Is The Finish Line in Sight for the Country's Longest Ongoing Strike?

Maximilian Alvarez: I’m honored to be joined on the show today, first by Ed Blazina, 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 Erin Hebert, 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.

I wanted to just start by asking if you could introduce yourself and 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 over the past two and a half years.

Ed Blazina: I’ve been a journalist for 45 years. For the last 10 years, I’ve been the transportation writer at the Post-Gazette. I’ve been a union officer for 25 years. I’m old enough to retire and retire with full benefits. I refuse to let the Blocks end 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.

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. It keeps me sane, if you want to call two and a half years on strike being sane. And the other aspect is we’re running a strike. We’ve raised well over a million dollars to help people be able to stay on strike. But it’s two and a half years now, so it’s difficult. We probably have half the people that we had before. It’s tough, but we’re still at it, and we’re still going to be here.

Erin Hebert: I’ve been at the Post-Gazette since 2016, the vast majority of my professional career as a journalist. I haven’t had a contract since March 2017 which was five months after I started. I haven’t had a contract that entire time. I’m from Louisiana, and I didn’t know anything about unions before I came here. And the life education that I’ve gotten being in Pittsburgh and being with this local and at this newspaper, I can’t even begin to describe how much my life has changed over the past 10 years.

[The strike] has been a real roller coaster, 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 have 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. It is very much like a family at this point.

Emily Matthews: 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. I got engaged, got married, adopted a cat, and yet we’re still on strike.

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 the strike comes to an end soon and we can get back to work. I grew up here. 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.

Alvarez: Can you walk us through what the back and forth has been like and what the key updates have been in the strike?

Blazina: 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 for management. The company appealed that original decision from 2023. They appealed. It took over a year for the full board of the NLRB to throw out their appeal. 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. Once the appeal was decided, then it moved over to what’s called a 10(e) for enforcement. So now the NLRB goes to court to enforce its own order, because the NLRB 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.

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 the NLRB to get a 10(e) injunction. 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. Just we think you were wrong.

Two weeks ago, we won. The court threw out that appeal, so there are no more appeals. 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. So the NLRB is preparing to file for fines against the company for refusing to follow a court order. We know that in previous cases, those fines are hefty and they usually double every day, so they’re putting themselves at more financial risk to keep fighting for we don’t know what. We have no idea what their endgame is. They’ve now lost at every level of court they’ve gone to.

Alvarez: What kind of resolution are y’all hoping for right now, and what messages do you have for folks listening to this about what they can do to help?

Blazina: I think the important thing here is the fight we’re fighting could have happened anywhere. 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. 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 the people who will come up behind us and need the protections that we’re fighting for.

Hebert: For me, this strike has always been existential. 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 has treated its employees with such disdain. I went to journalism school and was told that you comfort the afflicted and you afflict the comfortable. This is the ultimate iteration of that.

Moving forward, I think we’re trying to make ourselves more seen in the community. 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, come and talk to us and ask us what we’ve been through. We always have our QR codes when we’re out for people to donate.

Alvarez: 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.

Matthews: Working in journalism, it’s easy just to appreciate that you have a job in journalism and to accept your working conditions for what they are, but you never know when your conditions can change for the worse and when you’re in a really bad spot. At that point it’s too late, so you need to unionize early. Unionize ahead of whatever the company is planning on doing. Get one step ahead of them.

Hebert: And just remember, some of us need union protections to be able to earn a living in our field. We should be guaranteed good jobs that allow us to do the work of covering our communities.

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 just before the election. Their strike fortunately lasted 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 will pay it forward to, because that’s what you have to do. We’re all in this together, whether you like it or not.