Tuesday night about a dozen of us wore our black PUP T-shirts, the most vigorously chic attire in labor history, and gathered in the Gold Room at the Allegheny County Courthouse to stand with the county’s elected leaders as they voted to approve a proclamation honoring the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh for maintaining a strike that’s about to hit the three-year mark.
We arrived early to a room already crowded with people. Also on the night’s agenda was County Executive Sara Innamorato, who was scheduled to outline to County Council her administration’s 2026 budget proposal. TV news cameras lined up at the back of the room.
This is a tough time for local governments. President Donald Trump injects large doses of chaos and enmity into governance, generating a lot of social media buzz (much to the delight of conservative influencers) and creating a certain hell for elected leaders trying to balance budgets and meet the very diverse needs of their constituents.
Innamorato last night described budgets as “moral documents” that reflect a community’s values. It was refreshing to hear this stated clearly and publicly by someone charged with making difficult financial decisions. Especially now.
Trump’s proposed federal budget would slash about $120 million in funding the county uses to pay for a variety of initiatives, including support for our most vulnerable neighbors – among them, those with no homes and people struggling with addictions. They’re an easy target. How we collectively decide to deal with their complex needs in this time of fiscal uncertainty will say much about us. What do we treasure most? Trump uses money as a lever to separate people, institutions and businesses from their stated values. He often seems gleeful at how little pressure he must apply to do so.
Innamorato’s presentation resonated with us because we’ve been thinking about money and values for quite a while. When we went on strike Oct. 18, 2022, most of us thought we’d reach a resolution within a few weeks, maybe a month or two. Thanksgiving came and went, then the holiday season, followed by a merciless winter. We cheered journalists at Fort Worth, Texas, and Business Insider who struck and won contracts. Autoworkers hit the picket line and got a deal. Our fight continued, month after month, then one year, followed by another and another.
At first, we talked often of our “righteous fight.” But the talk quickly faded. Truth is, this whole “acting on your values” thing is hard, unglamorous work.
The picture at the top of this page shows us smiling, proud, grateful for the acknowledgement. It reflects our general attitude these days. We’re more confident than ever that we as workers, together with a supportive community, will win our case. Our daily meetings are upbeat. In fact, we began Tuesday’s online gathering by playing The Village People tune “In the Navy” – it seemed both ironic and appropriate, given the events in Annapolis, Maryland, over the weekend.
The road to this point, however, has been tough. Three years of striking is brutal. It’s a nearly constant scramble for donations so we can help each other pay bills. It’s picking up the phone and listening to tearful colleagues who aren’t sure they can last another day, and your heart breaks because you don’t know what to say. You just listen, and then slowly the resilience emerges, but you don’t dare hang up until you hear a laugh.
It’s the frustration of winning your case at one level, only to have it appealed to the next level, and then you win again, yet have it appealed once more to a court system that moves at a glacial pace. Sometimes it feels like we’re squeezed in a vice designed to crush us out of existence, a situation deemed over and over to be unlawful, while those with the power to stop the screw from turning sit in a distant chamber and deliberate over a course of action that seems obvious: stop the damn hand that’s turning the screw.
What keeps us going? Events such as Tursday night’s proclamation certainly help. We also rely greatly on the support of our allies who show up at rallies and picket lines and donate to our strikers fund. Our super power, however, is the way in which we lean on each other.
After Tuesday night’s applause and hand shaking, we exited the courthouse and walked down Grant Street to a bar for a round of beer. Unit chair Andrew Goldstein offered a toast. He said the past three years have drawn us together in ways we could never have imagined when we gathered on the picket line nearly three years ago. “I know it’s a cliche,” he said, “but you all are family to me.”
Yeah, it is a cliche, but I don’t give a damn. I’m claiming you as kin, Brother Goldy.
***
Bethany Hallam, councilperson at-large and frequent supporter at our rallies and pickets, read the proclamation. We joined her at a podium and presented her with a strike T-shirt, which she immediately pulled on over the shirt she was wearing, which read “Read Local News.”
The proclamation is a doozy. We enjoyed hearing the words read aloud.
Hallam began by pointing out that we’ve been bargaining for a contract since 2017 against a company that “refuses to move off of their many bad-faith contract proposals.”
Then Hallam delivered this awesome sentence in just a few breaths: “And whereas in July 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Post-Gazette management took advantage of statewide travel restrictions to illegally declare an end to bargaining and stripped union members of their workplace rights, including five-figure increases in some workers’ health insurance, removing the guarantee of a 40-hour workweek, gutting the short-term disability plan that workers rely on when they get sick, shrinking paid time off, and removal of overtime guarantees, among other violations of federal labor law.”
She continued: “To further undermine striking workers, Post-Gazette management has hired nearly 40 replacement scabs to steal the work of these journalists who are fighting for a stronger workplace, all while the company continues to flaunt their blatant lawbreaking in court.”
Hallam noted that striking PG workers have “faced on-duty and privately hired off-duty cops, helping the Post-Gazette break the picket lines by force and threat of arrest, simply for exercising their rights.”
She ended by recognizing the PG strikers “who have been holding the picket line for three years against ownership’s relentlessly lawless union busting, and are vowing to stand strong in the picket line until Post-Gazette leadership comes to its senses, quits breaking federal law and restores their rights.”
Ah, we couldn’t have written it better ourselves.
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.