The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and as we reach the end of this season of the show at the end of an impossibly long, dark and exhausting year, it truly fills my heart to say these words, which I’ve been waiting to say for over three years now. The longest ongoing strike in the United States has come to an end and the workers won. Here’s the announcement from a press release posted by the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh last month. Striking workers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette sent their return to work offer to the company on Monday, November 17th, heralding the end of the longest running strike in the United States.

They offered to return to work at the Post Gazettes North Shore office on the morning of Monday, November 24th, and asked the company to inform strikers if they are being asked to report at a different time or place. One week prior, the United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Post Gazette to restore the terms of the 2014 through 2017 contract that the paper illegally unilaterally discarded on July of 2020, including the healthcare plan. Some workers paid time off the short-term disability plan and the right to fight discipline for managers among other collectively bargained workplace rights. The healthcare plan, the company imposed effectively cut workers’ wages by thousands of dollars each year as the Post Gazette dumped cost onto its employees. Members of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh struck on October 18th, 2022, demanding the restoration of the 2014 through 17 contract terms and dignified healthcare. Unlike with the many previous rulings against the post gazettes years long union busting campaign, the Third Circuit Court’s order is backed by enforcement powers that include the ability to have noncompliant owners and managers detained, as well as daily multiplying fines.

The Post Gazette has stated its intent to appeal the ruling, but the court ordered amount of compensation to workers, including those currently working at the Post Gazette, grows every day. Stryker voted on making the return to work offer last Thursday with 84% voting in favor. And on Monday, November 24th, after more than 1000 days on strike, the brave, strong, resilient workers who held the line the whole time were cheered on by supporters at a rally in downtown Pittsburgh before they once again entered the Post Gazette building to return to work. Now, as you heard from the passages I read from the press release, it’s not as if everything has just suddenly gone entirely back to normal, and all the issues at the center of the strike have been resolved and tied up with a bow. The post gazettes Union busting law, law-breaking owners refuse to just take the goddamn L and we will see what happens in the coming weeks and months.

But make no mistake, this is a huge historic victory, a victory for all working people, for the labor movement and for the working class heroes who went on strike and who have showed us all what real strength, solidarity, and perseverance look like. And I’m honored to welcome back to the show three of those working class heroes whose voices you may recall from prior episodes we’ve recorded over the past three years on this strike. We’re joined once again by Bob Batz Jr. A veteran, editor and writer who served throughout the strike as interim editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the Incredible Strike newspaper created by Workers on Strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. We’re also joined by Steve Mellon, a veteran photographer and writer, and a regular contributor to the Pittsburgh Union Progress. And we’re also joined by Natalie Duleba, a web editor, newsletter writer, and award-winning contributor to the Pittsburgh Union Progress.

Bob, Steve, Natalie, thank you so much for joining me here. And may I be the first to say on behalf of all of us here at Working People, the Real News and everyone who listens to us, congratulations to you on a hard won fight. You guys are truly working class heroes and it’s really, really great to see your faces. So I wanted to dive right in. I know we got a lot to unpack here. We got a lot of issues that are unresolved, and I know that now that you guys are back to work at the Post Gazette, we may not be able to talk as freely as we did when you were on strike. And so I want to give that disclaimer for folks listening here that I am not going to ask you to talk about anything that could jeopardize the state of things now. But of course our listeners have been invested in this struggle since the first interview that Steve and I did years ago. And so I wanted to just start there and ask if you could tell us a bit about what the heck the past few weeks in your life has been starting with that first day back at the Post Gazette.

Natalie Duleba:

Well, the first day back was so bizarre because up until we had a rally before we walked in the door at 10:00 AM it started at nine 30, I was the mc. And even up until that time and when we approached the front door of the North Shore office, there was still a part of me that was wondering if they wouldn’t even let us in the door because we hadn’t heard anything from the Post Gazette saying to come back at a different time. But they also hadn’t told us that we could come back at the time that we had given them. And it was very emotional. I wasn’t expecting to be as emotional as I was standing in the little area in front of the front door behind a little gate. You had a walkthrough and waving to the crowd and feeling all of that support was really great going into what was, we were all just being very, being very tense and delicate situation.

And I’ve said this a couple times to my friends, but it felt like how people must have when they were on a big ocean liner when people came to wave them goodbye like, Hey, thanks for coming. We really appreciate you, but we have to go somewhere else that you can’t follow us now. And inside it was tense. I don’t think that anyone would argue that, but we had a plan of the things that we wanted to know, which were, do we all have desks? Who are our managers? Do you plan on keeping all the people that you hired during the course of the strike? And this is my impression, and this might not be the same impression that people got, but it really seemed that they thought we were going to be disruptive or more crazy than we were as they directed us not to go toward the kind of bullpen area of the newsroom where managers were working.

They shepherded us to an empty space to have our meeting and we just listened to the here’s a form to fill out to get paid, and these are what we’ve been doing in the newsroom since then. And honestly, it was, I think it went about as well as we could have ever hoped. They had a plan for us for that day definitely and for that week, which was great because we didn’t know. We truly had no idea what was going to be like in there and it was just a lot of emotions. I came home that night exhausted. We had a Zoom meeting debrief that night and I had to call my, called my mom, my sister afterward, and at the end of that conversation they were starting to move away to other things and I was like, guys, I am falling asleep on the phone.

So very emotionally taxing and probably one of the most emotionally taxing of the last three years, which is wild to say because the last three years were the most difficult of my life in so many ways. And then to walk into that room feeling so tense and then the relief of it working or moving smoothly and then just coming home and having all of that release off my shoulders and my body, yeah, I was happy with how it went in my own personal conversations with my manager. So that’s really all you can, obviously that’s not all you can ask you. You can ask for as much as you deserve, but that was my hope was that I was going to have a good outcome and that we were going to be welcomed in with a plan of how to sort us into things. So that was my impression.

