The striking workers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette resumed picketing Monday after a quiet Thanksgiving holiday weekend, hoping to resolve the strike and return to work.
Striking workers picketed outside the PG’s North Shore newsroom on Monday, as has been the norm since some 120 newsroom, distribution, advertising and production workers struck in October.
The unions that represent those workers are scheduled to meet with the company for a bargaining session Dec. 6. Two previous sessions failed to yield an agreement to end the strike after the PG’s representatives continued their pattern of bargaining in bad faith.
The strike and the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh were the focus Monday of a NEXTpittsburgh column by former longtime guild member and Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman.
Norman, who left the PG in August after more than 30 years of service, notes that even though “unions aren’t perfect,” for him, “membership in the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh made the difference between a solidly middle-class life and mere subsistence living.”
He points out that a recent video of Allan Block, the chairman and CEO of the PG’s parent company, striking a union representative with a bag of food and swearing at him is “a taste of what those in the unions representing workers at the PG and the Toledo Blade have had to deal with for nearly two decades.”
Norman also praises the recent WESA and WYEP vote to unionize with SAG-AFTRA and short-term strikes by Pittsburgh-area workers represented by Starbucks Workers United. And he encourages media outlet owners not to follow in PG management’s footsteps, because, he says, “There’s no ethical reason to treat media professionals like peasants.”
Alex is a digital news editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike.
