Scores of journalists and workers in media, telecommunications and other industries are coming to Pittsburgh this weekend and next week for two big union gatherings.
The NewsGuild-CWA (Communications Workers of America) sector conference happens Friday and Saturday at Downtown’s Wyndham Grand Hotel.
Friday comprises organizing and bargaining workshops, and on Saturday delegates elected by their locals to attend the conference will adopt rules, pass resolutions, amend the TNG-CWA Constitution and conduct other business.
Three delegates will be officially repping the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which currently is on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in what remains the longest running strike in the country at more than two years and nine months.
Guild President Zack Tanner is one of those delegates and will be the Pittsburgh delegate for the bigger CWA Convention — the 80th — that convenes Monday and continues Tuesday at Downtown’s David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
Tanner says more than 100 delegates are registered for the sector conference on Saturday and expects about 1,000-plus staff and guests for the CWA Convention. The latter will not be electing a new president, as President Claude Cummings Jr.’s term runs for one more year.
“It’s great that this is happening in Pittsburgh,” Tanner says with a nod to Pittsburgh’s labor history. “The CIO was formed here” — that is, in 1938, the Congress of Industrial Organizations that is now part of the AFL-CIO. “Having a lot of union members in Pittsburgh is a good thing.”
The CWA has about 368,000 members in a number of industries and sectors, including the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. About 2,600 members are in the NewsGuild, approximately 8,500 of whom have joined since 2020 at 211 newly unionized publications and other workplaces.
The striking Pittsburgh journalists, whose local was chartered in 1934, plan to be present throughout both gatherings to share their story and seek support and solidarity, as they did at the 2023 CWA Convention in St. Louis. They also are keen to see what happens with resolutions such as one pertaining to strike benefits.
Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board’s federal case on behalf of the journalists against the PG, which appealed it, has been sent by a panel of three judges of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to the court’s chief circuit mediator, who is to speak confidentially with both sides starting Aug. 21.
The journalists’ unfair labor practices strike began on Oct. 18, 2022.
The PUP is the publication of the striking workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
