Greater than 750 unionized staffers at The Washington Post walked off the job Thursday to protest stalled contract talks on the broadsheet owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the corporate said.
The employees planned a day-long picket and rally outside the publication’s Washington, DC, downtown office — the largest labor protest to hit the corporate in 48 years — and asked readers to abstain from buying the newspaper or reading its website in solidarity, the outlet reported.
Non-unionized editors and managers, meanwhile, scrambled to generate content to publish Thursday.
The walkout follows a stalemate between unionized staffers and management that has left employees with no contract for 18 months.
“This can be a declaration by a whole bunch of Washington Post staffers saying that if the corporate is to work with us fairly, it has to respect its employees,” Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter and steward for The Washington Post Guild told the newspaper.
The union is in search of pay increases of 4% for the following three years, while the corporate’s latest offer was 2.25% next yr, with 2% increases in 2025 and 2026, in line with the Wall Street Journal.
“Despite a yr and a half of efforts, Post management has refused to bargain in good faith for a good contract that keeps up with inflation and our competition,” the union said, per the Journal.
In line with publication, bargaining over salaries has slowed down the method with the Guild, which is in search of minimums of $100,100 for reporters, for instance, while The Post’s latest offer is $73,000.
Other issues include the dimensions of annual cost-of-living raises.
Management said that it’s open to the Guild’s requests, including longer contracts, adding that its current offer provides “significant” changes to minimum salaries and annual increases which might be “more generous than typical Guild contracts signed in the last 20 years.”
“The Post has made its last, best and final offer to the Guild,” a Post spokesperson said.
In October, the corporate offered voluntary buyouts in an effort to slash head count by 240.
It said layoffs would follow if the goal isn’t reached. Editor Sally Buzbee told staffers the reduction is anticipated to depart the newsroom with 940 journalists, roughly the whole it had at the top of 2021.
The guild has called the terms of the buyout offer “stingy.”
Those opting to depart would get base pay starting from six months to 2 years, depending on how long they’ve worked there.
Union officials say the buyout might be more generous because it is being paid out of a flush pension fund.
To this point, roughly 120 staffers have taken the buyout ahead of the mid-December deadline.
Thursday’s walkout comes as the corporate is about to get a recent publisher and CEO.
William Lewis, a British-born veteran media executive, will take over Jan. 2.
He most recently worked on the Wall Street Journal.
He was tapped last month to exchange Fred Ryan, whose chaotic tenure was punctuated by layoffs.
A sweeping walkout hasn’t occurred on the renowned newspaper since 1975 when printing press employees led a strike while shutting down printing operations.
The paper’s then-publisher Katharine Graham hired alternative employees to run the presses, essentially breaking their union, the report said.
The Washington Post work stoppages mirrors the one-day walkout by greater than 1,100 unionized Recent York Times employees almost a yr ago to protest deadlocked contract negotiations.
The two sides struck a deal five months later.