Dozens of Post-Gazette workers cross picket line as newsroom strike enters Day 2

Dozens of journalists, photographers and editors have crossed the picket line to continue working at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Newsroom workers, represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, launched a strike at noon Tuesday in protest of what they consider unfair labor practices by the company.

This comes after Post-Gazette employees belonging to unions representing production, distribution and advertising workers went on strike earlier this month.

Already, about 30 people have crossed the picket line, according to union officials and a group of workers who are not striking.

“It was a very narrow vote” to go on strike, said Alex McCann, secretary of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

McCann said the vote for newsroom workers to strike was tallied at 38 to 36. The Guild had said Tuesday that the union represented 101 newsroom employees, though dozens of employees have resigned from the Guild and stayed on the job. An exact number was not immediately available Wednesday.

A group that said it represented a large portion of the Post-Gazette employees still working said the Guild “commenced a strike with fewer than 40% of its members voting in favor of the move.”

“This vote was taken under the pressure of the Communications Workers of America, which threatened to unilaterally impose a strike on the local and remove its leadership if the vote did not conform to its wishes,” the group said in a statement.

The Communications Workers of America is the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh’s parent union.

As for workers leaving the union and not participating in the strike, McCann said he was confident that “as time goes by, they will join in our fight.”

“We believe our strike will expand and grow as the days go by. The door is always open for anybody who has chosen not to strike immediately or who has chosen to resign their [union] membership,” McCann said.

Even with the numbers it has now, McCann said, union leaders are confident that they have enough support for contract negotiations. McCann said the union has also seen strong support from other labor leaders and guilds throughout the country.

“We are very optimistic that the community will continue to step up for us,” McCann said.

Still, he acknowledged that the decision to go on strike is a difficult one.

“Going on strike is an extremely difficult financial decision for a lot of people,” he said. “We understand that asking people to go on strike is likely the most difficult decision they will ever have to make in their working lives.”

The CWA is providing strike benefits of $300 a week for workers on the picket line, McCann said. That could ultimately increase to $400 a week, he said.

McCann said union leaders are in the process of setting up a system where people could donate to support striking workers. They also are planning to launch a strike publication, which he said would feature stories about the striking workers and possibly expand to include general journalism as well.

The group of workers still on the job said in its statement that it hopes the local Guild prevails, but they won’t be joining in on the picket line. The group said many of its workers had supported members of other striking unions by withholding their bylines during a byline strike.

The group argued that the CWA “has imposed a strike against the local’s wishes,” and suggested that some people who voted in favor of the strike only did so “to retain local leadership in the face of CWA threats.”

The group noted that two years ago, many of the non-striking members of the Guild were among the 76% of members who voted to strike then.

“That action was well-planned and gave workers ample time to gather all the information needed to make a decision. The vote was democratic,” the group said. “In the end, the CWA – claiming that the Guild did not have the necessary support – refused to authorize a strike.”

The group said this time around the strike vote was taken on short notice and that appears to be “no coherent plan for success.”

“We also cannot support the union’s self-defeating campaign to encourage our subscribers and advertisers to sever ties with the company,” the group wrote.

The number of people crossing the picket line to continue working “seems like a huge proportion of people,” said Risa Kumazawa, an economics professor at Duquesne University.

“There has to be solidarity for these strikes and strike agreements,” she said. “The fact that they’re not participating implies they’re OK with the working conditions, so it definitely puts a damper to the union workers trying to reach better working conditions.”

Kumazawa said it’s hard to speculate why so many workers might be willing to ignore the strike.

“I did think to myself, ‘That’s unusual,’” she said. “Usually, people are agreeing about needing to fight for these things together.”

This comes at a time when unions are losing power across the country, she said, with less than 10% of American workers in unions.

“Unions don’t have this stronghold that they used to have,” Kumazawa said.

The fact that such a large number of people are continuing to work could hurt the union’s position at the negotiating table, Kumazawa said. Statements from the newspaper’s ownership don’t seem to indicate they’re overly eager to meet the union’s demands, she said.

Kumazawa said the best-case scenario would be for the union to reach a middle-ground agreement with the Post-Gazette leadership to end the strike as quickly as possible.

“The longer the strike is, usually more destruction is a result of that,” she said. “The hope is they can come to an agreement earlier rather than later.”

Striking workers picketed Wednesday outside the Post-Gazette office building on the North Shore and the U.S. Steel Tower in Downtown. The CWA said workers also would be “extending their picket line to the Butler Eagle” because that newspaper was “assisting the Post-Gazette in continuing to print papers” during the strike.

In a press release Thursday, Butler Eagle President and Publisher Ron Vodenichar explained the decision to help the Post-Gazette in its printing.

“It is our firm belief that if the Post-Gazette fails to distribute a print product for any length of time it would cause the end of the Post-Gazette,” says Vodenichar, president and publisher of Butler Eagle. “Only through the assistance of a third party will the jobs of the workers - and maybe even the future of the company - survive.”