Washington Post Guild

Around 750 employees for the Washington Post walked out on their jobs Thursday in the first labor strike against the newspaper in fifty years. A couple hundred of the actively striking employees gathered outside of the paper’s headquarters in Washington, DC, where they marched in tandem and noshed on coffee, pastries and pizza provided by local businesses. Coincidentally, that is about even with the number of jobs — 240 — the Post says it needs to cut amid negative profits and struggles to grow its subscriber base. So far 120 employees have accepted voluntary buyouts to leave their roles, meaning just as many will likely be laid off in the coming months. Nonetheless, the employees mostly seemed happy and excited to be on strike.

Cockburn’s soul surged with admiration earlier as he witnessed the brave employees of the Washington Post do something truly heroic. Risk life and limb to report from the front lines? Well, no. Attend a White House press briefing and grill Karine Jean-Pierre? Nay, something far more daring still: more than 450 members of the Washington Post Guild, the publication’s union — brace yourself — stepped away from work on their lunch break to demand “Washington Post management gets serious about management and bring [them] a wage proposal.” It looked to be a beautiful sunny day outside the Post offices in Franklin Square, where employees mingled in t-shirts and helped themselves to — are those boxes of pizza?! — and what appears to be a variety of flavored bubbly water.