Bob Batz Jr.:

Thank you, max. Thanks Natalie. Thanks, Steve. I agree with Natalie. Our first day back was a big deal, as you might imagine, after not being at work for three years. My train, I missed two trains on the way in, so I was almost late for my first day back at work in three years, which would’ve been something pretty embarrassing, but I got there in time for the rally. I’m not a big rally guy, but this was a beautiful, perfectly orchestrated short telling emotional rally, and I think it helped a lot of us go back in those doors that we didn’t know were going to be unlocked or not for us, and we didn’t know what was waiting for us. It was quite cordial, I think on both sides. Everybody carried themselves quite well. But I think the one thing that I made it difficult for me and that I still carry with me today and I will tomorrow, is that the fact that the legal battle continues, it makes it difficult.

And we went back with this great court win, but it hasn’t been enforced yet. And I think that to me is sort of what characterizes my feelings right now. I think. I don’t feel like I’m a hero in any way, thank you, max. But we did what we had to do to last on strike for what was 1,132 days, 1,132 days. We went back at 10 0 1, so we didn’t quite make it to 1,133 days. But yeah, we still got some work to do. We still got to get this big court win enforced and that’ll change life at the Post Gazette quite a bit from our healthcare to at the rest of our contract. And so in the meantime, that’s what we’re looking forward to have happen. And so we’re still kind of on this sort of daily vigil for news and developments on that as we get back to work at the PG

Steve Mellon:

Max. This all happened very quickly and unexpectedly. I have to say on the 17th, November 17th, we were all preparing to check into our daily 10 o’clock meeting. We have one every morning. We had one every morning the day of the strike, a weekday morning, and maybe two or three minutes before logging on, we got a text from our president, our former president who’d been in contact with the attorneys, and he said it was a very odd message. It said, if you were thinking about skipping this morning’s meeting, please don’t. And I’m like, okay, that’s either really good or really, really bad. But it was just hanging out there. And so I think everybody packed into the Zoom meeting. And then one of the first things Zach said, former president Zach Tanner said was we got a decision from the third circuit and he was reading it in real time to us, and it was weird Max because it was just dead silence.

It was like, shit, we won after three years. It was just, I don’t think people could process it. I mean, there wasn’t any cheering. I think a couple of people were doing the hand clap or the thumbs up thing that it was surreal to think that this decision finally came down and that we had won so decisively the court had ruled in our favor. So decisively I didn’t expect in this day and age, you mentioned how difficult of a year it has been, the fact that we got a labor victory, a decisive labor victory, now it’s like that’s unbelievable. I’ve still had a hard time getting my head around that in the day we went back to work. So that all happened very quickly, and one of the first things that happened is that our current president, Goldie, Andrew Goldstein, who’s not cut his hair, trimmed his beard since the strike went on, he was looking a little bit scruffy.

He decided he was going to get his hair cut on Tuesday nights. So I went with him to the barbershop in Squirrel Hill and he went in there looking scruffy, but he walked out looking like a fine professional young man that he is. So that was fun. There were a lot of rituals that we went through before going back to work, but going back into the building, the strike happened very quickly and I had the same problem with getting my head around this thing three years ago when we went out more than three years ago. And I intentionally parked about a mile away from the building to join the picket line, just to kind of get my head around what was happening and what was about to happen. And I did the same thing when we went back to work. I parked about a mile away and walked to the rally.

I saw a lot of supporters there. I agree with Bob, that was a beautiful rally. These things can be up or down and sometimes they go on way too long. This one was the perfect, and it just confirmed to me that we started out with what 105 people, guys initially, and a lot of the other units dropped off because they didn’t really have a prayer once Trump dismantled the NLRB, they hadn’t didn’t have their decision yet. So the other units didn’t really have a hope. And so they were gone and in the end it was 26 people left on strike. But I looked at that crowd and it’s not a strike of 26 people. It was a strike of thousands of people because we had all those supporters in Pittsburgh, we had all those supporters across the country. You max, all the people that kept us in their minds, kept us in their hearts, donated their money and their time. That’s how this happened. I will admit that we were persistent. I think that is key to these battles, persistence, but it’s equal to persist. We can’t be persistent if we don’t have support, financial support and emotional support. Somebody just calling up and saying, Hey man, how’s it going? How are you doing? Now, there are a lot of dark days in a strike and that kind of kind of support is priceless, and that’s how you win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It makes me, I have so many kind of questions on that and I am thinking in the second half. I’d love to turn back and reflect a little on the strike itself and how it changed you all and what lessons we can extract from that other workers out there. Like Starbucks workers right now are on an indefinite, unfair labor practice strike. What can they learn from your struggle? I think that would be a great place for us to focus in the second half. But I guess while we’re on the subject, and as I mentioned at the top, things are not fully resolved yet. Poor Bob can’t fully unclench yet, and I hope that that day comes, but let’s talk a little bit for folks listening about the gritty details here. Can you say more about the third circuit ruling, what it means, and I guess where things currently stand? You guys mentioned that when this sort of contract is enforced, it’s going to benefit a lot of other workers there. And so I just want to unpack that a little more For folks listening,

Natalie Duleba:

Part of being on strike is learning how to communicate these pretty niche law mechanisms. I didn’t even know what an administrative law judge was before. I didn’t know that was who’s the first ruler in unfair labor practice lawsuits? So we got our first decision in our favor in early 2023, and that was a huge moment of celebration. I think at that point it had been five months. It happened in February, 2023 maybe. And so we thought that was going to change things and the company immediately appealed and we had to wait a whole other year for the National Labor Relations Board, the full five person board to hear the appeal. And we got that decision in our favor 2024 sometime. I think that happened roughly around the times I was at Labor Notes because the Teamsters settled with the company around the same time, and that was all the topics I was discussing, labor notes.

And that felt like a good thing. And I think from my memory, the National Relations Board, they affirmed and added some stuff that the A LJ hadn’t. But I think by that time we had been on strike for that long. We’re like, okay, well the company’s going to appeal this. While it was obviously a moment of validation that our case was strong enough to make it through that next round of appeals, we knew that we were in for probably another year long wait. And in fact, up until late June, mid June, we thought that the third circuit wouldn’t even hear our case until fall 2025. That was the timeline that we had kind of been given, and the company did ask for an expedited schedule. So we were lucky enough to have the hearing in early July in Philadelphia. A group of us went down there and the municipal workers of Philadelphia were on strike at the time, and so we were able to go and go on their picket lines.

