Picketing advertising employee resigns after nearly four decades at the PG

With sparkling wine and Shop ‘n Save marble cake outside the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Clinton printing plant, striking news workers on Thursday celebrated Patty Haluka’s bittersweet resignation from the PG after 38 years of service.

Having started out in the newspaper’s circulation department answering phone calls in 1984, Haluka gradually progressed to her final PG job title of customer service team lead while gaining experience in nearly all areas of the production process. 

“I moved my way up slowly,” she said. “I was in every department of this place, between advertising, production and composing.”

What she liked most about her job were her colleagues — many of whom she considered family — in addition to the “satisfaction of getting an ad processed and published in the paper from beginning to end.”

Her least favorite part of her nearly four decades at the PG she summarized in two words: “This strike.” 

Haluka was a member of the Pittsburgh typographical union, members of which — along with workers in the production and transportation unions — have been on strike since Oct. 6 (they were joined by newsroom workers on Oct. 18). This was not her first time involved in a Pittsburgh newspaper labor dispute.

As a company messenger in the early 1990s, she was one of the roughly 1,200 employees who were part of the 1992 Pittsburgh newspaper strike. Because her role wasn’t as directly involved with the newspaper process as it came to be, she remembers that strike being less emotional for her than the current one.

“Back then, we were considered locked out, and I didn’t even have to go on the picket line. It was completely different,” she said. “This time, we’re on the line here, and I’m feeling it. It’s tough.”

Haluka tearfully expressed the upset of her hopes to stay with the PG until retirement. Instead, she is starting a new job as administrative assistant for the Communication Workers of America Local 13000. She begins on Jan. 2.

“I’m working towards better benefits and better retirement,” she said. “It’s a future I should’ve looked for awhile ago but never did because I was happy here.”

Although not the retirement party Haluka envisioned, the picket line reception was a warm one. As many of her colleagues expressed with their goodbye hugs, “This is a loss for the Post-Gazette.”