In the summer of 2015, the online news site Gawker, known for its gossipy scoops and puckish style, became the first major digital media company to vote to unionize. The victory bucked a then widespread belief that young journalists had no interest in unions, and spurred a wave of labor organizing in digital media. At the center of the Gawker effort was a journalist named Hamilton Nolan, who had joined the site amid the Great Recession and became its “de facto labor reporter,” publishing scoops on corporate malfeasance and union drives across the country. “We had a lavish roof deck at the office, but no system of getting regular raises; big parties with open bars, but no functional system of internal communication; a pancake machine in the kitchen, but no severance pay,” he writes in his new book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. “All major company decisions were made inside the mysterious mind of the owner. He smoked a lot of weed.” Gawker Media’s first contract only lasted …