And that’s always a boost when you see other working class people fighting the good fight. And when the decision came down, honestly, it felt like we had been saying any day now for weeks and weeks. And what the case does is that this ruling does is those two other things. There’s no enforcement part of that. The company can just appeal and the rulings aren’t enforced at all. Whereas the Thursday Court, as you said, has enforcement powers. They have teeth behind what they’re telling the company. And not only is it restoring the expired 20 14 20 17 contract, it’s also resetting bargaining to status quo of that contract. And it also has a stipulation that the company has to give a report on bargaining to the National Labor Relations Board every 30 days. That was part of the previous ones, but that’s part of the thing too. But not only that is that there are people who are no longer employees of the opposing Act who will benefit from the ruling because the imposed conditions went into place July of 2020 when the company declared an illegal impasse and said, we’re not going to negotiate anymore.

We’re just going to enforce what we illegally can. And quite a few people have left the Post Gazette since then, but they did work under the imposed conditions. So when this ruling is fully enforced and this calculations of what the company owes the employees and the differences between pay and healthcare costs and all that, people who have left the company will be benefiting financially from this ruling. Not to mention anybody who’s still employed. Those differences are part of the make whole portion of that. And that’s amazing, especially for those of us who have been on strike and we’ve incurred debts, depletion of savings, yeah, it’s money that we should have had it the whole time, but I know that it’s going to help me get back to normal after the strike, or at least closer to normal for it just in my bank account, my wallet. And a lot of what we’ve said this whole time has been that we’re not just fighting for us, we’re fighting for Pittsburgh’s future journalists and having this 2017 contract back in place is a better working conditions. It will allow us and people who come after us to be able to build a life in Pittsburgh and invest in the city they’re covering so that local journalism is meant to be by local journalists and knowing that young people or not young people who take a job if they want to buy a house or have a family, there’s a contract that makes their expenses predictable and more favorable to them. And that means a lot.

Bob Batz Jr.:

Yeah. Thank you. And thanks, Natalie. No. And yeah, and Max is, I must look clenched on Zoom because I am clenched in some ways, but everything that Natalie said is right, but I’m an old hockey coach Max, and I don’t count a win until the scoreboard goes off and our scoreboard hasn’t gone off. And I might be more eish about this than some of my colleagues, but I own that because of what I just said. But there’s two things in play right now. Just to pick up on what Natalie said. We did get this stunning victory in court in the third circuit, but they still have time to appeal that yet again. And I think that most of us expect that the company will do so and then everyone has their opinions about whether that would hold any merit or it would get kicked out right away, but we haven’t won it yet and it’s not being enforced.

I think we’re farther along on this sort of smaller emergency injunction that we won from the third circuit where they said, you have to restore the healthcare that we had before they imposed their own healthcare in 2020. And they’ve appealed that multiple times, including appealing it because they plan to appeal the bigger case, which was interesting. And the court has said No. We said what? We said, no, we said what we said, and no, you can’t have a stay to do this while you consider appealing the bigger case, they’re saying you have to restore the old healthcare. And we are believing that we’re very close to having that happen. And when that happens, it’ll actually benefit the people that were working under the imposed healthcare more than it will the strikers, because we weren’t working during that time. But some of the people that we’re working for those three years will stand to gain, as Natalie said the other night, to a group of people, of workers, of journalists, you can gain thousands of dollars back. But again, I need to see this enforced. I get the We have one, I’m very happy. It’s a big victory, but it’ll be a bigger victory when it’s finally enforced, and that’s what I’m waiting for.

Steve Mellon:

Yeah, I don’t have a whole lot to add to this. We’ve been watching this play out in the courts for some time now, and I think I’ve learned to be patient with the courts so far. I think we’ve done pretty well simply because we have a pretty bulletproof case. So the newspaper management and the ownership broke federal labor law, and it’s as simple as that. So that’s justice in today’s. Of course, you never know in today’s world, you know what, the courts are all over the place, but correct me if I’m wrong here, Natalie or Bob, but this is what the blocks are asking for is for something called an on banc hearing. So basically what the blocks are doing with the third circuit ruling, that ruling was a unanimous decision by a three judge panel made comprised of judges from the third circuit. There was, I think a bush judge, an Obama judge, and a Trump judge.

They were unanimous in their ruling. And so the post Gazette could ask the entire court to rehear the case. The people we’ve talked to say that’s extremely rare for a court to grant that, to hear a case like that again, especially one that is unanimous. So I get where Bob is coming from that we don’t want to spike the ball at the five yard line or the two yard line or the six inch line wherever we’re at here yet. So we’re kind of refraining from doing that. But we had said all along that we’re waiting for the third circuit hearing, we were waiting for the third circuit decision and we got it. And so we went back to work at that point, been on strike for three years. It’s like we could have waited around, but we were ready to go back to work. We took the win, we were ready to go back to work. We all had, like Natalie said, we had a lot of desks piled up. I think we told our supporters we were ready to go back to work. We got the win. And so we took it.

Bob Batz Jr.:

And I think the one thing that’s on the table is you shouldn’t have to be on strike for three years, one month plus to have your court case settled. That’s the crazy thing about it. It feels so weird to this day to say we were on strike for three years and one month, but that’s what it took. And the court case continues on, and that’s one of the biggest messages for a lot of us, I think, is just how can it take that long? Who can stay on strike that long? We don’t even know how we did it, but that’s what we had to do to get it to this point, and that’s why we did it. That’s the only reason we did it.

