A dozen leaders from five striking Pittsburgh news unions and their lawyer, representing people who have been on strike at the Post-Gazette for 11 months, met with two company lawyers and a manager Tuesday at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown.
There was no news.
This was the first bargaining session in a full quarter of a year — since mid-June, when the two sides exchanged proposals for restoring health care coverage, the loss of which precipitated the strike for the pressmen, mailers, drivers and advertising workers on Oct. 6. The journalists, whom the company moved to its health care plan when it imposed conditions in 2020, went out on their own unfair labor practice strike on Oct. 18.
Both sides had seemed amenable to the costs and benefits of the unions’ proposed health care plan, but a sticking point was the company said it would not sign a participation agreement. The unions said they would run that past this plan’s trustees, who repeated that they require a participation agreement (a contract that spells out the terms between the participating company and employees and the fund).
Tuesday’s two-hour-and-10-minute session could be summed up by this exchange between union lawyer Joe Pass and company lawyer Michael Oesterle:
Pass: “You going to sign our participation agreement or not?”
Oesterle: “No.”
Most of the rest of the time consisted of bickering and a rehashing of what did or did not happen in the days/months/years leading up to the strike since in 2021. The lawyers even argued about what they were doing — “effects” bargaining on health care or contract bargaining? The company stuck to the former, though the unions — their contracts expired since 2017 — had formally requested the latter, as well.
But company attorney Richard Lowe did elaborate on what he said is the company’s big health care concern: Being “hit by a huge increase” in cost that it maintains could be imposed by the proposed two-year health care plan on or after Jan. 1, 2025. So he handed the unions a proposal that said the company would agree to be in the plan and negotiate any changes that come up in 2025 — “We can’t do anything unilaterally” — but included a paragraph saying it would not sign a participation or any trust agreement, and asked Pass to present that to the plan.
Pass, who insisted that the company could elect to leave the plan without penalty at any time during its duration, which he further offered to limit to a specific number of months, said he would go back to the plan but he expected the trustees couldn’t budge.
“C’mon,” Pass said, “you’re playing games with people’s lives.”
Some of the union leaders questioned Lowe about whether workers would be covered while cost increases were being negotiated and about ways the participation/trust agreements might be reworded to be workable to both sides — such as allowing workers to pay cost increases or accept reduced benefits or seek a different plan — as a beginning point to ending the strikes.
Lowe raised the fact that the end of the strikes might bring new issues, such as the company having fewer than expected employees due to attrition or needing fewer if it decides to drop one or two of the remaining days of weekly print production.
Once again, the actual time bargaining was shorter than the travel times for most participants, especially the company lawyers, who are based in Nashville.
Though the company had proposed several, no next bargaining date was set.
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.
