PITTSBURGH—The Pittsburgh Union Progress is back in business, still written and published by members of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, but without the word “union” on its masthead.
That’s because the staffers didn’t just make it a strike paper, as it was for the last three years of their five-year-plus struggle with the Block brothers, the right-wing owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
As of July 27, the Progress’s first day on the streets of the Steel City, the workers are publishing a real, regular paper, online, owned as a co-op by its workers and its readers. It’s now just the Pittsburgh Progress, in honor of the strike paper. And all the workers are still members of the NewsGuild of Pittsburgh, TNG-CWA Local 38061.
And they’re ready to give the new owner of the Post-Gazette—who went non-union—and the also conservative Pittsburgh Star-Tribune a run for their money.
The Pittsburgh Progress will “feature worker-centered reporting hard to find elsewhere,” the Communications Workers report. It will “serve as a source of communication and connection that reflects the needs of working-class people in the region.”
CWA Local 7250 members at the Sassafras Collective, a unionized co-op, designed the new website of the Pittsburgh Progress.
If the Pittsburgh Progress succeeds, Pittsburgh will be one of the few cities in the U.S., in the shrinking newspaper industry, with three papers.
The saga in Pittsburgh began years ago. There hasn’t been a new contract at the Post-Gazette since 2017. In one respect involving the workers’ battle against the Blocks, it’s still going.
The Blocks, who own a large mansion in an upper-class neighborhood and next to Pittsburgh’s World War I memorial, still haven’t paid the federal court judgment for years of back pay, health care costs and other damages to the workers and legal fees to the News Guild.
Fast forward to early last year, when the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia sided with the Guild and the National Labor Relations Board in the case.
The appellate judges ordered the Blocks to obey a lower-court injunction, bargain with the workers and restore all the benefits, including lost pay at the old scale, health care, paid leave, 40-hour weeks and vacation time, which the Blocks arbitrarily and illegally yanked. The Blocks appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the pro-worker rulings. The justices refused.
That’s five years or more of back pay, damages, benefits, health care and everything else the workers had under the old union contract. And the back pay, including back pay for replacement workers, wouldn’t have been just net back pay, i.e., what they were owed minus what they earned while waiting for a final resolution of their legal case against the Blocks.
Instead, under a mandate issued by Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB General Counsel during the Biden administration, “back pay” would also cover expenses wronged workers ran up—credit card bills, auto loans, finance charges, rent and so on—while waiting for their case to be decided.
Even for the Blocks, who once stonewalled the workers at their other paper, the Toledo Blade, for 17 years before signing a contract, that sum is serious money.
The Blocks’ response was to close the Post-Gazette. A new owner, the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a non-profit financed by Maryland multimillionaire Stewart Bainum, bought the rights to its name and planned to start the paper up again.
Bainum also owns the Baltimore Banner. He established that paper to compete with the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild-represented Baltimore Sun, now owned by a right-wing group of radio stations.
Though the Post-Gazette is back on the streets, it’s not with the staff that beat the Blocks. Bainum went non-union.
Even then, the former PPG staffers previously told Press Associates Union News Service in an informal conversation that they were considering reviving the Union Progress, but with community and worker ownership. Now they have.
“We can support the former strikers today by becoming members of their co-op and subscribing, following their accounts on Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, and reading and sharing their work,” the Communications Workers add.
Contributions and/or subscriptions can be made here.
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