Help a Freelance Labor Reporter Afford a Labor Day Vacation

By: Mike Elk August 21, 2019

Help Us Reach Our Labor Day Vacation Goal

$2,321 / $2,500

Donate Here!

The last two weeks of August are a brutal time for freelancers. While everyone else is off on vacation, you have to work because you have no paid vacation days and you’re a broke freelancer.

Instead, you find yourself distracted and miserable as you scroll Facebook watching everyone else have fun. And man, it’s Labor Day, why can’t a labor reporter take a labor day vacation like everyone else? Everyone else is packing their stuff to go to the beach or for the weekend away, they’ve got their sunblock and their best beach canopy as well as tons of towels and food. Why can’t I have the same?

So here’s the plan: the United Electrical Workers, of which my father Gene Elk is the Director of Organization, is holding their convention in Pittsburgh next Monday. I am gonna take a few days off to attend that then I am gonna go to Philly.

The Pirates have completely collapsed and it’d be great to go to Philly to see the Phillies, who are still in the playoff hunt. Maybe even take the bus up to New York to stay with friends, catch a few Mets game, and take a trip to Rockway Beach.

While I intend to travel cheap and stay with friends, I simply can’t, as a freelancer, afford to take a week and a half off to enjoy a proper summer vacation. So I am asking my readers for help.

If I raise $1000, I promise to go on an amazing vacation and send my readers plenty of photos.

For three years now, my readers, through crowdfunding, have helped me stay in the news industry as freelance pay and opportunities are being cut everywhere. I ask your support once again for something so many people take for granted: a Labor Day vacation.

Donate today.

About the Author

Mike Elk
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 exposing within the labor movement. Raised in a UE union family in Pittsburgh, Elk was illegally 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 when attending journalism school at PUC-Rio de Janerio. Email: [email protected]

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