Why am I about to get Written Up?

Written Up is a newsletter about the working class. It will keep you up to date on issues relevant to working people, and add my own original research, reporting, analysis, and commentary to help you understand the world. It is a project of collective education that features the voices of working people from all over the country. You’ll get at least one post in your email each week, and more as I develop my workflow and routine. If you don’t like email, you can also get it via text, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram or Twitter DM. Just sign up, then email writtenupnewsletter@gmail.com to tell me how you’d like to get it:

Written Up is not about clicks. It’s not about half-baked stories with no context or history churned out to boost ad views. There are no ads and no owners here. Written Up is about, by, and for the working class.


OK….but who are you though?

My name is Eric Murphy and I’m a worker, an organizer, and a journalist. I grew up and live in Wisconsin, and I’ve worked in retail, food service, as a janitor, and as a security guard. The mythical White Working Class Male From Wisconsin that the national media loves to poke and prod with their scientific instruments? I’m one of them.

I also organized a union at my shop twice while I lived in California: first as a food service worker at Intel, and later as a security guard at Facebook. Both of these campaigns had many successes and many failures, and I’ll talk about them in my writing where it’s relevant. I am far from “in the tank” for unions, but I can bring insider knowledge of what makes a successful campaign, the perspective of a worker-organizer, and an honest eye to problems of the labor movement. You can learn more about why I think organizing the working class is important in this piece I wrote during the union campaign at Facebook.

And I’m also a journalist. I have a degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and have worked as a reporter in stretches, most recently at Mission Local in San Francisco. Here’s some news I broke there.

I don’t have a huge social media presence, so if you find this project valuable, I’d love for you to share it with workers, organizers, and journalists you know. And if you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you at writtenupnewsletter@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!

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I write about labor at writtenup.substack.com