Over 700 employees of The Washington Post began a 24-hour strike on Thursday in response to the 18-month standoff in contract talks with the newspaper’s management.
In the first protest at the daily since the mid-1970s, reporters, producers, editors, and business-side employees quit their jobs and started picketing outside the Post’s mysterious downtown headquarters.
The struggling historic newspaper is facing impending layoffs, and the Washington Post Guild, a part of the larger Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild, is suing management, claiming that they are negotiating in “bad faith” to get a contract that would address pay disparities and provide raises and job protections for staff.
The strike occurs as Post management tries to close a $100 million deficit by considering buyouts or staff reductions at the publication.
The proprietors of the publication have tasked senior Dow Jones employee Will Lewis, the new CEO, with turning around the paper’s dwindling readership and subscriptions in the face of mounting costs.
The Post has let go of nearly 40 workers in the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, many americans are having an increasingly difficult time getting by due to the high rate of inflation.
Americans are having a hard time getting by due to the high rate of inflation.
Over the past year, The Post, like other big publications, has struggled with a downturn in advertising.
Since reaching a peak of three million digital subscribers under the Trump administration, the company has also lost hundreds of thousands of readers, many of whom have decided to tune out of the kind of liberal politics regularly pushed by the Post.
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