In the latest episode of Working People, we go back to the picket line to get a critical update on the longest ongoing strike in the United States. In October 2022, over 100 workers represented by five labor unions—including production, distribution, advertising, and accounts receivable staff—walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PPG). The strike began after the newspaper’s management, Block Communications, which is owned by the Block family, cut off health insurance for employees on Oct. 1 of that year. After more than 2.5 years on strike, with other unions reaching contracts or taking buyouts and dissolving their units, workers represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh are the last remaining strikers holding the line. We speak with a panel of union officers for the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh about how they’ve managed to stay on strike so long and about recent legal updates that have given them hope that an acceptable end to the strike may be on the horizon.
Panelists include: Ed Blazina, striking transportation writer at the PPG and one of the Vice Presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh; Erin Hebert, also one of the Vice Presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh and a striking copy-editor and page designer at PPG; Emily Matthews, photographer on strike and treasurer for the Post-Gazette Unit of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.
Additional links/info:
- Pittsburgh Union Progress website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
- Donate to Support Striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Workers
- Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh website
- Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
- Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Union Progress, “The strike is over for 3 Pittsburgh news production unions, but the journalists’ strike continues”
- Ian Karbal, Pennsylvania Capital Star, “The strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is now the longest in the nation. And it’s not over”
- Mel Buer, Working People / The Real News Network, “Two years into a strike, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers aren’t ready to give up”
- Bob Batz Jr. & Steve Mellon, Pittsburgh Union Progress, “A start to the end of the strike? Feds file for temporary injunction to return Pittsburgh news unions to work”
- Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams / The Real News Network, “‘AI will not scab us’: Post-Gazette newsroom decries use of artificial intelligence”
- Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “(Livestream) After months of striking, media workers aren’t backing down”
- Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “(Livestream) Strikes at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, University of Michigan, and more”
- Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s half-year strike”
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are going back to the picket line to get an update on the longest ongoing strike in the United States. In October of 2022, over a hundred workers represented by five labor unions including production, distribution, advertising and accounts receivable staff walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike at the storied publication the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The strike began after the newspaper’s management block Communications, which is owned by the block family cut off health insurance for employees on October 1st of that year.
As Ian Karbal wrote in December for the Pennsylvania Capital Star. Since 2017 Post Gazette journalists have worked without a union contract. The papers owners appeared to show little interest in negotiating a new one, but in 2020 they imposed new terms on employees. Workers learned during the pandemic that the cost of their healthcare plan would increase for many and some would lose banked sick days. Among other unfavorable changes, some newsroom staff were also fed up with the blocks who had drawn increased scrutiny to the paper through a series of widely criticized editorial and personnel decisions. For years, the Post Gazette had refused to cover annual premium increases for the production workers healthcare plan. According to Joe Pass, the lawyer for the three production unions and the Newsroom Guild, when the company imposed a $19 per week increase to employees in 2022 while pushing them into a high deductible plan pass said that that was a breaking point.
The ultimate tally was 38 to 36 in favor of the strike. The day after the vote, less than 60% of the newsroom walked out. According to Zach Tanner, president of the newspaper Guild. Though over a short time, the number of strikers grew with 60 on the picket line and 35 remaining at work. This is Max speaking. We call those scabs. Augh continues, but the paper was able to continue publishing online strike leaders say that documents shared with them by the paper a standard practice show. The company has given new hires and workers who remained at the paper unprecedented bonuses and ahead of schedule raises since the strike began. Their documents show that in total over 260 $900,000 has been awarded this way since October of 2022. An administrative law judge has ruled that the Post Gazette failed to bargain in good faith and the National Labor Relations Board took the rare step of issuing an injunction request to resume bargaining that could effectively end the strike.
The post gazettes owners have appealed that move now for two and a half years, strikers have held the line while putting their professional skills to work and producing without pay. Mind you, the Pittsburgh Union progress, an award-winning newspaper that we at the Real News have proudly taken out ads in and collaborated with striking journalist Steve Mellon and I actually just won a prestigious Izzy Award together for our collaborative reporting on the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s absolutely remarkable what Steve and his colleagues have done with this strike paper and in my personal opinion, it is one of the single most impressive and inspiring feats of journalism and solidarity in the 21st century. And in a March update on the strike posted in the Pittsburgh Union progress editor Bob Batz Jr. Writes workers in three news production and advertising unions that have been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for two years and five months over a dispute about their healthcare coverage have voted to accept settlements that end their strike, their jobs and their union locals or unit, but it’s over for the production and advertising workers.