Steve Mellon:

That speaks to the state of labor law in the country these days that law is written to benefit the companies. It’s a waiting game. We don’t have as many financial resources as the companies do. So I think, it seems to me like I didn’t have any discussions with the block attorneys about this, but it seemed pretty obvious that they were going to wait us out, and I think they probably thought we were just going to collapse at a certain point and that we would just kind of go away and we didn’t do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No. And I can a thousand percent understand the sort of complex feelings that you all must be feeling. And if I was in your shoes, I too would not be ready to spike the football when this hasn’t yet fully been resolved, but at the same time, you are back to work. You have gotten those rulings. And so I don’t want to belabor the point too much. I think y’all said what needs to be said, and when we get to the end of the discussion, we can ask what folks out there can do to continue supporting Yong, continue fighting for labor justice in this country so that the next group of workers that has to go on strike doesn’t have to wait an entire year for a decision from a court when they know they’re in the right and the company that’s in the wrong can just sit there and try to wait everybody out.

That’s not justice. I mean that is weaponizing the law to commit injustice. And so I want us to circle back to that at the end. But while we’re on the subject though, I wanted to just ask, this is a show that for years has been focused on the daily lives and the workaday lives of our fellow workers. And I’m curious what it’s been like to go back to that job after three years on strike and what you’ve been doing, covering. Has it been difficult to adjust to just getting back in that swing of things and has it been overall to just when you go into the building and do your work or is there still a lot of simmering, anxiety, tensions, that kind of thing, I guess? Yeah. What has it been like the past couple weeks going back to work even while you still have this legal limbo that y’all are in?

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah, so when we went on a strike, it took me many, many months to not be hyper aware of the start of my shift start time. I worked the same shifts my entire career, four to midnight. And so in my head I was like, everything I was doing, I was like, you got to be able to be home and in front of a computer by 4:00 PM and it took a really long time for that to stop being a mental post that I would, and now it’s on the opposite side of that where I’m having to relearn to be like, no, you got to show up.

Steve talked about Zach’s message being like, if you were thinking about not coming to today’s Zoom, you should. And there’s been many days when I would wake up and be like, I don’t have the energy to log onto the Zoom, and I would just go back to sleep or relax or whatever. The morning of the rally, my alarm went up at 7:00 AM and I was like, oh, I have to get up. I have to get ready and catch the tea to go to the North Shore and work. We weren’t sure how long we were going to be there. I think most of us left before a full workday. I mean, we got paid for a full workday, but I left around two 30 I think 2 33. And just having reorienting how much truly like, okay, eight hours my day is just work now as someone who struggles to do daily tasks at times being like, well, I can’t do it for those eight hours. Those little chores that you just do throughout the day have to be pushed to the evening, but they’re allowing us to work remotely pretty much as much as we want. We’re going to be transitioning into a new office building and there’s construction work happening on our floor on the North Shore office, so I haven’t been in that much, but the times that I have been into the office, it’s been pretty normal.

I’m kind of a gabber, so I will gab with whoever and the managers that I’ve interacted with have all been quite nice and accommodating all of the tensions that exist between people who went on strike and not on strike. I haven’t seen that translate into us doing our jobs. We have a pretty active Slack communication system and I had to get over feeling awkward about being like, Hey, person who I haven’t talked to talked to in three years, is this good to go or what’s your input on this? And I have felt this is a me thing, but I’m sure I’m not alone and feeling this of feeling like I need to operate on a very high level. And that was a lot of our anxieties because the Post Gazette uses an in-house design program and website manager that we did not have access to for the past three years and could not keep up to date on.

Its weird internal quirks, but luckily they’ve been very understanding about that. But I still have this pressure of I can’t mess up. I can’t make a mistake because I don’t want to put myself in any type of situation where they could use that to let me go. That’s separate from my protected to strike and to do those sorts of things. So I’ve an internal stressor, but I have felt that and I’m just doing my best learning what I need to learn. I’m fortunate in that I’m kind of doing it. My position is something that I didn’t do before and also hasn’t really been done since during the strike. So there’s a clean slate for me for the newsletters, which I really appreciate. And in terms of interpersonal stuff, rebuilding the union, that’s kind of a different story. There’s a long road ahead where that’s concerned, working with the people who cross the picket line and figuring out how to forge a new path ahead as a collective group. And that’s going to be a long journey that’s separate from the law lawsuit and the courts, but professionally in the job, I think it’s been going really well for me at least. I’ve been very pleased with that and all the adjustments that I’m having to make is just going to take time for me to get used to and feel fully settled, but so far so good.

Bob Batz Jr.:

Yeah, Natalie, you used the word professional and I think that’s what we are and that’s what we do. And I think that the Post Gazette is treating it that way as well. So we come back to work as people that are really good at what we do, and I think they know that and they’re letting us do that. And I worked every single day while I was on strike for the strike newspaper. So one of the things I said to the post gazettes executive editor and other people on the first day is, I’m not rusty, and I hit the ground running doing what I do, and I was pleased at how I did it. I wasn’t surprised by that, and that’s what I’m going to keep doing. I mean, there is work to be done. There’s journalism to be done and there’s a separate important crisis that we’re dealing with, but we know how to do that. And that’s what I think a lot of us are doing right now.

Steve Mellon:

The biggest challenge for me was two on strike. I felt like I was always on, but it was the stress level was at a certain height and it was there all the time, and I was always, it seemed like I was always thinking about the strike, always working for pup or answering emails or thinking about something related to the strike. It was like 24 7, but it was low after the first couple of months. It was like a low buzz. It became routine and normal, but I had control over my schedule. I would normally must have Bob’s frustration. I would often turn popup stories in at two o’clock in the morning simply because it was like I’m a night guy. It, it was fun to stay up and work. I’d cover something during the day and have a couple of beers visit with my family and then write the story starting at 10 o’clock at night, and that’s not an option now.

So it’s like now this for eight hours a day, like Natalie said, it’s like for eight hours a day, I mean, I’ve got to be intensely on, and Brenda was laughing, my wife was laughing. I’d come home and I would sit down on the couch and I would fall asleep, and she was like, you’re just not used to working. It’s like, I’ve been working all this time. And she was right. It was exhausting. One of the challenges I had, Natalie mentioned the janky lius system, that management system that folks on the desk work with. I had these cameras that I hadn’t used in. I used an icons during the strike, what I have had bought an icon during the strike and an inexpensive one, and then now all of a sudden I’m handed all these Sony cameras. So the first three or four days is like 90% of my pictures were out of focus, and I’m like, what the hell is going on? I was asking people, how does this damn thing work? I was trying to find somebody out in assignments who knew about in real time trying to get these cameras to work, and that was really frustrating. So we had to work through all that stuff. There are moments of tension because a lot of these people, they were working while we were on strike, and that tension is going to be there and we will have to work through that. That’s just, we have to be professional and be grownups.

