Washington Post Staffers Ask Richest Man in the World to Pay Them Fairly
On Thursday, about 400 staffers at the Washington Post signed an open letter to their newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, politely suggesting that he’s being a cheapskate in their union’s ongoing contract negotiations. From the letter:
We, the undersigned, have been extremely grateful that you stepped in to purchase the Post at a time when the traditional media model was collapsing, and we have given our all to take advantage of the long runway you promised. In the past year alone, the Post has doubled the number of digital subscriptions and increased its online traffic by more than half; its advertising team has met or exceeded all its targets.
All we are asking for is fairness for each and every employee who contributed to this company’s success: fair wages; fair benefits for retirement, family leave and health care; and a fair amount of job security.
The letter underscores the complexity of the labor dispute at the Post, which was bought by the Amazon co-founder in 2013 and has since seen something of a renaissance. Bezos—a digital oligarch worth an estimated $141 billion—has reaped both outside publicity and internal goodwill for his stewardship of the newspaper. And the narrative casting him as a media luminary took on a particularly idealistic sheen with the Post’s new tagline: Democracy Dies in Darkness.
For more than a year, however, the union that represents about 880 editorial and business-side employees has been locked in tense contract negotiations with the management team that answers to Bezos. And the open letter and corresponding social media campaign on Thursday comes after the union says it has been repeatedly stymied on requests for better retirement benefits, improved protections against layoffs, and a wage increase that’s higher than the $10 a week currently on offer.
“The more disturbing thing is the unwillingness to move on these issues,” Fredrick Kunkle, a metro reporter and co-chair of the Post’s bargaining unit, told Splinter. “We are toward the end of settling this contract, and it’s not going to be a great contract. We know that. We’ve basically spent a year fighting off bad things.”