“CBS News 24/7 journalists are walking off the job on both coasts today because management refuses to agree to a new contract with essential work protections and fair wages,” the union’s bargaining committee said in a press statement, per Deadline. “Despite multiple days of good faith negotiations and a strike pledge signed by 95% of our members to emphasize the seriousness of our demands, management continues to offer us worse terms than in our last contracts. We chose this field to cover the news, but we believe this work stoppage is necessary to achieve a fair contract. We eagerly await an acceptable contract offer from Paramount—which just shelled out tens of billions of dollars to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.” CBS News said in response, “We continue to negotiate in good faith and hope to reach a fair resolution quickly.”
Earlier this year, new head of CBS News Bari Weiss offered non-union staff a buyout if they weren’t on board with her vision for the once-venerable organization. This, obviously, only stoked further fears that people’s jobs were in jeopardy, and that was before parent company Paramount spent a ton of money on Warner Bros. Discovery. According to TheWrap, negotiations between the union and management broke down when the sides couldn’t agree on raises, schedules, and, crucially, severance.
It also sounds like the union itself may be a point of contention in the soon-to-be-even-larger corporation. TheWrap notes that staff at CNN—owned by WBD—is not unionized, nor is the staff at Weiss’ The Free Press. (No surprise there.) Weiss is among the people who have previously touted the opportunities that could come from CBS News and CNN joining resources, but joining one unionized work place with a non-unionized one generally means someone is going to have to change.
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