When I was in my twenties, I worked at Rock and Ice magazine for Big Stone Publishing, where I was paid a salary of $30,000 a year. Big Stone was located in beautiful Carbondale, Colorado, where there is world-class climbing, skiing, biking, hiking, a wonderful community, quaint farmer’s markets with local foods, free outdoor music and fun events, and—oh yeah, a real estate market where the median home price hovers around $1.1 million. Though buying a home was obviously an unrealistic goal for someone making minimum wage, Big Stone was also just a small company trying to make something fun and cool and inspirational, and they told its employees they couldn’t afford to give us benefits or pay us more money. They did, however, provide each and every one of its employees bonus checks of $100 each month to “cover health insurance.”

It took me five years before I got my first raise, to $36K per year. To get a fifth of my former salary added on seemed like a massive, life-changing bump—because that’s what one thinks when you’re young and have no idea how much you’re worth.

With that raise—a negotiation process that ultimately left me feeling more like my boss was doing me a huge favor instead of just compensating me for the dignity of my work— my responsibilities suddenly jumped 3x. After all, print was beginning its steep decline and the website was where it was at, requiring constant content creation, which was presumed to be just an easy add-on to the already full-time job of managing an editorial schedule to produce a whole magazine every six weeks.

Big Stone has since gone Belly Up, sadly, but there are no shortage of similar stories across the outdoor industry, especially in media. This is why employees at two major outdoor companies have announced plans to unionize—to give themselves the kind of collective bargaining power that I would’ve benefited from in my twenties. The power that will allow them to negotiate better pay, obtain health care and benefits, and, god forbid, secure more time off to actually go outside and play, which is presumably the initial reason for why anyone chooses to work in this industry.

What I find maddening, but entirely unsurprising, is that these efforts to unionize have been met with foot-dragging, dissuasion, and union-busting rhetoric by the very companies that otherwise seek to position themselves as being very progressive workplaces.