About 750 Washington Post staffers staged a one-day walkout Thursday. Contract negotiations between Washington Post Guild, the paper’s union, and management have stalled after 18 months, Guild members say, and they hope this strike will be a strong signal to management. “There’s no one up there,” said Sarah Kaplan, the Guild’s shop steward, gesturing toward the Post’s offices on Franklin Square. “Everyone’s out here. I hope it’s clear to everyone that they need us.”
Guild members marched in shifts of about 100 people at a time all day Tuesday beginning at 7 AM with the intention of going until midnight. They erected a giant inflatable rat outside the building and asked Post readers to refrain from interacting with the publication’s journalism during the strike’s duration. Some reporters withheld their byline from stories due to publish Thursday, and one by “Washington Post Staff” ran on the print paper’s front page Thursday morning.
Katie Mettler, the union’s co-chair for news, wrote that story, staying up till last Wednesday night to file. Union membership at the Post has ballooned in recent years, she said. Now more than 70 percent of the publication’s staff is represented by the Guild, up from the “mid to upper 40s” a few years back. While many publications are “closed shops,” meaning that union membership is mandatory, the Post’s union is optional as a result of the messy events that led to the paper breaking a bitter strike in the 1970s.
The December air grew chillier as we talked. Some staffers availed themselves of hot drinks, snacks, and hand warmers at a table. Some cars that passed honked in support. Maura Judkis, a reporter in the Post‘s features department, held a bullhorn and led a chant of “Stand up / Fight back / Local news is under attack.” The rat, nicknamed Scabby, swayed in the breeze and at times appeared at risk of flopping over like that George Santos balloon. Staffers quickly came to Scabby’s aid, tethering it to large Bluetooth speakers.
“I’m so proud of you guys,” Gene Myer, a former Post reporter who was the unit’s chair in 1978, told Mettler. He’d come down to march with them, and told stories about those days, like a Post executive who said Guild members were becoming “unmanageable free spirits,” a phrase members turned into buttons some people wore in the newsroom.
Staffers hung notes with clothespins on string, saying why they’d struck. “I’m walking out because…Wayne’s emails,” wrote one person. That appeared to be a reference to an email one Post bigwig, head of HR Wayne Connell, wrote to all staffers Wednesday, warning them that the union may “fine or discipline members who choose to work during a strike” and noting that people could avoid that fate “by resigning their union membership before working during a strike.” There were no plans to fine or penalize anyone, Kaplan told me Wednesday, adding, “Wayne Connell does not and never will speak for the Guild.” (Connell has a history of memorable all-staff emails.)
A rally earlier that day had drawn a couple hundred people, and speakers included union machers as well as Post legends like Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the first Black woman to work as a reporter there. It was a reminder, Mettler said, that the people outside were “part of something that’s bigger than us.” She got to the line at 9 AM and planned to be there until the strike ended at midnight.
Disclosure: Like the Post’s staffers, Washingtonian’s editorial staff is also represented by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