They are members of the typographical or advertising union and the Mailers Union, both locals of the communication workers of America as well as the Pressman’s Union unit. There are 31 workers who are losing their jobs as well as their unions or unit as their buyout stipulate that their locals or unit drop all pending unfair labor practice charges and then dissolve. Now, we’ve been covering this strike and talking to striking workers over the past two years here on this show and at the Real News Network and today we’re going to dive back in to get an update on how folks are doing, where things stand now with the strike and what folks like you out there can do to help. And I’m honored to be joined on the show today. First by Ed Blaina, a striking transportation writer at the Post Gazette and one of the vice presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.
We are also joined by Aaron Abert, also one of the vice presidents of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, and a striking copy editor and page designer at the Post Gazette. And we are joined as well by Emily Matthews, a photographer on strike and treasurer for the Post Gazette unit of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. Ed Aaron. Emily, thank you all so much for joining us today and I wish we were convening under better circumstances, but I just wanted to say up top to reaffirm that we here at The Real News, all of us here and our listeners at Working people continue to stand in solidarity with y’all as colleagues and fellow workers. And I know that our listeners are deeply invested in this struggle even though so many folks around the country have forgotten it, have not given it and y’all the support that you need over these past two and a half years. And we’ll get to that in a minute. But since this will be the first time in this strike that our listeners are hearing some of your voices, I wanted to just start by asking if we could go around and you could introduce yourself and just tell us a little more about who you are, the work that you did at the Post Gazette and the work that you’ve been doing for the strike and while on strike over the past two and a half years.
Ed Blazina:
Thanks, max. I’ll start. My name’s Ed Blazina. I am striking transportation writer. I’ve been a journalist for, I forget how old I am, sometimes 45 years, been at the Pittsburgh papers. We had the Pittsburgh press and then when it went out of business, the Post Gazette was there as well. I’ve worked for both of those papers since 1983. For the last 10 years I’ve been the transportation writer at the Post Gazette. I’ve been a union officer for 25 years and now we’ve been on strike for two and a half years. I’m eligible to retire. I’m old enough to retire and retire with full benefits. I refuse to let the blocks in my career this way. I’m not going to go down while we’re on strike. We’re going to fight this thing through to the end. What we’re doing now is raising as much money as we can to keep this going. As you mentioned, it’s gone on so long. Among the almost distressing things we hear is that people don’t remember that we’re still on strike. That’s particularly painful to me because the Pittsburgh press went out of business because of a strike back in 1991, and at that time it was a public tragedy that the newspaper was on strike. TV stations read the comics on television, they read obits. It was a calamity.
The Pittsburgh Press tried to print a edition, not scab. We were not unionized in the newsroom at the Pittsburgh Press, but they tried to print and distribute a paper while the other unions were on strike and there were 5,000 people in front of the building. I’m not sure. In two and a half years we’ve had 5,000 people show up total at the rallies we’ve had. It’s a different time now, so it makes striking much more difficult. Right now I’m doing two jobs. I’m covering transportation as well as I can for the union progress. Not everything I did before, but the major things keeps me sane, if you want to call it two and a half years on strike being sane. And the other aspect is we’re running a strike. I’m a vice president for the union. We’ve raised well over a million dollars to help people be able to stay on strike. We run speakers bureaus, we do all kinds of things to try to keep our name out there and let people know we’re on strike.
But it’s two and a half years now, so it’s difficult. You mentioned the numbers, it was sad hearing you recount what’s happened since the strike began. We probably have half the people that we had before because lots of people aren’t like me. I’ve had a career, I’m at the end of my career. We have folks here today with us who are younger who are still trying to build a career. It’s hard to tell somebody who’s 25, oh, stay on strike for two years, your career will come back. Don’t worry about it. That has to be extremely tough to do. I’m glad I don’t have to do that. I’m at the end of my career. I can afford to fight to strike through to the end, so it’s tough, but we’re still at it and we’re still going to be here. We’re not going anywhere.
Erin Hebert:
Yeah. My name is Erin Hebert. I actually graduated from journalism school 10 years ago this month. I got the reminders of that on my Facebook and I’ve been at the Post is that since 2016, vast majority of my professional career as a journalist. I started there as a copy editor as what was called a two year associate position, which does not exist anymore. But essentially when I was hired, I was making less than half of what top salary union hires make now at the post edge. So I was making about $25,000 working a full-time schedule, working a copy desk schedule. I had benefits. I was happy to have the opportunity, but the first couple of years for me, there were a struggle. And my experience at that point in my career as a really young person are a big part of why I think I’ve stayed out for so long and why I feel so committed to seeing this through.
Because I haven’t had a contract since March, 2017, which was it five months after I started. So I haven’t had a contract that entire time and the contract is the only reason that I was able to be hired as a 23-year-old. And then by the time I hit 25, after my two years of service were up as an associate, my salary jumped to $60,000, which is our top line salary. So it was a dream of mine to, especially when I was coming out of journalism school, hearing that newspapers were dying when I was so dedicated to this craft that I had studied, I was like, oh, cool, I can come here. I can tough it out for two years on a lower salary, be in a cool city as a young person, be in a newsroom and eventually make a good living in an affordable city.
