At 10 a.m. Friday, representatives of all five striking news unions met at Downtown’s Omni William Penn Hotel with representatives of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to propose a health care plan for members of at least four of the unions.
Discuss it they did, going through specific points over the course of about two hours of bargaining. Some of the points they went over multiple times.
The unions’ table, where a dozen representatives and others sat, was led by their attorney Joe Pass. He responded to the two company lawyers’ questions about plan language with assurances that no matter what, the proposed plan would last from the time all parties signed it, which could be yet this month, for two years, during which time the costs and the benefits could not change.
“You can’t beat that with a stick,” he said.
He answered all the company’s attorneys questions that he could and said he would get other answers by phone during a break, and he did. He also told them they were free to contact the plan administrators themselves. “In fact, I would urge you to do so.”
The eight-month and ongoing Pittsburgh news strike started when the Post-Gazette did not pay a $19-per-week increase for health care for workers in the production and transportation unions, aiming instead to move them to the company’s health plan. Those four unions went on strike on Oct. 6, 2022. The newsroom workers, whom the company moved to its health care plan when it imposed conditions in 2020, went on their own unfair labor practice strike on Oct. 18, 2022.
An agreement on health care would be a huge step in getting the production workers back to work, a possibility that even PG attorney Richard Lowe acknowledged during his questioning aimed at the typos (advertising workers) union when he began a sentence, “When the people come back from the strike ….”
But even when pressed for one, he gave no answer to the proposal, which the unions had sent to the company representatives about a week earlier. Around noon, when he was ready to move on to technically bargaining with the mailers on the exact same proposal, Lowe asked that union’s president about his availability to do so next week.
Several of those seated across the room on the unions’ side erupted into swear words and fists hitting the table, because they wanted to get more done right then. (The two sides hadn’t met for more than a month.)
Pass: “This is what you would call really frustrating bad-faith bargaining.”
Lowe: “A schedule is a schedule.”
Lowe walked out of the room, leaving behind his jacket on his chair and the PG’s Production Operations Director Rob Weber. But Lowe soon returned and asked for a 5-minute break, after which he turned bargaining over to his colleague Michael D. Oesterle, who had questions of his own about the plan.
After some discussions with more edge to them from both sides, sometimes about points that already had been covered, Oesterle said he was done — it was about 12:35 p.m. — and asked about the unions’ availability to meet next week.
Afterward, Pass said the two sides will meet again on Tuesday.
In a news release about the session, Zack Tanner, Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh president, said, “The Post-Gazette attorneys once again made a sideshow of the bargaining process and showed zero interest in resolving the strike.”
Bob, a feature writer and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is currently on strike and serving as interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Contact him at bbatz@unionprogress.com.
