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. The “protesters” took videos of one another explaining why they’re lunching out — or in one female’s words, “launching” out — and posted them to Twitter.
To ensure Washington Post executives would take them seriously, union members drove their point home by playing a Rihanna song on a loudspeaker. “Many” courageous members of the Guild reportedly somehow participated in the walkout (that took place during what Cockburn presumes to be a paid hour off) remotely from offices in “New York, San Francisco and elsewhere.”
Cockburn is heartened to see the Post Guild, after ten months of negotiating and on what just happened to be an idyllic spring day, leave their desks to eat pizza in the sunshine while sticking it to the man, before filing orderly back inside with full bellies and gratified egos. Bobby Sands would be proud.
“Today was the first of many actions planned to turn up the heat on the Post as we barrel toward month ten of contract talks — with many of our proposals still unaddressed,” the Post Guild tweeted. “Our Guild is bigger than it’s been in decades. We’re not taking no for an answer. Solidarity, y’all.”
Cockburn wonders how the Guild plans to up the ante on Fred Ryan, Jeff Bezos and co. A Bolshevik bottomless brunch, perhaps. Or a Molotov cocktail happy hour.