And I really fell in love with Pittsburgh too. And that’s, I think a big part of why a lot of us are out here is because we care about the city and we care about making the journalism field here accessible and welcoming for new talent. I don’t know, I’m from Louisiana and I didn’t know anything about unions before I came here. So I show up on my first day and an officer comes up to me and tells me the spiel, Hey, there’s a union meeting. I didn’t know what I knew nothing. I didn’t know anything about it. And the education that I’ve gotten, the life education that I’ve gotten, being in Pittsburgh and being with this local and at this newspaper are really just completely, I can’t even begin to describe how much my life has changed over the past 10 years. And a couple of years into my time at the post gisette I started, it was when issues with the publisher started to prop up more and more.
He was interfering more. And I was seeing the frontline of that as a copy editor because I was on the night desk. I was getting the calls from John Block saying, we need to change this different things that have been well addressed in the media before Everyone knows that these have been issues at the paper. So I kind of started looking for a way out and thinking that maybe journalism in the age of Trump was not for me, that if this was the direction that it was headed in, that was not going to be that not going to work for me. So I started exploring social work as a career and ended up going down to part-time as a copy editor while I was in grad school for social work at the Post Gazette. And while I was studying all of the strike talk has started happening and I said, okay, well part of I want to do organizing work.
I was more involved with the union by then, and I just felt really passionate about the social welfare portion of striking and how people take care of each other in crisis because that’s what I was studying. So they wanted the strike. I did a call from Steve Mellon, or sorry, the night before, and he says, Hey, you want to be head of the health and welfare committee with me? And I said, yeah, of course I would do anything with Steve. He’s the best. And it’s been a real rollercoaster since then. But I’m really proud of the work that we put in at the beginning of the strike to keep this going because I don’t think we would’ve made it this long had we not actually spent time making the systems that have allowed us to take care of each other and to raise money. And that have allowed us to get closer to each other personally.
It is very much like a family at this point, and that’s not something that is ever going to go away even when we go back to work. So it’s really just completely changed my perspective on a lot of things, but especially the value of my labor and also the importance of rest because I think the strike was the first time that a lot of us were forced to stop our work that we had been doing for so long and kind of think about what our lives were looking like without work. And that’s kind of the stuff that I’m focused on right now is how do we continue to take care of each other and finish this out and raise money because you’re right, we haven’t had the amount of attention on this strike that we should have.
Emily Matthews:
Hi, I’m Emily Matthews. I’m a photographer on strike, and I’m also the treasurer for the Post Gazette unit of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. I started at the Post Gazette in February of 2020, so I’ve almost been on strike for as long as I had worked at the Post Gazette, which is kind of crazy to think about and kind of crazy to think about how much can change in two and a half years. I got engaged, got married, adopted a cat, and yet we were still on strike. Some things don’t change at the Post Gazette. When I was working at the Post Gazette, Aaron and I started off as a two year associate and it was described to me as in between an internship and full-time. But really I was just treated as a regular employee just making minimum wage. When my two years were almost up, the union actually had to get involved to see if I was staying or not because they just wouldn’t tell me.
I think about two weeks before my two years were up, they finally let me know that I was staying and my manager was like, well, at least we got you on a few months before your two years were up. I was like, no, it’s not a few months. It was a couple weeks. So just that experience and knowing that the company didn’t really seem to care got us as individuals and how much the union did help kind of made me realize that, oh, I should get involved with the union. I care about the people that I work with. I want to make sure that they can have a job that lasts for as long as they would like. And at the Post Gazette, I was taking photos of anything that came up depending on the day from events to sports to whatever portraits and on the union progress.
I mostly focus on high school sports. I take photos of, right now it’s baseball and softball. We’re getting into the championship season, so we’re in the quarterfinals and semifinals right now. I think working on the Pittsburgh Union progress has really helped me because when we first started out, like Aaron said, it was kind of a shock not to have that amount of work every day that I was used to not going to multiple assignments every day. And I think as journalists, we do kind of have our identity tied up in what we do for better or for worse. So I remember just sitting in my apartment thinking, what am I doing? Who am I without taking photos? And the union progress did really help with that too. It gives me a reprieve from doing all the strike related activity, even though it is strike related, it feels more like a day-to-day at a regular job almost while also doing our strike work, which includes raising money.
