Payday has shown a proven ability to impact the conversation on the labor movement. Our work covering the strike wave has been praised by The Washington Post, which cited our work tracking strikes in a front-page cover story. The New York Times described us as a publication with “new energy.” PBS American Portrait profiled our work tracking the strike wave, and Esquire described our work as “invaluable.”
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Mike Elk, Senior Labor Reporter & Founder
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter who covered everything from Lula & the Brazilian labor movement to major league baseball. He spent years covering union organizing in the South for The Guardian and was labeled by the New York Times as an “abrasive gadfly” for his role in exposing sexual misconduct within the labor movement.
Raised in a UE union family in Pittsburgh, Elk was illegally fired for union organizing at Politico in 2015 and used his NLRB settlement to start the crowd-funded Payday Report. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and is fluent in both Pittsburghese and Portuguese, which he learned in journalism school in Rio de Janeiro.
He can be reached at melk@paydayreport.com or on Twitter @MikeElk.
Kat Callahan, Associate Editor
Kat Callahan is a journalist, civics teacher, and union organizer, with her previous reporting being in the areas of political, LGBTQ, Japanese, and automotive news. She has worked for Jezebel, Jalopnik, and contributed to AnimeNow and got her start as a student journalist at the Daily Texan.
She has contributed to academic textbooks. Her academic interests include historical Japanese radical ultranationalism and internationalization/supranationalism. Callahan has been active in unions both in the U.S. and Japan.
In addition to freelance journalism and editing, she currently works and teaches in Tokyo.