This past weekend I joined several dozen other folks supporting our family at the Baltimore Sun during the “Rally for the Soul of the Sun” near the harbor. The Sun was bought by David Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, in January.
Since then he’s pivoted the great publication to focus on crime stories, used the paper to promote his own political campaigns in the city, pushed dehumanizing language in opposition to the Associated Press Stylebook and terminated journalists for speaking up and raising issues.
Former Guild President Linda Foley, other labor leaders, the Sun’s journalists and I raised these issues and dedicated ourselves to fight for our family at the Sun.
“The Sinclair Media Group has no journalistic standards,” Foley told the crowd. “It’s well known that Sinclair’s goal is not to produce quality journalism but to act as a propaganda arm for right-wing causes and candidates and to reap profits.”
“It is critical that the Guild prevail in this fight for justice at work and objectivity in the news.”
Longtime columnist Dan Rodricks said, “I’ve been a columnist since 1979. I’ve been on strike twice. I’ve worked for five owners. And, in that time, we’ve won 7 or 8 Pulitzer prizes and had hundreds of thousands of stories written by Sun reporters and journalists all over the world.”
And then,
“We got a new owner this year who said he had never read the paper.”
“We’re not a perfect newspaper, but we’ve been a pretty damn good newspaper over the years, and we never knowingly printed bad stories in the newspaper,” he said. “We never tried to publish poor journalism, thinly reported, single-source stories from dubious sources. We’ve never done that until now, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to stop it. It’s going to take readers who really care about having a decent newspaper. We need our readers’ help to demand credible journalism so that the newspaper is not full of highly dubious stuff that should not be in the Baltimore Sun.”
We’ve now been on strike against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for two years, and our members rallied earlier this week to continue to hold the company accountable for breaking federal labor law.
We hired a large video advertising truck to play that message on repeat in the neighborhoods of the executive editor, and company board members.
The Pittsburgh Union Progress, our strike paper, picks it up from there:
At one point the truck parked at an intersection in Shadyside, near the mansion of PG publisher John Block. While a road construction crew guided traffic past cones and dog walkers shuffled by, striker Rob Joesbury’s image appeared on the billboard screen, his voice carrying down the block, “I have been on strike for nearly two years,” he said. “It’s been probably the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life, getting up in the morning and knowing you don’t have a job to go to but knowing that because you’re on strike, you’re fighting for something bigger than yourself. We just want the company to follow federal labor law.”
This is our union’s longest strike in 91 years and is the longest current strike in the United States. Workers went on strike in October 2022 over the company’s refusal to provide affordable health insurance and the company’s failure to bargain in good faith.
Repeatedly we’ve won our legal case. We won an administrative law judge decision in January 2023, got the National Labor Relations Board to file for a rare 10(j) injunction and won our case in front of the full NLRB just last month.
During Tuesday’s rally, striker Natalie Duleba called out management by name:
- Publisher John Block. “He’s told us on more than one occasion that he can’t do anything,” she said. “The man who owns 25% of the parent company!”
- Emily Escalante, a member of the Block family, a board member and part owner of BCI, the PG’s parent company. “She has a voice, one she can use to shout as strongly and as often as she can, ‘This has to stop, this has to end, this is not good for our company, this is not good for our workers,’” Duleba said.
- Ron Davenport, BCI board member, appointed by John Block. “He currently owes his former employees at Sheraden Broadcasting hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Duleba said. “So obviously John Block and Ron Davenport are birds of a feather here, in terms of prioritizing profits over people.”
- Stan Wischnowski, PG executive editor, who Duleba maintained should say to Block, “This is wrong. I want my hard-working reporters who I know and respect, who this town respects, to be back in this office producing the content that this community deserves.”
Stan, who left the Philadelphia Inquirer in shame, has hired 35 strikebreakers to do the work of striking journalists. I will not mince here. Scab journalists cannot be trusted. They do not seek or honor the truth. They do not follow our ethical duty to minimize harm, including the harm caused to our colleagues. And they do not hold power to account when they support an employer actively violating the law and causing severe harm to journalists.