We have a Stewards network where we call each other and check in to make sure everyone’s feeling okay, see what people need, let people know what’s going on, what fundraising events or other things that we have going on that we want people to show up to and attend. And I think doing all this has just really shown me how much everyone cares about each other. Before the strike, I didn’t really go into the newsroom as much because I’m a photographer, so I would just go out on assignments and usually edit in my car or edit there. So I didn’t spend a lot of time in the newsroom talking to my coworkers. It wasn’t until we walked out on strike that I really started to get to talk to people and get to know people. And now I’ve come to realize that I really care about everyone that I’m on strike with and hope that strike comes to an end soon and you can get back to work. I’m from Pittsburgh, I grew up here. I grew up with the Post Gazette, so I always wanted to work at the Post Gazette and I would like to work there for as long as possible, but I don’t feel confident that I can do that without a contract. That’s where I’m at right now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Ed, Erin, Emily, I wanted to ask before we sort of dig into the nitty gritty of strike updates, because I tried to jam in as many as I could in the intro, but I know there’s a lot more stuff that’s been going on from people crossing the picket line to people taking buyouts and union units essentially becoming non-existent to injunctions being issued against the Post Gazette. So I want to ask if you can kind of walk us and our listeners through that in a minute, but hearing you guys kind of talk in the first round, it was really making me think that our listeners and folks out there who maybe haven’t been following this strike the whole way through, really need to sit and think about what it actually takes to go out on strike in the middle of a pandemic and stay on strike for two and a half years along with everything else that’s going on in the goddamn world today. Can we just go back around and could you guys say a little more about what that was like personally for you? What it’s been like personally for you to hold the line this long
Ed Blazina:
Again, for me, it’s been a little bit different because I’m older. By dumb luck, I put in for full social security a month before the strike happened. We didn’t know we were going on strike. So financially the strike hasn’t been as big a deficit as it has been for other people. And my plan was because newspapers have been in bad shape for a long time. We’ve had our pension frozen for 15 years and I have a pension, but it hasn’t been growing. So my plan was to work two years after I went on Social security and bank that money put away some more for retirement. Well, right now, fortunately I’m living off of that money, so my experience isn’t quite the same as everybody else, but it’s been enlightening to see other people, how dedicated they have been. It’s humbling to see how people react when you tell ’em you’re on strike. For started out with nine months and then a year and a half now, two and a half years, I went to the CWA convention as part of our delegation.
My job there was to raise money. I wasn’t there as a delegate to the convention. And after three days I felt like a drug dealer. I hit $11,000 on the spread of my bed in the hotel room from people giving us money to support the strike that is humbling beyond belief. A couple of quick stories I to a democratic meeting up in Butler County, a small county north of Pittsburgh to speak at one of their candidate events, and they allowed us to put out a candidate to collect some money. At the end of the event, this woman who’s older than I am, came waddling up to me and handed me a $10 bill and said, my husband died six weeks ago, but I know he’d want me to give this to you. We had miners come up from Southern West Virginia out to the production plant out in Clinton by the Greater Pittsburgh airport, and big group of cuff guys and a few women.
And again, after they were done ka biting with us on the picket line, woman came up and handed us $20 and said, this is all I have, but you should have it. I think it’s important that you have it. That kind of stuff is amazing and it gives me hope every day that we know we’re on the right side and we know we can make it through this, through things like that. The help of other people, gifts, big and small, that’s how we get through this kind of thing, supporting each other, the support we get from other people. Even a show like this where you welcome us in to come in and tell our story, that’s amazing support.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and it just makes me think of another working person that I interviewed on this show the month after y’all went on strike. If I recall correctly, Marcus Darby, he was on strike at CNH industrial in November of 2022. And I remember talking to Marcus and he said something that really stuck with me when he was communicating to our listeners that he said, look, when you guys turn this episode off, you go back to your life. I’m still on strike. I can’t turn this off. So please just don’t forget that, right? And I think just having that appreciation for the time that this takes, the strength that it takes to endure for such a long period of time, I hope everyone listening out there understands how much your solidarity, your support, your refusal to forget struggles like these can keep them going in the darkest of times. Erin, Emily, I wanted to bring y’all back in here if you had anything else you wanted to add on, just what it’s been like for you personally to go out on strike and what it’s taken to stay on strike.
Erin Hebert:
I think one of the interesting things about, I guess strikes in general, but this strike from my perspective is that we obviously have this one common experience, but we also have vastly different experiences among individual people in this union. Age-wise, it’s a big variety, marital status, single childless children, whatever. And for me, I’m really good at the beginning of things. When something’s first going, I’m very gung ho. And then I found during the middle it got really, really hard for me, and part of it was just personal burnout from grad school and the pandemic and everything that comes with being a person in the world these days. So I did have to take a pretty significant chunk of time off from the strike. However, I also had to earn money outside of the strike because I don’t have retirement. I’ll be 32 in a couple of months.
