace safety there.

We want to expand into doing more on-the-ground videos. And we wanna be able to hire on other reporters to do special assignments.

So, give today, and share our fundraising video on Facebook.

Love & Solidarity

Melk

 

Mike Elk is a member of the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild and is the senior labor reporter at Payday Report. He previously served as senior labor reporter at POLITICO and has written for the New York Times. He also writes for The Guardian.

 

About the Author

Mike Elk
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter and alumni of the Guardian. In addition to filing nearly 2,000 stories from 46 states, Elk traveled with Lula from Sáo Bernando do Campos all the way to the Oval Office in the White House. Credited by the Washington Post for being the first reporter to track the strike wave systematically, Elk started Payday Report using his NLRB settlement from being illegally fired for union organizing in 2015. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and works frequently in Rio de Janeiro, where he attended college at PUC-Rio. He speaks both Portuguese and Pittsburghese fluently. His email is [email protected]

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