Unionized journalists at The Washington Post will go on strike for 24 hours next Thursday to protest staff cuts made by the newspaper’s management amid contract negotiations that began 18 months ago.
The announcement of the strike comes just a few weeks after the appointment of William Lewis, former editor of The Wall Street Journal, who was named general director and editor of the Post for the end of the year, where the medium expects losses of 100 million dollars.
The Post is one of many media outlets struggling to come up with a sustainable business model in the decades since the Internet disrupted the economics of journalism and digital advertising rates plummeted.
Management at the Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said at the time of Lewis’ announcement that they were offering voluntary retirements across the company in an attempt to reduce the number of employees by about 10 percent and reduce the size of the newsroom to about 940 journalists.
The Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents more than 1,000 Post writers, advertisers and other non-newsroom employees, said the former editor’s mismanagement led to nearly 40 layoffs last year, and that the company now intended to cut others. 240 jobs through operations.
Representatives of the newspaper’s management did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the labor dispute.
According to the union, management has threatened to impose more layoffs if too few employees accept voluntary severance packages.
“That means fewer Post employees doing the critical journalism that keeps our communities informed and holds our public officials accountable,” the Guild said in an online statement.
Furthermore, after 18 months of contract negotiations, “the company refuses to pay us what we are worth or to negotiate in good faith,” the union said on the social network X (formerly Twitter). “So on December 7 we will go on strike for 24 hours.”
In an online video produced by the union, numerous Post journalists, including chief Ukraine correspondent Siobhan O’Grady, appear sequentially on camera pledging to join hundreds of their colleagues in the strike and urging readers to “respect our picket line preventing Washington Post journalism” during the strike.