I’m at a point in my career. I’m not married, I don’t have family who can help me, so I had to look for other work. And I was doing housing casework for a HUD funded program for unhoused people with disabilities in Allegheny County in Pittsburgh. So I was doing that for 10 months last year. And during that time I was, I wasn’t as active in the strike because I had to earn money and that job was so stressful and I ended up experiencing burnout from that as well. Had to take the winter off to rest and recover. I was having a lot of chronic health issues pop up. And since I would say March, I’ve been back at it and back working. And now that we got the 10 E, the 10 E decision that we got has been a big momentum push for me for sure, because it kind of showed, oh, there’s a light, we can see the end.
There’s this actionable thing that has come down that we hopefully will be able to rely on. At least it’s the biggest piece of leverage that we’ve ever had. So now that we have this, and like Emily said, she’s not ready to go back without a contract, I’m not ready either because I, over my almost nine years working or being aware of blocked communications existence, I’ll leave it that way. As a company, I have seen, and Ed has seen it too, just from different perspective, everything that a manager could do would do on any level. The ways that even a manager not sticking up for you can completely, even if your manager or a manager in general isn’t actively harmful to you, if you know that they’re not going to have your back because they’re afraid of what upper management will do, that’s not a good working environment.
So I’ve seen an experienced that side of the post A and the union that was 91, it’ll be 91 this year, newspaper deal A, yeah, 91 years old. That’s the only reason that the paper has persisted for so long because without it, who knows what would’ve happened. So I think reminding myself of that has been really important. Resting, listening to my body when it tells me to rest, to take time off, which is the case in any organizing space, is rest and recovery. And also making sure to save time for happy moments. And a lot of those happy moments come from interacting with the community and being out there and just having conversations with people who you never would’ve necessarily connected with otherwise, who tell you, oh, this family member of mine was in a union. I know the struggle my dad was on strike, whatever.
Hearing people’s personal stories when you know that they get it and they get what it’s like to, I mean, not have a steady income and not have enough to pay your bills. And I’m really proud of, like I said earlier, the work that we did to build up our strike fund and to get all the systems in place because that’s a lot of people we’ve had. We have such a variety of experiences on this strike, and it’s the only way that we’ve been keeping it going is through talking to people in our community and each other and raising money.
Emily Matthews:
I think being on strike, it’s easy to get in my own head, thinking journalism all across the country. Is it a bad place? Why am I doing this? Is it even worth it? Are we even going to have jobs in a couple years? Why am I losing all this money if it’s just going to go away anyways? And like Erin said, I think going out in the community and talking to people really helps with that because just the other day I was taking photos at a high school track meet and this one coach came up to me and he said, oh, you’re with the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Brad Everett, who’s one of our sports reporters, he’s amazing. He puts his whole heart into every story that he does. And I was like, oh yeah, I know Brad, I work with him. He’s great. And he was like, oh yeah, he’s the best. He deserves everything. He’s the best source reporter that I know. And so just hearing how much praise that my coworkers get and fellow strikers get just lights a fire in me to keep going and like, yeah, Brad does deserve everything and he works hard and he’s good at what he does and he deserves to have a job that he can go to.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now. Ed, Erin, Emily, I wanted to ask if y’all could sort of give our listeners an update since we last had post Gazette strikers on the show. We’ve had folks like Steve Mellon, Bob Bats, like so many incredible folks from the Pittsburgh Union, progress from your union, kind of helping to educate our listeners over the years on what this strike is about, why it’s important and what critical updates are coming. And I know there’s a lot there to unpack. So I wanted to ask if we could just spend the next 10 minutes here, really sort of given folks the key updates in the strike over the past year or so, particularly the past six months, because I think listeners know that the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Post Gazette was bargaining in bad faith. Again, it feels like all these rulings have come down explicitly saying that the Post Gazette is being shitty, breaking the law, not fulfilling their legal obligations to bargain in good faith, yada, yada, yada, and then nothing happened or that’s what it feels like over here. So can you help walk us through what the back and forth has been like, what the key updates have been in the strike, especially over the past 6, 8, 10 months here? So Ed, let’s go back to you and please, all of y’all give us whatever updates you can.
Ed Blazina:
You think it sounds that way to you, try living through it. It was almost two. It was more than two years ago that we won the administrative law judge ruling from the NLRB, but the system is slow. It’s rigged per management. It’s not set up to help workers as much as it should. The company appealed that original decision from January of, I’m getting my years wrong. In 2023, they appealed. It took over a year for the full board of the NLRB to throw out their appeal, and the only thing we could find out along the way is it’s in process. In conjunction with that and running parallel to that was our attempt to get a court order to put us back to work. It’s an unfair labor strike. There’s ridiculous amounts of damage that’s been done to people’s lives because the company has repeatedly violated federal labor law.
