Mike Elk, the Politico labor reporter who importuned his co-workers to unionize, has reached a settlement agreement with the Rosslyn-based outlet following his August departure, he told the Erik Wemple Blog today. “I’m very happy” with the terms of the settlement, said Elk, who declined to specify details.
Robert Paul, an attorney with law firm Zwerdling, Paul, Kahn & Wolly, P.C. confirmed that a settlement had been reached but declined further comment.
Elk left Politico in August, a high-profile departure in light of his activism on behalf of unionization. Whenever a digital media organization voted in favor of forming a union, Elk would send his colleagues a pep talk about following suit. “Sure the snack bar is great, but a union contract would be even sweeter!” wrote Elk in a memo to staffers after the news of unionization plans at Salon. And Elk, as a Politico reporter, once asked presidential candidate Bernie Sanders whether he thought Politico’s ownership should agree to card-check neutrality. Yes, came the answer.
Though Elk wouldn’t open up about his settlement, he did detail the circumstances around his departure, which, he says, stemmed from PTSD. The condition, he has told the Erik Wemple Blog, came from having been too close to harrowing labor disputes. “I just have all these flashbacks about guys that wound up dying in the middle of stories I was covering,” Elk told the Erik Wemple Blog in an extensive Sept. 10 interview. In a first-person piece published at the Huffington Post, Elk wrote: “These last few years, I have gotten so much help in my struggle with PTSD from so many once-strangers that I cry when I think about it. It’s really proven to me that when you got a friend in labor, you got a friend everywhere. When you are in the labor movement, no matter how scary this world can get, you never walk alone.”
Because of this condition, Elk said, “I couldn’t take the speed of the reporting and asked for an assignment not as strenuous in terms of speed.” Politico determined that he couldn’t perform the rudiments of his job as reporter for Politico Pro’s labor category. “You’re too disabled for the job,” the outlet said, according to Elk. “At that point, I chose to resign,” he says. Politico didn’t respond right away to an inquiry about this matter, though it did issue a statement upon his departure:
“Mike Elk no longer works at POLITICO. As a long-standing company policy, we do not and will not comment on the specifics of personnel matters. We can say that Mike Elk’s recent departure has nothing to do with his union activities. POLITICO employees have been, and continue to be, free to engage in or refrain from union activities.”
In the September interview, Elk expressed support for Politico’s stated commitment to “union neutrality” but said that he was “just trying to work out a disability settlement. There were some issues — I got overworked a little bit there.” Pressed on criticism that he was “lethargic” and didn’t rack up many bylines, Elk responded, “I wrote 12 stories they didn’t publish.”
Elk professed that it was “really thrilling to be down there” after “playing all my career in the minor leagues.” Asked in September what, specifically, he was seeking in the negotiations, Elk riffed, “I’m saying, ‘Hey, obviously I wasn’t the right guy for the job, you did some things that sort of made the conditions worse: Here’s the remedy — pay for me to go back to [graduate] school to get a new job.’ . . . That’s what I’m asking, is grad school.”
