We finally have an injunction petition filed in Pittsburgh! It’s a major win in our 22-month-long strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Executive Vice President Marian Needham and I joined our striking family last week after the news broke in a press conference and rally at the Post-Gazette building.
The injunction petition from the National Labor Relations Board asks a federal judge to step in and end the almost two-year strike and put workers back to work. The filing is exceedingly rare — it’s one of only four authorized so far this year.
The NLRB is asking a judge to order the company to follow U.S. labor law, rescind the illegally imposed contract for journalists and reimburse other striking workers for health care coverage the company was legally supposed to pay for, but didn’t.
This follows an NLRB administrative law judge ruling last year that ruled overwhelmingly for our striking journalists.
These rulings are continued validation that we’re right and the company is wrong. How wrong? If they violate the judge’s order they could face contempt fines or jail time.
At last week’s press conference striking photojournalist Steve Mellon spoke about “the stand we’re taking and the price we’re paying.”
“It’s 22 months of waking up at 3 a.m. … staring out into the dark and asking yourself some disturbing and crucial questions: ‘If I’m not a working journalist, who am I? If I can’t provide for my partner, for my family, for myself, what is my worth, what is my value?’”
Now’s a great time to donate to our strikers and continue to support them.
Photojournalist Emily Matthews talked about how she and her fellow journalists just want to get back to doing journalism, which she appreciates having continued to do with the Pittsburgh Union Progress strike “paper.” “Thank you to everyone continuing to read and subscribe to the Union Progress. Keep doing it until we’re back to work,” she said.
Several videos from speakers are on the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh’s Twitter account.
Our strikers were out this week at a recent CWA and Steelworkers conference on health and the environment. Strikers sold t-shirts and got donations from fellow union members.
In Baltimore, members of the Baltimore Sun Guild gathered outside their downtown offices to rally for a fair contract and an end to the substandard, non-Guild work that is regularly filling their newspaper’s pages.
Though the Guild is bargaining in good faith to reach a fair contract, management has not offered them the same respect. The company has proposed a number of fundamental job protections, including seniority protections during a layoff and the requirement of just and sufficient cause for dismissal.
Additionally, management wants to fill the Sun with content from the new owner’s media company, Sinclair Broadcasting, and its television station in Baltimore, Fox45. The pages of The Baltimore Sun should be filled mainly by its unionized journalists, who have decades of combined experience reporting in Maryland.
“The company is trying to gut our contract,” said Christine Condon, unit chair, in a statement. “They have proposed making it easier to fire union members, and removing other key protections at the very core of our contract. They would prefer to leave us defenseless, so that they can change the Sun however they please. To that, we say no way.”
The Guild is asking supporters to join their members in calling for a fair contract and high-quality journalism written by Guild reporters by writing a letter to the editor at talkback@baltimoresun.com.
The Connecticut News Guild is still working to receive voluntary recognition from Hearst management. Since going public with their union last week, support among guild members has only grown. The Connecticut News Guild is now up to 85% of their unit having signed authorization cards.
But on Sunday Hearst fired organizing committee member Adrian Szkolar. Adrian was asked, as part of his job, to post Hearst’s story about workers launching their union. He captioned it with a statistic that about 85% of the workers had signed union cards, but that was not in the piece. And then the company terminated him.
It was retaliation against him for doing his job and wanting to build a union to make sure Connecticut newsrooms were strong for the community.
Ahead of Election Day, a number of teams across the New York Times participated in stress tests to prepare for the big day. The New York Times Tech Guild, whose members make the tools that help the New York Times run, celebrated this work and reminded management — with more than one Slack message per minute — that it’s the workers who make the New York Times systems run.
“The real stress test is the company testing whether we’ll endure the stress of elections without a contract,” one member wrote. “Election readiness work is union work, and I’m proud of all my fellow guild members for putting in the effort right now. If the company needs our work, then we need theirs on a strong contract.”
