Director’s Guild Cuts Deal While Writers Guild Stay on Strike – Port Workers Walk Out Across the West Coast – Gannett Journalists Walkout Across the Country 

Nearly a million workers could go on strike this summer in the US ((Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Greetings from the Burgh, where I am slowly getting back into action after taking a few days off to celebrate my birthday. 

Donate to Help Us Cover 1,500 UE Locomotive Workers Striking in Erie This Week 

Last week, Payday previewed a strike of 1,500 locomotive workers that is likely to happen this week in Erie. With the contract starting to expire on Friday, Payday is hoping to come up quickly this week to cover the likely strike. 

Donate to help us pay for gas to cover this strike. Please, if you can, sign up as one of our 751 recurring donors today. 

Director’s Guild Cuts Deal While Writers Guild Stay on Strike 

The leaders of the 19,000-member Director’s Guild have announced that they have reached a tentative agreement. 

“We have concluded a truly historic deal,” said Jon Avnet, chair of the DGA’s Negotiations Committee said in a statement. “It provides significant improvements for every Director, Assistant Director, Unit Production Manager, Associate Director and Stage Manager in our Guild. In these negotiations we made advances on wages, streaming residuals, safety, creative rights and diversity, as well as securing essential protections for our members on new key issues like artificial intelligence – ensuring DGA members will not be replaced by technological advances” 

For more, check out Deadline. 

Port Workers Walk Out Across the West Coast 

As talk between the longshore union and the major shippers heat up Frustrated by management’s refusal to meet wage increase demands, many longshore workers refuse to show up for work on Friday; shutting down port terminals up and down the coast

Longshore workers unions say that they will continue to resist the lowball wage rates being offered by the shippers.

“We aren’t going to settle for an economic package that doesn’t recognize the heroic efforts and personal sacrifices of the ILWU workforce that lifted the shipping industry to record profits,” ILWU President Willie Adams said in a press release. 

For more, check out CNBC

Gannett Journalists Walkout Across the Country 

Finally, Gannett journalists at nearly a dozen newspapers have walked out across the country. The walkout comes as Gannett continues to downsize newspapers across the country. 

“You have communities that go uncovered, and when things go uncovered it allows people to abuse their positions,” Kaitlyn Kanzler, a reporter for NorthJersey.com and The Record in northern New Jersey told the New York Times. 

For more, check out the New York Times. 

Alright yinz, we will have much more tomorrow. Keep sending story ideas and tips to [email protected] 

Donate to Help Us Cover 1,500 Locomotive Workers Striking in Erie. Please, if you can, sign up as one of our 751 recurring donors today. 

See yinz tomorrow, 

Melk 

About the Author

Mike Elk
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter and alumni of the Guardian. In addition to filing nearly 2,000 stories from 46 states, Elk traveled with Lula from Sáo Bernando do Campos all the way to the Oval Office in the White House. Credited by the Washington Post for being the first reporter to track the strike wave systematically, Elk started Payday Report using his NLRB settlement from being illegally fired for union organizing in 2015. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and works frequently in Rio de Janeiro, where he attended college at PUC-Rio. He speaks both Portuguese and Pittsburghese fluently. His email is [email protected]