That is what it is. The managers though have been, in my experience, they’ve been very professional. I think they were just happy to have some more bodies in that building. My direct editor said, I sat down with him and that day we went in and he just said, man, he said, I’m so glad you guys are back in here. I think they were just struggling in some ways to get the paper crossed the finish line every day. I tell you what, it felt really good to have that paycheck land in my bank account that first day. That felt really nice.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I bet, I bet. I mean, maybe a little shade to the folks who were working at the Post Gazette while the strike was going on. But I mean, frankly, as a reader, I saw the difference between what the paper looked like before you went on strike and what it looked like during the strike. And the Pittsburgh Union progress was where y’all channeled so much of your professional expertise, your journalistic energies, and I really wanted to just take a moment to give three cheers to the Pittsburgh Union progress and everyone who worked on it, because I think genuinely, it’s one of the most remarkable stories and achievements in journalism that I can recall, certainly in recent years, but we’ve talked about it on prior episodes. But I guess for anyone listening who hasn’t listened to those episodes, I mean, this was a full on strike newspaper IE, not just a paper about the strike, but it was a paper produced by striking journalists and media workers, and it was an incredible paper.

I mean, it’s still online. You can go back and look. Me personally, I have a close tie to the Pittsburgh Union progress because Steve himself, who’s on this call with us, he was doing the most in-depth humane on the ground reporting during the East Palestine train derailment and chemical disaster in 2023. And it was actually after I interviewed Steve on this show about the Post Gazette strike that I was reading his reporting in the strike paper and I asked him if he could help connect me to folks in East Palestine, which he did. And then the ball just kept rolling from there. And then Steve and I won an Izzy award together reporting together on East Palestine, and we’re both still, we’re still reporting on it to this day, but this was a paper you guys were producing while you weren’t getting a paycheck, while you were holding the line for three plus years. And it was incredible. Like the local journalism, the local sports reporting to strike other strikes going on in the city to Steve’s beautiful photography. I mean, I could go on and on about all that pup is and was, but I wanted to ask you guys if we could just reflect for a minute or two on the incredible achievement that was pup and anything that you wanted to share from this project that you think folks maybe didn’t see behind the scenes and all that it took to make it and all the impact that it had.

Natalie Duleba:

I can start off, but I’m probably going to have the least to say, Helen Fallon, one of our fellow strikers, she always pushed people to do more reporting for Pup. It did not work very successfully on me. I did not contribute as much as I’m sure that Bob and Steve and Helen would’ve liked me to. But I can say that the freedom of it where you could, I would just email Bob, I want to do this thing, and he’d be like, okay, cool. Let me know. And it might be in the kind of full control over deadlines and production schedules. I mean how Steve was saying that he could go to the event to cover it and then write up the story at his own leisure and how it felt very collaborative and very, this is our product. We can do what we want with it.

And there’s freedom in that. And I am continually impressed by the amount of work that people did. And I know that it kept probably quite a few people sane while on Strike to be still doing the work of journalism. And I am happy that I was able to contribute even pretty mildly in my own way. And I did win a Golden Quill for one of my stories, which it feels like almost like a little bit like a cheat code. I wrote seven or eight stories total, and one of them won an award. But I think it’s incredible. And I also think that it really shows that people on strike, you’re in control of what you put out to the public and that you can still do journalism while on strike, not just covering your own strike, but actual journalism as you said, and fill in gaps that existed in the kind of grind and expectations of a traditional newspaper. Find communities that are marginalized or ignored or undercovered. And because it’s all our own time going to there and find those stories that haven’t been told or that were ignored. And that’s a really great thing. And I think that the Post Gazette can learn from that definitely because a lot of the gaps that we were filling were the ones that the Post Gazette has left in the city. So that’s my teeny tiny perspective is a low count contributor to the union progress

Bob Batz Jr.:

Low count, but high percentage, I guess, Natalie. So no, max. I mean, thank you for your kind words. I don’t know that I’m prouder of anything in a pretty long and pretty busy career than the pump, and it’ll always be on my resume and on my LinkedIn. I’ll never not want to be associated with the strike paper. We did what we said we were going to do. We were withholding our labor because of a legal situation, because of federal labor law. But that doesn’t mean that we weren’t journalists. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have communities and sources that we wanted to cover. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have stories we didn’t want to do just because that’s what we do. That’s who we are. And we also said we were going to cover the strike because who else was going to do it? And I think we did all those things. We changed quite a bit over three years. Our staffing gradually shrunk because that’s what happens when you’re in a three year strike. But all in all, it’s still up. It’s going to remain up for the near future. We hope it remains archived and accessible, not only to us, but to other people. But we did do journalism and that’s what we do. So it wasn’t anything but that. And we did some damn good journalism, and now we’re doing it again for the Post Gazette.

And maybe it did keep people sane a little bit like Natalie said. I know some of my colleagues said that, but it was a lot of work. And one of the interesting, there’s sort of two legacies of the pup that I see. One is a discussion about how you can have a boss list newspaper where there’s nobody in charge. If I were in charge, Steve and Natalie probably would’ve been fired, but I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t that kind of a boss. Well, maybe not fired, but they would’ve been punished. But no, that’s not how we rolled. There were no bosses. We worked this out together. It was the most collective collaborative thing that we ever did. And there’s lessons to be learned from that that can be applied to other outlets. And one thing I hope to see happen is there was a long time when we wished that pup would continue on in some fashion and maybe even become more of a toothy biting strike paper or whatever, what have you.

But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the Post Gazette actively solicited some of the best of the pop for their coverage for us covering the communities that we covered or the communities the way that we covered them, like Steve covered East Palestine or just some of the topics that we covered, the labor movement that for the entire time that we were on strike was big news. We overlapped with this huge unionization effort in media. We overlapped with the Starbucks workers and all this other stuff that’s going on, and we could bring that into our current outlet, and I hope that we get to do that. But yeah, in a way, a pup is definitely done right now, but I hope that it lives on in different ways as we go forward.