So we went to court to get a 10 J injunction, sorry, this is going to be a little bit of alphabet soup here. A 10 J injunction is while something is going on, once the appeal was decided, then it moved over to what’s called a 10 E for enforcement. So there are no more appeals for the company at the NLRB level. So now the Labor Board goes to court to enforce its own order because the Labor Board has no power to do anything on its own. It has to go get a judge to order that what they have determined is in fact the case and decide what should happen from there. So back in February, we had a hearing before the third Circuit Court of appeals to argue whether there should be an injunction or not. It took another month for them to decide that yes, there should be an injunction.
It’s extremely rare for a union for the NLRB to get a 10 E injunction. There were, I think three or four filed in the previous year, and not all of them were approved by the courts. Ours was approved by the courts. What’s the first thing the company did? They appealed. They asked the same judges to go back and reconsider what they had ruled previously. No more evidence, nothing to change their opinion, just we think you were wrong. You should look at that again. Oh, and also your order was to restore the healthcare. Should that be just for the people who are on strike or should that be for everybody who should be in the unit that’s still working? As you said before, the scs, anything to delay they have done now, two weeks ago we court threw out that appeal. So there are no more appeals.
They are done appealing. There’s nowhere else they can go. So there’s an order that they restore the healthcare. They’ve missed now two deadlines for even taking any step towards doing that. There’s paperwork that has to be filled out by those still in the office. The union members, the strikers have filled out their paperwork and sent it in. The company hasn’t even, we know from people on the inside hasn’t even asked for the information from the employees. So the NLRB is preparing to file for fines against the company for refusing to follow a court order. And we don’t know what those fines will be, but we know that in previous cases, those fines are hefty and they usually double every day. They’re putting themselves at more financial risk to keep fighting for. We don’t know what that’s what’s most perplexing about this whole thing is what is their end game.
We have no idea what their end game is. They’ve now lost at every level of court that they’ve gone to. The other unions have been put out of business because they reached a point where I mentioned the 10 J injunction. They filed for a 10 J injunction and the US District court judge in Pittsburgh turned down their request. Basically her attitude was industries change and if that’s the conditions that you have to work under and you don’t want to, oh, well that’s too bad. So they were left without any recourse. So they took not very good buyouts, frankly. I’m sure they would say the same thing. They did the best they could, but they had nowhere else to turn. So they took buyouts and dissolved their units. So now the newspaper Guild is the only unit left on strike, and we’re waiting now for that enforcement procedure.
Emily Matthews:
I feel like one of the most frustrating things about all of this is just the long timelines and not having many answers to anything. And one of, well, the publisher for the post is that John Robinson block, he lives in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood, and he seems like one of the people in the company who is actually willing to talk to us. He actually, when we knock on his door, he seems excited to talk to us. So we’ll go to his house every so often, especially when something comes up, something in the courts or just something that we hear through our sister unions in Toledo or whatever, and we’ll knock on his door and talk to him and he likes to talk. He’s a talker. It’s sometimes difficult to piece out some useful information from what he’s giving us, but it’s better than nothing. And his willingness to talk to us is beneficial too. It seems like from him, from his perspective, the other board members and his brother Alan, who also is the head of the BCI company, no one really talks to John. It seems like from what he tells us, even though he should have this power in the company to have an impact and make a difference, he claims that he doesn’t. It’s all his brother. He doesn’t have a say in anything. He doesn’t talk to their lawyer, he can’t do anything. I think that also makes them kind of angry and I think that also fuels his willingness to talk to us like, well, no one else is talking to me, so I might as well talk to my workers because they’ll actually provide an ear and listen to me.
Ed Blazina:
He is such a different individual. This is a dysfunctional family, unfortunately, that runs the paper. And if I had to guess, the reason they still have a paper in Pittsburgh is so that John has something to do and leaves Alan and the rest of them alone, and they just want to give enough money to keep the doors open, but not enough to treat people in a civil and humane fashion by giving them a raise. Oh, maybe once every 10 years. I don’t think it’s as important to the rest of the group as it is to John, and he’ll leave their other profitable businesses alone if they let him run the newspaper. So it’s a tough situation to deal with.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Ed, Erin, Emily, I want to ask in the last kind of 10 minutes that we’ve got here, what a realistic and good resolution to this strike looks like at this point. Like you guys said, you were the last ones standing. The newspaper guild strikers are the ones holding the line now after other unions that you walked out on strike with back in October of 2022, some signed deals, some got buyouts and their unions effectively dissolved, and you guys are still holding the line, fighting it out in the courts and waiting these agonizingly long periods for more updates on the decisions that have already been made that the block family is challenging, so on and so forth. So I think we gave listeners a good update there on where things stand now. But I guess in the final 10 minutes that we’ve got here, what should folks listening to this be looking for?
