Help Payday Expand Into Appalachia & the Rust Belt 

Last month, 57 readers donated $1,945 to help Payday Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk secure a home after a year of couch-surfing. Now, we need your help to get furniture in the house and pay the rent.

Yesterday, I asked for $80 to turn on our internet and within a few hours, we got $213.

Our strength of a publication is our readers and their willingness to care deeply about the people doing their labor reporting. So each month, we plan to show our readers our budget, give them a breakdown of what we produce each month—and set our fundraising goal.

This month, we need to raise $1,600 to pay the rent, buy a desk, an office chair, some dining room chairs, and pay off a speeding ticket we got down in Mississippi while covering the union election at Nissan.

Help Us Reach Our Goal of $1,600.

$547 / $1,600

Donate Here!

The upcoming swing district Congressional special election, in the foothills of Southwestern Pennsylvania along the West Virginia border, will provide Payday a unique opportunity. After several years in the South, the upcoming election will give us the opportunity to connect labor struggles in the increasingly conservative Northern Appalachian and the increasingly progressive Southern Appalachia.

After several years covering the South, Payday Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk has moved back to his hometown—the Paris of Appalachia, Pittsburgh, Pa.—to be closer to his family. It’s a solid union city and a growing tech hub. Payday plans to work closely with the Community Forge incubator to expand our coverage to a national audience.

Payday will continue to focus heavily on the South and new organizing, but our aim will be to connect the struggles of traditional union strongholds of the Rust Belt and Appalachia with those in the South. While the North is being hollowed out and de-unionized, and factories move from North to South, the ranks of organized labor in the South are growing.

We will also be making frequent road trips and spending a third of a time on the road. If groups want us to come to their town, North or South, we will come if you are willing to help us fundraise and help us find a floor to put our air mattress on.

But before we go anywhere, we need to have a Fort, as Founding Payday Folk Labor Ombudsman JP Wight would say. So each month, we will show you the difference between what our sustaining members give us and what we need to keep the doors open.

Here is what we did in the last month with your support as readers:

• We broke the story of how Trump’s OSHA was not coordinating health and safety training with immigrants rights workers groups, putting hurricane clean-up workers at risk in Texas; our exposé in the Guardian came out the day before a hurricane clean-up worker was killed by a flesh-eating bacteria.
• We were the only national outlet to cover the defeat of the Steelworkers union drive at Kumho Tire in Macon, Georgia, by a mere 28 votes. Payday also broke the story of how Kumho fired a union activist in retaliation.
• We were the first national outlet to provide the inside story of how campus workers in Tennessee, despite lacking collective bargaining rights, were able to defeat Republican Gov. BIll Haslam’s plan to outsource thousands of campus jobs.
• Down in Nashville, we continued to hold corporate Democrat Nashville Mayor Megan Barry accountable for her silence on the death of Latino construction workers and her failure to stand up for affordable housing.
• Finally, back up in Pittsburgh, we did an in-depth preview of the crowded Democratic field shaping up for the Western Pennsylvania congressional special election.

And here is a look back at what we did in 2017 so far:

• In Canton, Miss., we filed over 15 dispatches during the historic union election at Nissan. (See them all here.)
• At the Kentucky Derby, we captured the story of how Trump’s crackdown on undocumented workers was upsetting the millionaire horse owners.
• In Nashville, Tenn., we garnered national attention to the electrocution death of a 30-year-old Guatemalan immigrant. We then went back to Nashville in August and covered how Latinos were upset with the mayor’s silence on the death.
• When the Newspaper Guild picketed the Washington Post, we were the only outlet to cover it.
• Again, in North Carolina, we were the only national outlet to cover the state Legislature stripping farm workers of union rights.
• Before national outlets picked up on the story following Hurricane Harvey, Payday was also the only outlet to cover how unnecessary delays by the Obama Administration allowed Trump to roll back vital chemical safety reforms.
• We held Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez accountable when we showed that he had stumbled in his pledge to eliminate unpaid internships.
• In Chattanooga, Tenn., Payday broke the story of how low wages and school bus privatization contributed to the death of five children in Chattanooga. Then, we cut a syndication deal with the African-American owned Chattanooga News Chronicle to get Payday’s stories on the crash in print to its 30,000 readers.
• Before Randy “Iron Stache” Bryce was a national sensation, Mike Elk crashed on his son’s bed for a week in Racine, Wisc., and broke the story of his now-viral run against House Speaker Paul Ryan.
• Payday traveled to Huntsville, Ala., where we covered the effect that Indivisible activists in the Deep South were having on the fight to save Obamacare (and we plan to go back to Huntsville a lot this year).
• We just so happened to be there in Baltimore when news broke that the city’s Democratic mayor vetoed legislation that would have raised the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.
• Through our weekly Payday Report newsletter, we showed how Southern nonprofits receive, on average, only one-tenth of the national average of foundation funding.
• Finally, on Mike Elk’s 31st Birthday, he covered the 90th birthday of an Italian Resistance fighter in New Castle, Del.

Help us build upon the successes of the last year as we seek to expand in order to cover the interconnectedness of the South, Appalachia, and the Rust Belt.

Make a one-time donation today and sign up to become a monthly sustaining donor so that we have to do this less often.

In solidarity,

Mike Elk