Steve Mellon:

Bob, you called it a fossil paper, and I understand where you’re coming from, but I always saw you as the boss. You were a different kind of boss though. And the thing that what motivated me many, many days was that I knew how much you were putting into the paper, and I did not want to disappoint you with a shitty story. So that was, I might turn it in at three o’clock in the morning, but I was not going to turn into a piece. I did not want to turn it in a piece of crap. And that was out of respect for what you were putting into the paper, what Karen Carlin was putting into the paper. I would send her a note at three o’clock in the morning. She would respond. I knew people were invested in this in ways that I don’t think, I mean, I was invested.

I’ve always been invested in my work, probably more so than is healthy, but I felt righteous in doing it with the pup because it was a collective and it was not a hierarchical, didn’t have a hierarchical structure. It was very much a working people’s paper put together by working people who were doing it because they had a passion for journalism and passion for these stories. And that felt really good. I honestly felt, I’ve been a journalist since 1980 and I was more effective and more efficient as a journalist for the three years I’ve been on strike than I have ever been working for somebody else. And I think that speaks to the structure. We decided early on that we were going to part of this because what we focused on is we weren’t trying to cover a thousand different things. Bob and I talked early on, I mean, let’s cover working people. Let’s cover working people. We’re on strike. We have that audience. So we spent a lot of time covering everybody from baristas to electrical workers and their labor actions, max East Palestinians to working class community. And it’s like we saw what happened there, and it’s like, how could you not cover that?

These are stories that a lot of places just aren’t covering, or if they are, they’re not giving voice. They’re not allowing those voices to rise to the surface, the working people voice. They’re talking to the community, the elected leaders, they’re talking to the business folks, but they’re not knocking on the doors of the people who live on Forest Avenue or Clark Street and hearing and hearing their voices. So I’m really proud of that. One thing it did for me is that it gave me a purpose and a sense of identity. There were a lot of days when I wasn’t a very good striker. It’s like I didn’t feel like going to the picket line sometimes, and it felt good to do. I felt like I was contributing to the community in a way that was really helpful. It was challenging at a time because I’ve always been, I was brought up into old school journalism. I was taught that you need to be separate from your subject and have this distance. And that really broke down in East Palestine.

I spent so much time out there, I became friends with a lot of these people, max, you know that you, you’re the same way. And I grew very close to them. And we saw a need there. The union saw a need in East Palestine that went beyond just us telling their stories. And so we started the food delivery. We didn’t start it, but we were asked to help with a nonprofits efforts to provide food and other support for the people who are affected by that derailment. And I’m extremely proud of this union during a strike that we stepped up and helped in that effort. And I know the people in East Palestine, what’s interesting Max, is that East Palestine is a very red area. These are people who are a very conservative area. And once a month, a handful of us would get in our cars and drive to East Palestine. A lot of we’re on strike. We’re pretty progressive folks, and we would get together and work together to solve a problem. And that happened because of the strike, and it happened because of the strike paper. There are a lot of different legacies of the strike that was near and dear to my heart.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to sort of end on that note. And Steve, you and I, while driving around East Palestine or walking around or sitting in the homes of the people whose stories we’ve reported on who have now become friends of ours through this struggle, I’ve had the honored to get to chat with you over the years about how being on strike has changed you as a journalist and even as a person. And I want to sort of just kind of end on that reflective note again, with all the caveats that we gave in the first half of this episode. It ain’t over till it’s over. Don’t spike the ball till the clock runs zero. The fight is still on. And I want everyone listening to understand that because I also think we need to reflect on the fact that we as fellow workers in the aggregate did not show up enough for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette strikers.

Yes, they got a lot of support, but I am speaking for myself, but I don’t think you guys would’ve lasted three and a half years if you didn’t find a way to keep going on those days when it felt like the support wasn’t there. And I know as someone who’s reported on your struggle over three years, that it was not always there. And it frustrated the living hell out of me, that other colleagues in the media world in journalism could not see our own fate tied up in your struggle and that folks weren’t raising hell about it every single day. I think that’s a huge failing on our parts. And again, I’m just speaking for myself, anyone who’s listening to this, I’m not raking you over the coals, but I want you to reflect on why that is and how we do better moving forward.

And I guess in that same spirit, I wanted to ask you guys, reflecting on these last three years of intense, drawn out struggle, how has it changed you as a journalist and as a person? And do you feel like there are any kind of really key takeaway lessons from this struggle that can help working people out there as we continue to navigate ever collapsing, exploding world, and shit’s going to be dark for a while, and we need all the tools we can get to survive and fight for a better future? And you guys have shown us what it really takes to fight. So yeah, I just wanted to sort of end on that note and offer you guys a chance to give us some reflections after three years and some change on the picket line.

Natalie Duleba:

I feel like, at least for me, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, it’s like I’m still coming to terms with three years that it feels like it lasted 300 years, but it also feels like October, 2022 was a couple days ago in some ways that if give it too much thought, my brain kind of like woo warps out and be like, oh God, it was three years. But for me, before the strike, I was a union member, but because I worked nights, I didn’t want to give any more time because working nights is kind of the crapshoot of journalism, and a lot of union meetings happen during the day. And I was like, I’m not getting up to go to a 10:00 AM union meeting. I was probably classified as a middling person. I wasn’t going to do anything against it, but you probably couldn’t count on me to go to a rally or whatever.

But it truly was just deciding in one conversation and one very drawn out Zoom call to assert stuff, to assert my position and support that snowballed into being really involved in committees and eventually being the local secretary of the Guild. And basically it’s like you don’t think you can do it until you just start doing it. And as you step up, you find places you see the gaps. The only way that you can see those where things need coverage is if you’re looking in there and you’re already on, you’re standing on the picket line and you’re like, oh, these are the things that need to be done because I’m actively engaging with the situation. And as a person, how much day-to-day stuff, the kind of grind of every day work and chores and things that it just seems like there’s not enough time to know everything to care about, to be passionate about.

