Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists walked off the job last week “in solidarity with non-news colleagues and in protest of working without a contract for five years.”
“Well, you’re seeing these years of roiling tensions really just explode into the open. What’s interesting in some ways is that there’s anxieties about this, and that is that the newsroom did not vote overwhelmingly to do this. I believe it was a 38-to-36 vote, just north of 50-50. Some more members of the newsroom have decided to go on strike in the days since – just in the few days since it was declared. But it’s controversial, and I’ll tell you why.
“This was the first full newspaper strike in 21 years. The last strike was in Seattle, which was kind of a wash. It didn’t really work out well for ownership or for workers. And before that, the last strike was in Pittsburgh, three decades ago, the early 1990s, and that was seen as really the low point for the strength of unions in the newspapering business.
“And so you thought at that point – when I was a newspaper reporter and a member of a union back then, you thought, you know, this is really going to be the waning days of newspaper unions. But instead, you’ve seen this real distinct dynamic, particularly in the past five years, where newspaper unions and, for that matter, digital media unions have surged and soared.”