What can we expect? What kind of resolution are y’all hoping for right now? And frankly, what messages do you have for folks listening to this about what they can do to help what people out there have done to help that you want to lift up? What can folks listening to this who genuinely want to support their fellow workers, maybe they didn’t know that their fellow workers have been on strike for two and a half years over in Pittsburgh, but they know now and they want to know what they can do to help and they want to know why this is important. Any final messages that you have in that vein that you want to share with our listeners? I just wanted to kind of turn things over to you guys in the final minutes here to offer any closing thoughts you’ve got there.
Ed Blazina:
I think the important thing here is, and not to make it sound like we’re way more important than we are, but the fight we’re fighting could have happened anywhere. It happened to happen here, but it’s extremely important that companies can’t do what the post Gazette they’re trying to do. Employers are very much monkey see, monkey do. If they see an employer getting away with eliminating healthcare, bullying their employees, stretching out a strike for as long as possible, hoping people will just walk away and then they win. That’s what happens. Other companies will try to do the same thing. We can’t let that happen. It’s too important for all of us to be able to feed our families to have good jobs, good union paying jobs where we have rights in the workplace and a say in how things are run. So sticking it out for two and a half years, yes, that’s been tough, but we’re there because of everybody else and the people that have supported us, the people who will come up behind us and need a job and need the protections that we’re fighting for. It’s extremely important that the nlrbs power be upheld. There have been cases in Texas where they’ve tried to rule that the NLRB is unconstitutional. That’s just ridiculous, but it got through a court there. We can’t let that happen. And if we have to be the last people in line to draw that line in the sand and enforce that, so be it. We’ve been here this long, there’s no reason to go away now.
Erin Hebert:
For me, this strike has always been existential. It’s been about the contract and we’ve known that the blocks and Allen block especially has always wanted to get rid of the union in the newsroom. And for me, experiencing the difference between a union job as I have had at the post gisette and my first job out of college and also all the jobs that my family has had in right to work states where I’ve lived. I was in Louisiana then I moved to Florida immediately after, before I came to Pennsylvania. So I know the difference between a union job and a non-union job, especially in journalism. And I cannot fathom giving in to a company who is so flagrantly violating labor law and just for years has treated its employees with such disdain, I mean literal disdain that, I mean, I went to journalism school and was told that you comfort the afflicted and you afflict the comfortable.
So this is kind of the ultimate iteration of that. And I think moving forward, we just want people to know that we are fighting for good journalism in Pittsburgh and for a strong newspaper in the city that we really, really love and care about and that it’s Mr. Rogers neighborhood. I love the city and I want us to have a strong daily newspaper. I don’t want it to go under because of bosses who can’t treat their employees fairly or well at all. And being treated well is more about more than about, more than just pay. I want to make it clearer. So moving forward, I think we’re trying to make ourselves more seen in the community This summer, it was really hard starting the strike in October of 2022 and then going right into winter where in Pittsburgh, everyone hibernates and goes inside. So every time the spring rolling around, it’s a good chance for us to get out and about.
And I guess I would just say that if you’re a person who’s in Pittsburgh or you see any of us out, if we’re ever in DC doing an action with the News Guild, people come and talk to us and ask us what we’ve been through. We always have our QR codes when we’re out for you to donate for people to donate. We’re working on new merch and new projects for things to put out into the community like artwork and music and just different community-based projects that’ll help us raise money but also shine a light on our supporters in Pittsburgh and around the country.
Emily Matthews:
Also, if you’re not in Pittsburgh, but would also like to help, we have a link. I know it’s on the Union Progress website through the Action Network where you can donate, you can also buy t-shirts. We have two really cool designs designed by our own striker, Jen Kundra. So check out the Pittsburgh Union progress. We have updates all the time on strike related things as well as Pittsburgh things. And we do have a bargaining date coming up on June 5th, so hopefully, fingers crossed, something will come of that. Even if it doesn’t, we always update on the union progress. So make sure to check it out after that to see what’s going on. And in the meantime, we always appreciate just messages of support too. If you can’t donate money, send us a message. It’s always uplifting to hear from the community.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just with the last one to two minutes that we got here, I wanted to ask if any of y’all have direct messages to our fellow colleagues in the journalism industry. I’m doing my best here to still, I mean, on episodes like this, I try to be somewhat objective. I don’t have, objectivity is a myth, but I’m trying to be at least fair, transparent, get people the truthful factual information, firsthand information from y’all that they need. But all the while I’m sitting over here just boiling because I want to scream at every one of our fellow workers in the journalism industry, what the fuck are you guys doing? How have you not been, pardon my French, but how have you not been raising hell over this from the day this strike started? Like Ed said, if the blocks get away with this, what makes you think that you’re going to be safe when you’re employer looks over and says, Hey, why don’t we do what the Post Gazette did?
