Washington Post goes on strike Thursday

December 5, 2023 12:48 PM

On Thursday, the Washington Post's workers are going on strike for 24 hours. They've worked now for 18 months without a satisfactory contract, there have already been layoffs, 240 staff have been offered buyouts, and the owners are now threatening more layoffs. The staff have asked people not to engage with Washington Post content on December 7 from midnight to midnight (a full day). They also encourage you to send a letter to the Post's leaders asking them to stop the cuts and give a fair deal to employees.
posted by rednikki (25 comments total)

Letter sent. (Thanks to rednikki for getting the word out.)

I'm a longtime Post subscriber. I've also worked for Guild newspapers, and non-union newspapers. The differences are astronomical. Guild newspapers have more reporters and editors, and they're paid better, so they stick around longer and all of that results in better service to their communities.

I've seen the Guild save a promising young Black reporter's career when he made a mistake, and at a non-union paper, I've seen a promising young Black reporter drummed out of the business because of a mistake made by his (old, white) editor, who threw him under the bus.

And at a former paper, my current hometown paper, I've watched management illegally drive out union activists, only to still see the paper go union, and the only reason the paper is hanging on is because the hedge fund owners can't outright fire everyone.

Please support the Post employees seeking decent pay. It's the right thing to do. Plus, Bezos can afford it.
posted by martin q blank at 1:09 PM on December 5, 2023 [33 favorites]

I sure hope Jeff Bezos has the resources to weather this storm.
posted by chronkite at 1:13 PM on December 5, 2023 [11 favorites]

Letters sent, thank you OP.
posted by wicked_sassy at 1:14 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Any man who can afford to have his own private space program can also afford to pay ALL of his employees (and I mean ALL OF HIS EMPLOYEES) the living wage they are entitled to in exchange for their labor.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:14 PM on December 5, 2023 [23 favorites]

Cosigning martin q blank's post. I'm a Newsguild member at a different publication, but we're also at odds with our management right now. We've been bargaining with them for over a year for a new contract, and they're refusing to even give us responses on numerous proposals we've put forward (including to increase our measly allocation of 3 sick days per year).

I'm inspired by all the union activism in media circles over the last several years, and I'll be supporting the Post's membership this Thursday by boycotting the paper.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:19 PM on December 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

Democracy dies in darkness oligarchy.

(the <strike> tag has rarely been so apropos)
posted by caution live frogs at 1:33 PM on December 5, 2023 [20 favorites]

Definitely support the strike, I'm curious, though, is the issue of major papers basically trying to prohibit their journalists from signing open letters, expressing support with causes online, and generally being decent human beings, an issue in this or any other labor dispute going on right now?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:54 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, good God, how infuriating. Thank you, I had no idea. Will definitely not click on The Post Most Thursday even if another guy in Arlington blows up his house. And I will write a thing.

...

Okay, I wrote them this:

"I've subscribed to the Washington Post since you endorsed Hilary Clinton, and I got my mother a subscription then, too. I usually love any excuse to drop a subscription, but I admit sometimes it hurts. When I had to drop Harper's Magazine in 2018 after 20 years, that hurt. And I would be sad to have to cancel this subscription, too. I've kept WaPo the longest of anything I'm currently paying for, and, like Harper's, I actually read it. I would rather keep WaPo than anything else.

But I subscribed because you did the right thing when it was not easy, and I kept the subscription because your coverage is excellent, whereas now you seem to be doing the most spectacularly wrong thing imaginable at the worst possible time to deliberately make your coverage less excellent. Because... what? It's somehow not clear to management that you need to do everything possible to keep the paper strong? Now when every other story on NPR is bellowing about the Trump horrorblimp looming on the horizon? And Zuck and E. Musk and the Murdoch boys seem hellbent on handing the country over to orange Tweedledee and plunging the country into that vaunted darkness democracy dies in?

Why now of all times are you risking the quality of the coverage? I do like knowing all about what's going on in DC and environs and getting the skinny direct from the people on the ground whenever some guy in Arlington blows up his own house or the president dispatches a mob of rabid loons to kill the vice president, but you know what, other cities have good gossip, too, and I can get the broad strokes about DC anywhere. WaPo is great, but it's not essential to my continued happiness, especially not if it deliberately turns itself into a bin liner. Maybe you're deliberately aligning with Zuck and Musk and all of them because you think I and people like me will again panic-subscribe if Trump looks like winning again? Well, I won't. That only works once. I will kick my WaPo subscription into the sun and get the L. A. Times or The Miami Herald* if you do not stop firing people and negotiate with your workers to give them a fair deal.

*I have been L.A.-Times- and Miami-Herald-curious for years. Try me."