California legislators made a backroom deal between news bosses and AI companies in California this week, leaving nothing for actual working journalists. Not a single organization representing journalists and news workers agreed to this undemocratic and secretive deal with one of the businesses destroying our industry. Leaders of our union were joined by those in NABET-CWA and CWA in opposing the actions of legislators and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“The future of journalism should not be decided in backroom deals. The Legislature embarked on an effort to regulate monopolies and failed terribly,” we wrote. “Now we question whether the state has done more harm than good.”
“I’m worried that this deal actually causes harm to journalists, instead of helping us in any way,” Media Guild of the West President Matt Pearce told reporters in a press conference Wednesday.
“If you’re going to have a deal about journalism, it should include the journalists,” California Labor Federation President Lorena Gonzalez told the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday after addressing the California delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “You cannot save an industry with a policy proposal that the workers in that industry are adamantly opposed to.”
Congrats to Bethesda Game Studios workers who unionized with CWA and CWA Canada last week. They’re joining workers in Rockville, Maryland, Dallas and Austin, Texas. The Microsoft-owned studio is responsible for highly successful game franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and they now become the first game studio in the province of Quebec and first wall-to-wall studio in all of Canada to unionize. The Montreal workers in the new unit include developers, engineers, programmers, design and QA staff.
Law360 workers have signaled they’re ready to strike if they have to. Unionized editorial workers at LexisNexis-owned Law360 have put management on notice that they will walk off the job on an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike in September unless there’s real progress in rectifying the harm caused by the company’s unlawful tactics and at the bargaining table.
“We have truly made every effort, but we are ready to strike,” said Hailey Konnath, a reporter for Law360 and unit chair for the union. “It’s now up to management and Harmon to make the right decision, remedy the ULPs and negotiate a fair contract.”
SEIU Local 32BJ staff publicly announced their campaign to form a staff union, citing their commitment to better serve members, strengthen the organization and expand the labor movement.
The 32BJ Staff Union represents the employees who work for the largest property services union in the United States, who are not protected by a union themselves while representing and supporting 180,000 32BJ members.
32BJ staff members report a variety of motivations for joining the union drive, but the most common is the fight for job security and just cause protections. These workers want the basic workplace rights that brought them to the labor movement in the first place – fair representation, a contract, and a voice in the workplace.
There’s still time to apply to Cornell’s in-person Labor Leadership Skills Bootcamp. Guild leaders voted unanimously to set up a scholarship to honor former staff representative Bruce Nelson. The deadline to apply for the in-person training is September 8.
The scholarship will be used to subsidize collective bargaining training for NewsGuild-CWA elected officers, paid staff, stewards, bargaining committee members, and other NewsGuild activists in roles that support a local’s bargaining efforts. Training may be provided directly to individuals or, in some cases, may be set up as group training for locals or groups of locals. NewsGuild-CWA Locals can also apply to have an instructor train members and staff in-person at a central location.
Local and national NewsGuild officers and staff can nominate scholarship candidates. Individuals can apply directly with the endorsement of their local union. The participant’s local will be asked to pay the tuition fee and the national union will reimburse the local when the participant completes the course and submits a copy of the ILR training completion certificate. The scholarship grants cover tuition only; locals or individual participants will be responsible for any other related expenses.
Last week 17,000 CWA members at AT&T went on an unfair labor practice strike over the company’s illegal behavior committed during negotiations. Make sure to sign the petition telling AT&T CEO John Stankey that it’s time to engage in good faith bargaining on a fair contract. And print out a sign and post a picture in solidarity with our CWA family on strike.
We lost member Lincoln Wright, who died suddenly at 34. Lincoln was a core organizer with the Midwest Digital Optimization Team at Gannett and previously organized with his colleagues at the South Bend Tribune.
“This should come as no surprise, as he always prioritized the well-being of those around him,” his loved ones wrote in his obituary. “No matter what challenges he faced, his concern always shifted to others, especially to his family and friends. His tender-hearted nature was further evidenced in his deep love for his two cats, Thelma and Louise, who he even put ahead of himself when considering a significant life change!”