But being on strike really put a lot of that into relief and also showed where people don’t care. There’s things from the strike that will follow me. There’s restaurants that talk to the Post Gazette that I don’t support anymore, that I won’t support going forward. And I would’ve been nice to have seen more people boycott the Post Gazette to not talk to the Post Gazette to, I hope no one from these teams get upset at me. But the players for our major sports leagues talked to the Post Gazette, and they’re in their own players unions. The lack of cross union solidarity was disappointing because if the quarterback for the Steeler said, no, man, I’m not crossing a picket line to talk to you, that would’ve made a huge difference. That really would’ve made a huge difference. And if people didn’t read it and didn’t respond to any email from a post Gazette writer, or if someone who was crossing the picket line or decided that I’ll get my coverage elsewhere, that it’s not worth it to me to betray working class people in my own town to get a feature, that would’ve been great.

And I am now trying to be more mindful of those things. Obviously, we love the Starbucks workers. I wasn’t a big Starbucks drinker in the first place, but I’m not going to go to a Starbucks. And we have, I’ve made connections through various conventions, et cetera, of people, and we have group chats where people say, Hey, my employer is doing this shitty thing. Can you sign this petition? Can you tell our employee to voluntarily recognize our union? Can you send in an email pushing you back against the firing of a union journalist? And those are small actions, but they do mean a lot. And I know because we were very attached to how many people responded to our action network, the newsletters and emails and a couple seconds of your time really makes a difference. And you choosing not to do something, not to talk to somebody, not to support a business that crosses a picket line or engages in anti-union and anti-labor practices, those things make a difference.

I know that we can fall into the fallacy of like, well, if just me, I won’t make a difference. But if everyone who thought that actually did it, it’d be a lot of people doing it. And our picket lines, the times that we had the big numbers were our most effective picket lines, which is why for the Starbucks strike, I’m so happy that the Teamsters are respecting their picket line that a bunch of people came out to their picket at the distribution center somewhere in central Pennsylvania that was very effective. And it truly is just like bodies, people showing up and being there to support physically, it makes a big difference. But for the people who, I’m not trying to say, if you didn’t come to a picket line, you didn’t support the strike because the donations made a huge difference. I said this at our victory party, but over the past three years, regardless of the strength of our legal case, the strike could have collapsed at any time if one of a million things broke. And first of all, we didn’t. The 26 of us fucking stuck it out. But also the people in our lives, strangers, friends, families, they were part of the glue that kept us together. And I think if people keep that in mind that it’s not just the people on strike that makes a strike successful, that it’s their community and the people that they don’t know supporting them, that keeps a strike going.

Bob Batz Jr.:

Yeah, Natalie. And that’s one thing I would say is I don’t know that we ever thought that we didn’t have support, max. I would correct you on that, and I don’t know that we ever felt that. We were sure pissed when people crossed the picket line or advertised or didn’t totally honor our strike, but that is what it is. I think one of the things that I learned the most from this is that we need a whole hell of a lot better education in this country, in this continent on how union works, how unions work, and how strikes work, and we need a lot more work to improve federal labor law. We weren’t on strike for three years for the lack of support. We were on strike for three years. We had so much support. It was the fucked upness of federal labor law that made it take that long and that was the problem.

So I would love to see some more education and I would love to see some changes that way. I remember early on in the strike, hot strike summer, it sounds so quaint, 2024, hot labor summer, whatever you were calling it, but I do remember our international president, John Schloss, was saying that with all the media organizing and some strikes and some other labor actions that were going on, that these were journalists that if nothing else would learn how labor works and would learn how those struggles work and they would be a lot more empathetic and smart about those kinds of things. I certainly feel changed that way myself. I feel like I’m a more empathetic just to people struggling and now we’re living that baby. Everybody’s struggling for some way or another, but I feel like I’m better at recognizing that and as I transition from being struggling myself, I know I’m going to make myself help other people more than I maybe would have before the strike.

I will stand in front of the truck for the Starbucks workers because they stood in front of a truck for me and I will do it. You can quote me. You can record this and you can share it. One of the phrases I came to hate during this whole process is the union chestnut, when we fight, we win. I got to points in this strike where I was like, do not say that to me because I fought and I fought and I fought and I’ve been appealed. I haven’t won shit. So I came to hate that phrase, but I also came to believe in it more than ever because when you fight, that’s the win. That’s the win. We’re just standing up for ourselves here. All we’re doing, don’t put a timeline on it, don’t put a number of people on it, don’t put anything on it, but we’re standing up for ourselves and our rights and our dignity and our contract and for the law of the land and however these court cases play out, I’ll never feel like I didn’t win because I stood up for myself. I stood up for my fam and they stood up for me and that part of that phrase I’ll always get.

Steve Mellon:

Yeah, max, I would urge people to know what labor actions are taking place in your community and support them. Respect the Starbucks boycott. Do not buy Starbucks until the striking the Starbucks Workers Union tells you. It’s okay. Respect that. If you can spare five bucks a month, the five bucks a week, 20 bucks a month, donate that to a strike. Cause that can make the difference between, that’s strike survival and its collapse. I agree with Bob. I think the amount of it’s pathetic that we in this country have no, we don’t teach labor history. How many people know about MA one? How many people know about the, one of the things we did with Pup is that we tried to write on a regular basis about labor actions that took place in our region. We went down to mate one and spent some time down there to write about mate one.

We wrote about a lot of the strikes. This is my third strike, max. I went through a strike in Knoxville, Tennessee back in the late eighties. It was a teamster strike down there, that thing, it’s not a union friendly state. That strike collapsed fairly quickly. I was caught up as was Bob in the 1992 Teamster strike here in Pittsburgh. That was a long drawn out affair. Most people in Pittsburgh had no idea. There was a time, there was a Sunday night, Bob, you probably remember this, back in 1992, I think it was in July of 1992 when there were 5,000 people in the streets of Pittsburgh. We basically shut the city down and stopped the newspaper from getting out of the, they loaded trucks full of newspapers. They did not go anywhere. The press tried to publish in the middle of a strike. The people and the workers of this city said, no fucking way.

