Washington Post Employees Resign In Protest

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More than 750 Washington Post employees said they walked off their jobs early Thursday and refused to work for 24 hours. This was the largest labor protest at the company in nearly half a century.

As workers planned a day-long picket and rally outside the Post’s offices in downtown Washington – asking readers to avoid the newspaper and its website for the day in solidarity – editors and other managers prepared, many to tackle the tasks involved in producing a daily news report, from writing articles to operating printing presses.

Union members said they were marching in protest at the stalemate in negotiations with the company, which has left workers without a contract for 18 months. They also reject the company’s recent offer to offer employees cost-saving buyouts, saying the terms are stingy and the seemingly voluntary packages are enforced by the threat of layoffs.

“This is a statement from hundreds of Washington Post employees who say that if the company wants to work fairly with us, it must respect its employees,” said Sarah Kaplan, climate reporter and Washington Post Guild administrator.

“I know they will still try to put out a newspaper,” she added. “But without us they can’t put out a good newspaper.”

Company executives dispute the union’s claim that it negotiated in “bad faith” and say they still hope to reach a contract by the end of the month.

“We respect the right of our guild colleagues to participate in this planned one-day strike,” a company spokesman said. “We will ensure that our readers and customers remain as unaffected as possible.”

The company expressed confidence that it can print and deliver newspapers as usual on Thursday and Friday while keeping its website operational and active.

But in at least one respect, the impact of the strike will be obvious to regular readers: many reporters, photographers and artists will have their names withheld from their work.

The strike comes as The Post grapples with both internal leadership changes and the same economic challenges that have rocked media industries around the world.

After a decade of rapid growth under the leadership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, executives admitted in the fall that the company had expanded a little too far and that it would be forced to make cuts after optimistic financial forecasts failed to materialize. The Postal Service is expected to lose $100 million this year – the impetus for the takeover bids that executives hope will result in 240 voluntary departures, or about 10 percent of current staff. About half of those cuts would come from the newsroom.

The company is now on the verge of getting a new publisher and CEO. William Lewis, a British-born veteran media executive who most recently worked at The Wall Street Journal, was hired last month to replace Fred Ryan, who resigned earlier this year.

It has been 48 years since the last major strike at The Post. In the fall of 1975, printing press workers led a strike that lasted 20 weeks—a chaotic period during which some workers shut down the presses and company managers came in to operate the machines and print the newspapers themselves. However, most journalists did not participate in the strike, and eventually The Post’s then-publisher Katharine Graham hired replacement workers to run the printers, essentially breaking up their union.

Today, however, guild members say enthusiasm for organizing is growing. About 75 percent of eligible postal workers are now dues-paying members of the union, up from about 40 percent five years ago.

This follows a greater uptick in unionization in the media world. The strike at the Postal Service is almost exactly similar to a year ago at the New York Times, where more than 1,100 workers walked off work for a day to protest deadlocked contract negotiations. Five months later, the two sides agreed on a new contract.

Statements from the guild suggest that negotiations have stalled on issues such as salaries – for example, the guild is seeking a minimum wage of $100,100 for reporters, while the Post’s latest offer is $73,000 – and level the annual cost of living increases.

“Our salaries are not keeping pace with inflation or our competitors,” Kaplan said, adding that the Post has lost too many employees to other news organizations because of this.

The Postal Service’s negotiating committee responded that it had signaled openness to the guild’s request for longer contracts and agreed to many of its other priorities. The current offer includes “significant” changes to minimum salaries, the committee said, and annual increases that are “more generous than typical guild contracts signed over the past two decades.”

“The Post has made its last, best and final offer to the guild,” a Post spokesman said.

However, the takeover plan continues to cause tension and concern in the newsroom. Guild members argue that the offers – which range from six months to two years of base salary depending on the employee’s length of service – could be far more generous because the company is paying them out of a grossly overfunded pension fund. Meanwhile, those offered a buyout often felt compelled by warnings that the Postal Service would resort to layoffs if the company did not find enough voluntary departures.

Last week, interim CEO Patty Stonesifer said only about 120 employees had accepted an offer, half of what was needed just weeks before the mid-December deadline.

Katie Mettler, a Maryland courts and crime reporter and co-chair of the guild, said earlier this week that taking part in the walkout means she may be on an important day in the trial of a police officer accused of shooting and killing , a handcuffed man might be absent.

“It’s possible the verdict will be made as I walk out,” she said. “I don’t take that lightly. I’m sure someone from the Washington Post will appear in court on Thursday. But they won’t know the case as well as I do.”

In fact, the trial ended with an acquittal on Wednesday afternoon. The Post story about it was published without attribution – it was simply attributed to “Washington Post staff.”