The best thing you can do to support our union family on the line for two years in Pittsburgh is to donate to their fund. Together we will win this strike and do our solemn duty to hold power to account.
We have three other groups on the verge of striking. First up is the New Yorker, which unanimously voted to go on strike last week. They won their first contract three years ago and came super close to striking then. But their first contract expired at the end of March and now they’re looking at striking soon if Conde Nast, the owner, doesn’t quickly agree to a new contract. New Yorker members launched dozens of testimonials on their website.
“Through a fair contract, we will push for the democratic changes so badly needed in corporate media and continue to make The New Yorker a fair and equitable place of excellence,” said Jasper Lo.
“Striking is the most important and powerful tool we have as a collective to get the contract we deserve—and I’m ready to strike,” said Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa. “We give this magazine everything, and it’s time that management recognized our value; if not, we’ll make them!”
The New York Times Tech workers are also telling the company the clock is ticking for a potential strike. They voted 95% in favor of striking, potentially shutting down the election needle and the vast election data reporting on the New York Times website and app. Not to mention a picket line around Wordle and Spelling Bee. Our members recently leafleted in New York City and are asking for pledges calling on the company to agree to a fair contract. The larger and longer-established NY Times Guild passed a resolution supporting their colleagues. They’ve been updating social media with testimonials from members too.
“I voted YES to authorize a strike because we deserve better, and leadership has made clear this is the only way to get it,” said Benjamin Harnett, a software engineer at the Times.
And finally journalists at the Southern California News Group authorized a strike last month. They’re pushing the hedge fund-owned newsrooms to increase wages and job security for our 125 members there. Donate to their strike support fund here. And read more about it in our strike publication Long Beach Watchdog.
Last week three strikers from Law360 joined me on Twitch to talk about their 8-day strike. We played Overcooked, a stressful multiplayer cooking game, and chatted about how they got so many colleagues to strike, how they supported each other during the strike and what they won.
And, we talked about Rizzo, Scabby’s cousin.
If you or your colleagues play video games and want to talk about our union and your fights, let me know!
This week journalists in Anchorage at the Daily News voted to form a union. A few folks are scattered across the big state and are voting by mail still. Results will be in next month.
“I love working at the ADN and I want it to thrive,” said Sean Maguire, the state government reporter. “Our union will give us a seat at the table to negotiate fair pay and conditions. We can make our newspaper stronger to serve Alaskans for years to come.”
This will be our union’s first union newsroom in Alaska.
This Tuesday I’m joining National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and the Laborers’ General Counsel Brian Petruska to talk about the legal challenges facing the NLRB and the fact that 70% of Americans approve of unions, but just 10% of American workers are part of unions. I’ll definitely talk about how more than 10,400 workers have joined our union from 230 workplaces since 2018. Credentialed journalists and members of the National Press Club are able to attend. More info and registration here.
This week marked a devastating toll on journalists in Gaza. At least 128 journalists and media workers have been killed in the last year and 123 of them were Palestinian. The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS), our sibling union and International Federation of Journalists affiliate, counts more than 150 journalists killed, more than 10% of Gaza’s journalists. PJS says about 200 others are severely wounded.
“Journalists are the workers who shine a light in a dark world,” I said in a statement. “An attack on journalists anywhere is an attack on journalists everywhere. We must continue to stand with journalists in Gaza and the region who are the ones bringing us the truth during this war.”
Finally, we represent journalists in 11 newsrooms across Florida, in Miami, Orlando, Sarasota, Lakeland, Palm Beach, Bradenton, Jacksonville, Naples and Fort Myers. They’re part of CWA Local 3108 and also members of CWA District 3. The district has a disaster relief fund to support members coping with the damage from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Please donate to the fund if you can and support our family in the South.
In solidarity,
Jon