WTH is happening in Pittsburgh?

Yes. They're scabs. Including the ones who resigned from the union to keep working. Fuck them. And everyone who looks like them.

 

The late, great Free Press columnist Susan Watson called the crossers house scabs and the replacements field scabs

 

I don’t think it’s fair to call them scabs. That was a 38-36 vote with 27 absentee votes. It is a failure
of leadership that they went through with the strike with those numbers.

 

In Detroit, about half the Guild crossed
The other five unions were in the single digits

 

I understand crossing the line 30 years ago, when it was easy to just re-stock with scabs from other Gannett papers who really wanted to get experience at a metro. (Disclosure: I worked at another Gannett metro during the Detroit strike, and was among those offered $700 a week plus expenses to cross the line. I was being paid $670 a week at the time, so the $30-a-week bump plus not having to buy my own food would have been pretty sweet, but it wasn’t nearly enough to get me across a picket line. My dad, shop steward at a United Rubber Workers shop for years, would have disowned me in a heartbeat.)

Now, though (WARNING: Individual anecdotal knowledge only), pretty much everybody I know personally who used to work for a newspaper is now in a job that ranges from better to MUCH better. I don’t know anybody who’d give that up to go work for the Blocks.

 

Also, I deeply, sincerely admire the pop-up efforts at New Gannett papers to organize. But they need to understand that a strike is LITERALLY the only leverage they have. Whining on Twitter isn’t going to make anybody in Mike Reed’s office sad enough to change anything. People are going to become disillusioned quickly, because I’m 100 percent certain New Gannett is going to be about as willing to come to the bargaining table as Old Gannett was (which is to say, not at all.)

 

A scab is damn scab.

 

Nah.

 

Yes, you’re an absolute piece of shit if you cross.

 

OK, internet tough guy.

 

Yeah, not crossing a picket line is being an internet tough guy. Don’t want to respect the picket line, go work for a non union company.

 

Cool story, tough guy.