We are forced to read between the lines of a letter that a group of 20 elected city, county and federal officials sent to the new owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
On the surface, the letter purports to “warmly welcome” the chairman of the nonprofit Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism to Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. Four other institute officials were copied in the correspondence.
Read between the lines, however, and you’ll find a thinly veiled threat from a score of public officials against a private concern that saved the P-G from closure after more than two centuries of operation.
And you’ll also find a metaphor for what continues to fail Greater Pittsburgh – its blind devotion to unionism.
The public officials blow the salutatory smoke at the outset, talking about the importance of an independent press and how they look, oh, so forward, to being critically covered and scrutinized by the new P-G.
Yada, yada, yada. Better add another “yada.”
But then the pols’ letter quickly pivots to its real motive — noting that their responsibility in accepting the P-G’s role in holding them accountable is part of the “same responsibility” that “extends to informing you of some basic foundations for success here.”
The keystone of that foundation, the pols state, is unionism: “It is crucial that the Post-Gazette remain a union paper …,” the writers declare, imploring the new owner to “bargain in good faith with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.”
That would be the same guild in which one official openly mocked some of the salaries of the new owner’s leadership, smeared the scores of P-G employees who did not strike (and new hires for new positions) as “scabs,” then did its best impression of chicken droppings to thwart a vote for new guild leadership.
Oh, indeed, the pols’ letter urges new ownership to “strive to maintain as robust of a staff as possible, providing the caliber of in-depth coverage our communities deserve.” (And, indeed, at least two score of the newsroom staff was eliminated, an effort to make the P-G more financially sustainable, according to reports.) But, make no mistake, the union issue is the pols’ job one.
“Because we are invested in your success, we are invested in labor peace at the Post-Gazette,” the pols say.
But what they really mean is that they are invested in capitulation to organized labor. It’s the kind of appeasement that – and whether the sector be private or public – inflates costs, thwarts commonsense efficiencies, retards productivity and serves the purposes of the union cartel at the considerable expense of the private and public weal and sound public policy.
Tragically, Pittsburgh, a “union town,” the pols’ letter decrees, continues to be the poster child for this kind of union-fueled dysfunction and the signatories to this letter its insolent children.
We can’t wait to see these same union-pimping pols’ reaction should the newest iteration of the Post-Gazette decide to hold organized labor accountable for the serious damage it long has inflicted, and keeps inflicting, on Greater Pittsburgh.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
