Newsroom workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, began a strike against the company at noon Tuesday and kicked off a daylong action outside the PG newsroom on the North Shore.
On Monday, the Guild sent a notice to Post-Gazette management to demand that the company end its illegally declared impasse to contract negotiations, lift the unilaterally imposed working conditions and reinstate the terms of the previous collectively bargained contract, and return to the contract bargaining table to reach a fair contract.
The Post-Gazette failed to meet those demands, and Guild members voted to authorize an unfair labor practice strike.
“We’re out here because we believe in this place, we believe in the journalism that we produce, the papers that we print and deliver to the community at large,” Guild President Zack Tanner said Tuesday on the picket line.
“Without the Post-Gazette, without the workers who produce the product, those readers go uninformed,” Tanner added. “It seems like lately, for the past five or six years, the Block family disagrees with that.”
The striking Newspaper Guild workers will continue their actions Wednesday at noon, both outside the Post-Gazette newsroom and at the U.S. Steel Tower.
The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh calls on readers, advertisers, business and labor leaders,
politicians and other members of the community to contact the publisher of the Post-Gazette,
John Block, at johnrblock@theblade.com and impress upon him the importance of ending the
labor strife at his newspaper by reaching a fair contract with the Guild.