MetaFilter is the best for subscription management! This is where I found out about the Katie Roiphe stupidity that outed the "shitty men" listkeeper and made me have to drop Harper's.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:18 PM on December 5, 2023 [14 favorites]

Will definitely not click on The Post Most Thursday even if another guy in Arlington blows up his house. And I will write a thing.

For better local coverage, ARL NOW
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 2:29 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

yeah, my closing line threw their motto back at them, too. Something like: "Democracy Dies in Darkness, and you're trying to turn off a couple hundred lights."
posted by martin q blank at 2:45 PM on December 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

Don Pepino, unfortunately LA Times management are also acting rather sus these days. Heba Elorbany (who is a signer of the Protect Journalists open letter) was recently laid off (though not necessarily because of that, it's not clear why).
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:53 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, I should've checked first, crap. It never occurred to me, but of course they're probably all growing fangs at the same rate.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:57 PM on December 5, 2023

What about The Detroit Free Press? My cousin is a photographer for them.
posted by Don Pepino at 2:58 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not sure how relevant it is to the timing (since the contract shenanigans have been going on for so long), but WaPo just announced the hiring of William Lewis as CEO a month ago, an alum of multiple conservative rags including being CEO of Dow Jones (publisher of the WSJ) for six years.

He hasn't started yet and the existing CEO is not exactly a bleeding-heart himself, just wondering if this strike has anything to do with that transition.
posted by Riki tiki at 3:41 PM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

If we ever make it to some enlightened future society, the fact that we had media controlled by a few rich individuals is going to be incomprehensible to them, much like our use of cars and fossil fuels.
posted by ropeladder at 4:27 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I sure hope Jeff Bezos has the resources to weather this storm.

His megayacht has a support yacht to hold the jetskis and luxury cars. If his support yacht can't weather this storm, the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle will be brought in to provide backup to the support to weather the storm.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:16 PM on December 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

My workplace is unionized through CWA. We aren't part of NewsGuild, but I have had the opportunity to sit in on trainings alongside NewsGuild members, and I cannot emphasize enough how impressed I have been by their dedication to not only the union members they represent, but to the quality and integrity of the work they do at their publications.

I hope the Washington Post's clicket line is a success, and that the Post's workers get a new (and fair) contract. Lord knows their owner can afford to pay other people what they're worth, and that we all depend on the Post's work.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 6:50 PM on December 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Letter sent. I've been mildly annoyed about the Post's editorial section for a while now, and have been delaying renewing my subscription until the last minute. Which is Friday. I do read the Post daily and find value in it, but my goal in subscribing was to support journalism. If they're laying off a huge chunk of journalists and not paying the rest a living wage and fighting with the union, while being owned by Jeff Bezos, it might be time to let the subscription lapse for a while.
posted by mersen at 7:05 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Good luck, workers.
posted by doctornemo at 8:38 PM on December 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Letter sent.
posted by Songdog at 5:17 AM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I did some engineering work for a few DJ properties including WaPo. If the way they treat their technical staff is the way they treat their reporters, well, best of luck to you.

- Demanding that I fire an engineer on the spot for ‘disrespecting the hierarchy’ by ‘making faces during a call’

- Emails in 40pt neon green font calling my team incompetent and entitled because the thing we told them would break broke exactly the way we told them it would break, on a Sunday.

- A manager emotionally blackmailing one of my young engineers to ssh to a production server at night and modify live data to cover up for a higher-up’s mistake. Fortunately I caught this on time and managed to trick the manager into putting the request in writing.

- A very contentious and violent offsite designed to agree on goals and success metrics for a data analysis project. A couple of us took one of the leaders to a nice dinner and after a few gin and tonics got: The only success metric that matters is for me to get a promotion and a big bonus, so I expect *your* results to match *my* predictions exactly! That is why we pay you, we can not do this in-house.


After a while we used this project as a “hardening” experience for engineers who wanted to work on their dealing with irrational clients skills.
posted by Dr. Curare at 6:34 AM on December 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

If anyone is subscribed to any of their podcasts, might make sense to turn off automatic downloads (since downloads are counted for platform statistics, and affect reach) and not listen tomorrow. And if subscribed to email newsletters, probably just don't open those?
posted by Night_owl at 1:46 PM on December 6, 2023

The guild's Twitter account has more detail in threads here and here about the sticking points in the negotiations.

Targeted buyout offers are not "voluntary", they note; senior staff are being offered buyout packages that are the same as staff who've been with the company for less than half the time, and the audio and podcast team will be severely cut back as a result of the buyouts, among other points.
posted by mediareport at 1:39 AM on December 7, 2023

Unfortunately, X/Twitter threads are now not viewable to people who don't have an account and/or aren't logged in.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:17 AM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sorry, I usually add Nitter.net links when linking Twitter. But any time you see a Twitter link, you can just enter the link or username into the search bar at Nitter and can usually read it that way.
posted by mediareport at 2:15 AM on December 8, 2023