PITTSBURGH—“Why don’t they enforce their own court order?”
That’s the question one worker asks. He’s been on strike for almost three years now, protesting the flagrant defiance of both the federal courts and the National Labor Relations Board by the right-wing pro-Trump Block brothers, owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The workers, members of the News Guild of Pittsburgh, are the last of the five union locals still striking the paper. Three years ago, the Block brothers forced the strike by unilaterally imposing an impasse after workers massively rejected a contract offer. They hadn’t had an active contract since 2017.
The Blocks’ pact doled out minimal raises, which were swallowed them up by health plans that cost more and covered less. The minimal gains were also eroded by changes in work rules. Part-timers represented by the News Guild would have gotten no health insurance at all.
Making a bold and creative move, in addition to walking the workers established their own paper, the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Almost three years later, it’s still going strong. So is the strike—the longest in News Guild history, and the longest current strike in the U.S.
At the time the workers began their strike, the Pittsburgh Guild had approximately 100 members at the paper. The other four union locals—including two Teamsters locals, a Communications Workers local, and one from the old International Typographical Union, now a Communications Workers (CWA) sector—eventually dropped out and dissolved their Post-Gazette chapters. The News Guild is also a CWA sector.
That, plus attrition, reduced the workforce. “People can’t stay out of work for three years,” one worker told People’s World, noting that the workers soldiering on against the Blocks now number 27, all of them members of the Union Progress staff. Others “took jobs at other places.” The Blocks hired dozens of scabs.
In such cases, there’s a mandate bosses must put at the end of the “Help wanted” ads they post, stating anyone taking a position would be “joining a strike newsroom.” The Blocks didn’t.
The Blocks also fired the paper’s prize-winning cartoonist, Rob Rogers, who was not a Guild member—after spiking several of his cartoons criticizing GOP President Donald Trump.
A U.S. District Judge in Pittsburgh ordered the Blocks back to the bargaining table with the News Guild. The judge issued an injunction ordering them to bargain in good faith and reach an acceptable contract. The bosses thumbed their noses at the court.
Headed for Court of Appeals
The Guild and the National Labor Relations Board, under then-General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, headed for the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. That court upheld the injunction, but the Blocks appealed and Abruzzo sought big fines against them at a court hearing several months ago. The workers expected a quick ruling.
The three workers, whom People’s World interviewed on August 11 during the CWA convention in Pittsburgh, are still waiting.
The Union Progress workers are surviving on $880,864 in strike fund money from CWA, plus voluntary contributions from around the labor movement. That included $114,000 in leftover community contributions to tech workers forced to strike the New York Times for a first contract. When they won, the Times people sent the excess funds to their Pittsburgh colleagues.
The two sides met recently, the Union Progress members/Post-Gazette strikers said, “but we saw there was no path forward,” said one. The Block brothers offered the same contract, with their cuts, that they had offered at the last bargaining session months before.
“We hadn’t met for six months because of the situation with the NLRB,” where anti-worker, anti-union President Trump fired Abruzzo—which was legal—and fired Board member Gwynne Wilcox, which wasn’t.
The National Labor Relations Act gives its five members staggered four-year terms and specifies they can be fired only for cause. Wilcox’s term was scheduled to end in August 2028. In late January, Trump canned her anyway, for, he said, not being pro-corporate.
When Wilcox was bounced, the board lost its quorum. It had only two members and needed three. She sued and won her job back temporarily, thanks to the lower courts. But the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled—in a 6-3 partisan vote—that Trump could fire her, or anyone else, no matter what the law says, and didn’t have to give a reason, either.
That one move has big ramifications and not just for the Guild members who are suing the Block brothers of the Post-Gazette. It gives the president, any president, uncontrolled authority to hire and fire anyone in any federal agency, including independent agencies such as the NLRB. Only the Federal Reserve Board, because of its key role in monetary policy and interest rates, is the exception.
All this has left the Union Progress Guild members/Post-Gazette strikers frustrated, but more determined than ever to keep their case before the public. So they did so on August 12, after the convention closed.
There’s a bus hired to leave the David Lawrence Convention Center that evening, and anyone can ride. Its destination is a News Guild picket line, in front of the Block brothers’ house.
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