A 22-month strike journey: From staring sleepless into the darkness at 3 a.m. to finding hope

At noon on Sunday, journalists on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hit another milestone: the start of their 23rd month on strike. That’s one day closer to two years of fighting against unfair labor practices. The strikers, in four unions, had some rare good news this past Wednesday, when the National Labor Relations Board filed in U.S. District Court for an injunction that could put them back to work. At a Thursday news conference/rally, striking photojournalist and Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh member Steve Mellon spoke about what it’s like to be on strike for so long.

Last night, Region 6 of the National Labor Relations Board filed to enjoin the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for its many violations of federal labor law.

Here’s a reminder: The Post-Gazette could’ve settled this dispute at any point — even before the strike — by respecting us and our rights as workers and simply following labor law. Failure to do so has consequences.

We’ve fought for 22 months for this moment. Ours is the longest-running strike in the U.S., the longest strike in our union’s history, and the longest strike in the history of this great city of labor. We’ve been proud to stand up for ourselves and each other, but while we’ve waited for the law to be enforced, we’ve borne many costs.

This is what the fight has entailed:

• Twenty-two months of no paychecks.

• Twenty-two months of putting the career you love on hold.

• Twenty-two months of getting in your crappy old car in the morning and praying to God the red “check engine” light doesn’t come on because you don’t have the money for repairs.

• Twenty-two months of waking up at 3 a.m. and staring into the darkness and asking yourself some disturbing questions. “If I’m not a working journalist, then who am I? If I can’t provide for my family, for my partner, for myself, then what am I worth?”

• Twenty-two months of continually telling your spouse, your partner, your kids, “This strike won’t last forever; life will return to normal soon.”

• Twenty-two months of telling your family, “Let’s just get pizza tonight instead of going to a restaurant” because your bank account is at a low point.

• It means getting together with your family, your partner, and saying, “Look, we’re going to have to change our vacation plans again this year.”

When you go on strike, your spouse, your partner, your kids — they go on strike with you. They, too, feel the shattering of family routine, they feel and experience the anxiety that hits when your income plummets. They see the anger you express when people you thought you knew, people who you considered friends, betray all of those progressive principles they’ve spoken about in the past and cross a picket line.

• Striking has meant standing on picket lines in the cold rain at 1 a.m., tired and stressed, getting yelled at and pushed around by police, standing inches from the grill of a rumbling truck, with a PG manager telling the driver to go ahead, “Go ahead and put it into gear, these shitheads will move.” And of course we didn’t move.

OK, enough about the costs. Let’s talk about what we’ve accomplished. It’s a long list:

• We’ve learned how to take care of each other. The day the strike began, a handful of us got together to anticipate strikers’ needs — financial needs, transportation needs, physical and mental health care needs. And then we organized ourselves and worked together to meet those needs.

• We organized to raise money so people could pay their rent, make their college loan payments, keep food in the refrigerator. We organized fundraising events at Bottlerocket in Allentown, with music from the Pittsburgh Labor Choir, the extraordinary vocalist Phat Man Dee and our own Rick Nowlin.

• With the help of supporters like Allie Petonic and our great friends at the United Steelworkers headquarters, we held bake sales. We spent hours texting supporters and making phone calls. And when people sent donations, we wrote hundreds and hundreds of thank-you notes.

• When we saw that mental health was becoming an issue several months into the strike, we reached out to mental health experts and asked their advice. How do we help these people we’ve come to love and respect in this difficult time?

• We’ve learned how to talk to our families about the strike and the sacrifices it has entailed. Those have been difficult conversations. How do you explain to your children and your partner the importance of taking painful blows now so that you and your colleagues, and those who follow you, can have a better future? How do you convince yourself to keep up the fight as the days and weeks and months drag on?

We remind ourselves: Our children, our partners, our families and our friends are watching us, they’re listening to what we say and weighing it against what we do. How we square those two things in this moment will be our legacy.

• We’ve made so many good friends, people who understand what it means to take a stand, to pay a price to hold onto something you believe is so important: having a voice in the workplace. These are people who know that the only reason workers in this country have decent pay and health care, time off and safe workplaces is because workers have fought for those things.

I mentioned standing on picket lines in some very uncomfortable circumstances. We have done this, over and over, and when we’re standing on the line and look to our right and then to our left, we see our steadfast allies. Baristas, environmental activists, members of other unions, members of the LGBTQ+ community, musicians, and some people who simply have balls and like standing with others who are taking a stand.

This is a great city, folks. It’s filled with people of great courage, people willing to sacrifice their time and their money and their energy to stand by us, knowing that they themselves will get nothing tangible out of it. All they’ll gain is the knowledge that they’re giving a little juice to a cause and a people they believe in. These are people who reject the transactional nature that defines a lot of relationships in this country. I know no better people. And this gives me hope.

Steve Mellon

Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.