Journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will begin receiving reimbursement checks totaling more than $100,000 plus 6% interest this week, after a years-long legal battle over the company’s refusal to pay contractually obligated health care coverage increases.
Management has delivered the checks to the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh Local 38061, which will distribute them to union members.
The reimbursement follows a November 2021 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that upheld a December 2020 ruling from U.S. District Judge Marilyn J. Horan.
Lacretia Wimbley, president of the Pittsburgh Local, said Block Communications, the Post-Gazette’s parent company, “has gotten away with disenfranchising us from our contractual rights for far too long — this decision by the Third Circuit is empowering and liberating. The local represents about 100 unionized journalists at the Post-Gazette and about 120 full-time faculty professors at Point Park University.
“It’s sad and ridiculous that the company would rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting us. Now they have been forced to pay what they should have paid to begin with, and it has cost them much more than it would have to simply do the right thing,” she said. “Victory has never tasted so sweet, and this is only the beginning.”
Judge Horan rejected all seven points the company raised when it appealed an arbitrator’s Dec. 30, 2019, ruling in favor of the Newspaper Guild. She ordered enforcement of the arbitrator’s decision, which required the Post-Gazette to reimburse members of the Guild for the higher deductible payments they incurred after the company’s refusal to pay insurance increases reduced the level of coverage.
Judge Horan upheld U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan’s rejection of all seven of the Post-Gazette’s challenges to the arbitrator’s award, including technical points, such as missing the deadline to file an appeal, as well as the legal merits of the case.
“This is a monumental victory for the journalists at the Post-Gazette,” said Zack Tanner, the Guild’s Post-Gazette unit chair. “We are finally collecting money that the company tried to steal out of the workers’ pockets instead of doing what was right and preserving our collectively bargained benefits.”
The healthcare issue is part of an ongoing labor dispute between The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and management. The union’s contract expired in March 2017 and the company unilaterally imposed conditions in August 2020, a move the union is challenging through an unfair labor practice charge before the National Labor Relations Board.
“Our goal is to get back to the bargaining table and secure a fair contract that respects the union journalists who make the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,” the Pittsburgh Local said in a press statement. “We all deserve a local newspaper that invests in our community and empowers inclusive journalism that reflects our city.”
Photo: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalists picketing outside the home of John Robinson Block, one of the owners of Block Communications, in October 2020.