And those trucks did not leave that compound. And yet these big collective actions are, they’re basically unknown to people. That’s a shame. I tell you what, I was really frustrated. We’ve had a lot of support from our local politicians. We have two representatives. They’re very progressive. All we had to do is call ’em. They’d be on the, if they were in town, they would show up at a picket line, they’d show up to make a speech. They were very supportive. But our national politicians, Joe Biden came here on Labor Day. He came here on a labor day. We’ve been on strike for what, a year and a half at that point, almost two years. He came here on Labor Day. He had a big speech down at the electrical workers hall. We weren’t mentioned, we weren’t invited up on the stage. We were there to cover it.

There was no mention of us. Nobody showed up to walk with us in the Labor Day parade, and this is the most labor, the so-called most labor friendly president in modern history, and we couldn’t get squat out of them, no support whatsoever. I look at why Joe Biden lost us because he did not have support of the working people and he didn’t have support of the working people because he didn’t show up for them and we’re a perfect example of that. There was one of the darkest moments. There are these angels though, and I feel like I need to speak up about this. I remember you guys, I know Bob and Natalie. Natalie, I know you remember this. There was a time early on in the strike, we’d been on strike for maybe three months, three or four months, and we had all applied for unemployment and we were really counting on that money.

We weren’t as financially stable at that point in the strike as we had been in the past or that we are in the more recent times. And there was a lot of talk that if we didn’t get the unemployment check that we felt we deserved and needed, that the strike would collapse. And we were all in a 10 o’clock meeting when we all got texts or emails that we had been denied unemployment. And I remember just feeling sick and I think everybody else probably did too, but we had a gentleman, there might’ve been people who are also a part of this, Natalie, you’ll know better than me, but there was a long time supporter of union causes in this city named Barney Aler, and he worked with us tirelessly to appeal those decisions and to work with the administration. We eventually won that unemployment and it’s because a person or a handful of people in this community put in a lot of effort.

So there are people who put in, like they donate a little bit, they show up, they make phone calls. That’s all great. We also had these people that put real blood and sweat into this movement for no reason other than they felt it was the right thing to do. Barney didn’t get any money out of it. I’m sure it was a big headache for him. Natalie, how many hours did you spend on the phone with him to figure out, Natalie’s the one who learned from Barney to teach us how to navigate this bureaucratic Byzantine system to even get that money. So the little things really, really help those, I really appreciate those people who show up in big ways at great cost to themselves. That’s all a part of the recipe that got us to where we are now.

Natalie Duleba:

Just a little thing that obviously you don’t have to include this or whatever, but when you’re talking about coverage and that the strike should have gained garnered more interest on a national level, I completely agree with that. I had lunch with a friend who we graduated from the same journalism program and I was saying to her that our strike was the perfect microcosm of the greater labor movement that we were regular everyday people who were journalists who were just trying to get a fair contract and we were the longest running strike the us. Sometimes we would have to stop talking about it. We would get so upset that no one wanted to talk to us or because we were a small group, we weren’t worth covering or we wouldn’t have enough people that would to go to the event to justify sending someone to cover whatever it was.

Or there was a time when, yes, KDK has an agreement with the post that they share stories, but when Sag AFTRA and WGA were on strike, they ran a segment about all of the active strikes in the country and they did not mention us in their own city like, okay, you’re in partnership with the Post Gazette, but that’s bad journalism to not mention us. I was like, if you’re doing labor journalism at all in this country, it didn’t make any sense to me that they wouldn’t at least shoot us an email, be like, do you have a statement from the News Guild of Pittsburgh about strike stuff happening elsewhere? And that was a frustrating thing to feel not ignored by the supporters, but ignored by the larger media atmosphere when, I don’t know, I’m not a full-time journal writing journalist the way that Steve and Bob are, but I’m like, we are the perfect people, real life sources to talk about this specific issue, but also how the broader issue of labor in this country, and we want to talk to you.

Anybody on strike is going to want to talk to you about their strike. That’s the kind of make it personal, personalize it. That was us. And it was crazy to me that other media news outlets didn’t see that and didn’t reach out to us as experts or man on the ground type sources. So that was one of the, I think when we think feeling ignored or forgotten, I feel like that was where a lot of it came from, that we cared so much about this and we knew how important it was, but it didn’t seem that that was recognized on a broader scope within our own industry. So a bit of a bummer to end on that, but I want to point

Steve Mellon:

Out, Natalie, I agree with that. We talked to reporters from the New York Times. We talked to journalists from the New York Times, spent quite a bit of time here. We talked to a reporter I talked to twice to a reporter from the Washington Post. I’ve never seen those stories. To my knowledge, those have never run for whatever reason, for their own reasons, and I think they really missed the boat here. I want to call John Sales who made mate one the movie and say, man, get your butt here. Make a movie out of this. This is like a real David and Goliath story. We were like in the end, we were 26 exhausted strikers that we were getting up every morning. Like Natalie said, I don’t want to go to the fricking strike meeting this morning, but we did it more often than not and we plugged away and we beat this billion dollar plus corporation with their high priced attorneys at a Nashville, Tennessee who never lose, who never lose. And we have the personalities, the guy who never cut his hair. We have the Scruffy 84, not 94, 80 3-year-old attorney. It is like, how is that not a story that somebody has to tell me about that?

Bob Batz Jr.:

Well, I will say this, not just because we’re sitting here with Max, but I know you two will agree that we do appreciate you staying in touch Max, just as a journalist, you’ve covered us, you’ve followed us, you’ve let us talk, you’ve asked us good questions, we appreciate that. And so thank you. We really appreciate it and we’re happy to be here again tonight. Hopefully we’ll have another update for you before at some point we can talk about too.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guest, Bob Batz Jr. Steve Mellon and Natalie Duleba, all newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh members who have been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette for over three years, and who as of November 24th have returned back to work to Bob, Steve, Natalie, and to all of the strikers who held the line since October of 2022. My friends, you bow to no one. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.