At striking Pittsburgh news workers’ hearing, less is more, and there’s more to come

The dozen or so striking workers sitting in Judge Cathy Bisson’s federal courtroom Wednesday stared for hours in the direction of a massive painting of Downtown Pittsburgh as seen from the Rachel Carson Bridge. The artwork looms above Bissoon and includes so much detail that at times it seems like a photograph. You look at it and wonder, is this real?

Some of the testimony heard in the courtroom begged the same question. For example: Is a wage increase really a “raise” if the pay is increased and yet the employee ends up with less money? Perhaps we should all go back to school to learn how addition becomes subtraction.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers in four unions have been on strike now for 27 months; the fate of workers in three of those unions was the focus of Wednesday’s hearing at the Joseph F. Weis Jr. U.S. Courthouse. Bissoon is tasked with deciding whether to grant an injunction that would get those employees back to work under a contract that expired in 2017 and force the company to bargain a new agreement in good faith.

Testimony from two attorneys filled the day. First up was Joe Pass, who represents union mailers, advertising workers and pressmen. Anne Tewksbury, attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, methodically walked Pass through a series of documents that showed the vast gulf between the unions’ expired contracts and those put forth by the PG.

The PG proposals, Pass said, leave workers vulnerable to layoffs and arbitrary changes in wages, work schedules, health care benefits, and disciplinary procedures. They allow union work to be outsourced and strip employees of a guaranteed number of workdays each week as well as the right to strike. The company would have “total control,” Pass said at one point.

He said the company never budged from its proposals, which he defined as “bad faith” bargaining. It was frustrating and rendered bargaining useless, Pass said.

As for wages, Pass said the company proposal would cut press workers’ pay from an hourly wage of $25.84 to $24.48 during the proposal’s first year. That pay would raise over three years, topping out at $25.72. “They’re losing money,” Pass said.

Attorney Richard Lowe, representing the Post-Gazette, followed Pass and made the case that the PG proposal actually provides workers a pay increase. This argument uses interesting math. In the expired contract, 8% of employee wages were diverted to cover health care costs – that amount was capped at $4,000 annually. The PG proposal eliminates the diversion and raises pay 8% from the amount workers received after the diversion. The catch: Health care costs rise for the employee and could be as high as $14,000 annually.

Lowe painted the PG as an entity of plummeting fortunes. “Dismal” is the word he used to describe the newspaper business. He said he PG loses millions of dollars every year and the company needs flexibility in order to sustain itself in a news economy shifting away from print and towards digital models. The PG said it plans to move to an online-only news platform, according to Lowe.

Pass testified that the company has been making this claim for years and yet continues to print on Thursdays and Sundays, using a printing facility in Butler instead of the PG printing plant in Findlay since the strike began.

Lowe criticized a January 2023 decision by Administrative Law Judge Geoffrey Carter that the PG had violated federal labor law by negotiating in bad faith and imposing work conditions. At one point, Lowe seemed to be making the point that any contract represents a loss of freedom. For example, a contract locks workers into certain holidays, without the option of adding other holidays. 

The “loss of freedom” theory left striking newsroom workers scratching their heads. They wondered if they’d heard correctly. By Lowe’s measure, one suggested, owning a home represents a loss of freedom because homeowners are locked into sleeping under the same roof every night.

Newsroom workers represented by the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh would not be covered by this injunction, because their case against the Post-Gazette was affirmed in September by the National Labor Relations Board, but they attended the hearing to support workers in the other unions.

After several hours, Bissoon called the testimony to end for the day and said the hearing would resume at a date yet to be scheduled.