Unionized journalists at The Washington Post said they’d stage a 24-hour strike on Thursday to protest staff cuts and what they call management’s failure to bargain in good faith in contract talks which have stretched on for 18 months.
The planned one-day walkout comes weeks after William Lewis, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, was named chief executive and publisher of the Post as the venerable Washington every day newspaper was projecting a year-end lack of $100 million.
The Post is one among many news outlets struggling to plan a sustainable business model within the a long time for the reason that web upended the economics of journalism and digital promoting rates plummeted.
Executives on the Post, which is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, said on the time of the Lewis announcement that they were offering voluntary buyouts across the corporate in a bid to cut back worker headcount by about 10% and shrink the scale of the newsroom to about 940 journalists.
The Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents greater than 1,000 editorial, promoting and other non-news staff on the Post, said mismanagement by the previous publisher led to almost 40 layoffs last 12 months, and the corporate was now searching for to chop one other 240 jobs through buyouts.
Representatives for the newspaper’s management didn’t immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment on the labor dispute.
In accordance with the union, management has threatened to impose more layoffs if too few staffers accept voluntary severance packages.
“Which means fewer Post employees making the critical journalism that keeps our communities informed and holds our public officials accountable,” the Guild said in an internet statement.
Furthermore, after 18 months of contract negotiations, “the corporate is refusing to pay us what we’re value or bargain in good faith,” the union said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “So on Dec. 7, we’re walking off the job for twenty-four hours.”
In a Guild-produced online video, quite a few Post journalists, including chief Ukraine correspondent Siobhan O’Grady, appear sequentially on camera pledging to hitch lots of of work-mates within the strike and urging readers to “respect our picket line by avoiding Washington Post journalism” in the course of the walkout.
The minute-long video ends with the refrain, “because we’re value more, value greater than our bosses are offering.”
Lewis is about to tackle his duties from Jan. 2, 2024, replacing Patty Stonesifer, who became interim chief executive in June, and Fred Ryan, who stepped down in August after a nine-year stint as publisher and CEO.