And think of all that we lose in the industry when we lose journalism as a good paying career, a career that people want to invest in and stay in and make their career lives out of. I’ve talked to Steve Mellon and Bob Batson and other colleagues of yours at Pittsburgh Union progress about the meaning of this strike for all of us who depend on journalism, local and national, and it makes my blood boil that so many in our industry have forsaken y’all and forgotten y’all and in my opinion, have frankly slit their own throats in our collective throat because this is going to impact all of us. So anyway, I’m getting hot here. So in the last minute, do any of you have any direct messages to folks out there in journalism that you want to share before we close?
Ed Blazina:
Just exactly what you said. It absolutely can happen to you. Don’t let it happen. Get involved in journalists have this thing, and it’s something I’ve had to learn. Even though I’ve been a union officer for 25 years, we always wanted to be neutral. We can’t take a stand on things. Well, I’m sorry. My job, I can take a stand over and absolutely I’m going to, but it’s something you have to learn. We are reticent to go to politicians to give us help. Well, heck, we have a bunch of politicians in the Pittsburgh area who have refused to talk to the Post Gazette because we’ve told them, don’t cross our picket line. It was hard for us to do, but you have to do it. There’s lots of things you don’t like to do, but you have to, and this is one where you have to
Emily Matthews:
Working in journalism too, it’s easy just to appreciate that you have a job in journalism and just to accept your working conditions for what they are. But you never know when your conditions can change for the worst and when you’re in a really bad spot and at that point it’s too late. So you need to unionize early, unionize ahead of the company’s, whatever they’re planning on doing, get one step ahead of them, unionize, organize, talk to your coworkers, make sure everyone’s doing okay. There could be things going on with different people that you just don’t know about because people are afraid to speak up and talk about it. I think that’s another important thing to do is to, even if you’re not in a union, start talking to your coworkers. See what issues arise, see what problems they’re having, try to organize and figure out how to unionize. There’s lots of resources out there to do that.
Erin Hebert:
I would say to also remember that not everyone in journalism, even at Legacy outlets, so to speak, come from a background where they have financial support. A lot of people working at big national outlets, I mean, there’s that whole, the scandal over the New York Times preferring to higher Ivy League graduates. There’s definitely a very stark class disparity in journalism that I’ve found and that I’ve discussed with other people on strike who also come from lower middle class backgrounds, I guess you would say socioeconomically, and just remember, not everybody has the freedom. Some of us need union protections to be able to earn a living in our field. Not all of us grew up with family connections to the industry. Not all of us can make the switch to pr. Like everyone says, oh, you can’t make it work in journalism, go to pr. We shouldn’t have to do that.
We should be guaranteed good jobs that allow us to do the work of covering our communities, and which over two and a half years of this strike, the city has been, I mean, the social circles that I’m in, it’s just everybody’s talking about this stuff and everybody has a different opinion on it, but nobody seems to really care to ask us directly. It’s kind of just talking, and I just think it’s important to remember that, as Emily said, this can happen to you at any time. You cannot trust the boss to have your back or anybody who is okay cowering to the boss and not standing up to the boss, and that you can only get past that by talking to your fellow workers and talking about your experiences. Honestly, even when it’s hard or it’s embarrassing or you think you’re not going to be believed based on what you’ve experienced,
Ed Blazina:
And even if you’re in a union, you have to pay it forward too. One good example of that is the New York Times tech workers had a short strike back at the beginning of the year. Actually it was before that. It was just before the election. They struck during election week, brilliant move because a lot of what the New York Times does on election night is based on what those folks do technically in their computer systems. They had a strike. Their strike fortunately lasted I think less than two weeks, but in that time, they raised so much money that after their strike, they had $114,000 left over that they donated to us. We end our strike. I’m sure there’s somebody we’ll pay it forward too, because that’s what you have to do. We’re all in this together whether we like it or not.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, ed Blaina, Aaron Abert and Emily Matthews, three union officers for the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh who have all been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for over two and a half years. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Speaker 6:
When my fish you no longer see, I live on, yes, I live on wherever we go. We are going to roll the union on the Some I live on. Yes, I live on wherever Hungry, hungry. Are we just as hungry as hungry can be? The some I live on, yes. I live on where mean things are happening in this land. It’s red or sung. I live on, yes, I live on wherever the book mean things are happening. In this land is read. I live on, yes, I live on wherever the video tape of me showing I live on. Yes, I live on. If I have help to make this a better world to live in, I’ll live on. Yes, I live on when my body is silent and in some lonesome grave I’ll live on. Yes I on when my songs are on, I.
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