A thousand days in, there may be an end in sight for the newsroom strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike has reached its 1,000th day. That’s about 143 weeks or 33 months or 2.75 years. The strike has been the longest ongoing strike in the country since December 2024.

There’s reason to hope the strike — which started in October 2022 — may not last too much longer. A judge ordered the Post-Gazette, owned by Block Communications, to restore health care benefits and return to the bargaining table or be held in contempt. After a series of appeals and delays, both sides agreed to a mediation that is expected to take a minimum of two to three weeks. (A spokesperson for the Post-Gazette declined to comment on the strike or the 1,000-day milestone.)

Bob Batz, Jr. — a feature writer and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — has served as interim editor of the strike publication Pittsburgh Union Progress since late 2022. Over the weekend, I asked him how he was doing with the strike stretching on (and on and on).

“I’m feeling…tired. Mad. Broke,” Batz wrote back. “But hanging in and hoping to end this thing.”

Natalie Duleba, a page designer and web editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was a member of the strike delegation that went to Philadelphia for court hearings last week. When Post-Gazette workers joined the city worker picket line and told some fellow workers the date they’d started their strike, she said the Philadelphia crowd first thought they were joking.

“We [said] we went out in October 2022, and they were like ‘Twenty-TWO?!’ in disbelief,” Duleba said. “We know it’s been a long haul, but sometimes that outside perspective of shock really puts [it] into perspective.”

What awaits the returning journalists? If and when the strike does end, striking journalists would return to a newsroom and find themselves working alongside colleagues who never left their posts. The original vote to strike was an extraordinarily narrow one and there have been many contentious moments over the past 33 months of the strike. During that time, other Post-Gazette unions have dissolved and taken buyouts. According to reporting in the Post-Gazette, “about 27 employees remain on strike while some 73 other editorial workers have crossed the picket line to continue producing digital and print editions of the newspaper.”

“The goal is and always has been to bargain a fair contract for all the journalists and, yes, go back to work,” Batz said.

Duleba wants to get back to work too. She’s put many things — from home improvement projects on up — on hold while out on strike. But she’s not letting herself think about what it’ll be like to return to the newsroom quite yet.

“Every victory we’ve had in the courts has been delayed by another appeal from the company,” Duleba said. “It feels like we’ve gotten so close to being [in] a position to return, but the company just keeps pushing back instead of doing the right thing. I don’t think I’m alone on the picket line in having learned to focus on what’s right in front of me and react to that.”

“Thinking about what it’s going to be like in the office is borrowing worry and stress from the future, when I have plenty of it right now,” she added. “It’s better for me to concentrate on the mediation and doing what needs to be done to keep the strike going.”