Note: This story was reported and edited independently, without feedback or prior approval from WESA staff or management.
After nearly two years of negotiations, Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting Corporation and its unionized employees have reached an agreement.
“Pittsburgh is a union town, and we are proud to serve it as a unionized station,” workers said in a press release. “We believe this is a strong first contract that rewards the dedicated professionals at WESA and WYEP with immediate wage increases, while also helping to shape the stations' direction for years to come.”
The three-year contract is “an investment in the people who create the news and music programming our listeners have come to rely on,” said Kiley Koscinski, WESA’s health and science reporter. She is a member of the union’s organizing and bargaining committees and spoke on behalf of the unionized workers for this story.
“We’re really happy to have come to this agreement,” she said.
In addition to the kinds of protections and benefits one might expect from a union contract, the agreement also includes rules governing the use of artificial intelligence at WESA and WYEP. “We're not against AI. But we deserve our place in discussing if that technology is ever used here,” Koscinski said.
The contract was ratified by workers and unanimously accepted by Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting’s board on Wednesday. President and CEO Terry O’Reilly said the agreement was the result of “many months of hard work by members of our respective bargaining teams.”
“We are looking forward to working with SAG-AFTRA and its members in our work to provide the highest-quality public media service to the more than two-million residents of Western Pennsylvania,” said O’Reilly.
Out of 61 employees, 27 are represented by SAG-AFTRA, which stands for Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The group serves thousands of broadcast professionals across the country, including the employees of several public media outlets. Oregon Public Broadcasting, Miami’s WLRN, and Texas Public Radio workers voted to join SAG-AFTRA this year to help secure workplace protections amid industry-wide financial challenges.
In Pittsburgh, staff formed a bargaining unit in 2022 for workers who create broadcast and digital content for WESA and WYEP, including editors, producers, reporters, hosts and music directors. Contract negotiations began the following year.
Organizers said a primary goal was to make wages more equitable across the organization. They also wanted the company, whose staff is overwhelmingly white, to improve its approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. And they wanted to make the workplace more transparent and supportive.
Those talks hit a snag during a round of layoffs and cuts that saw the end of WESA’s flagship news program, “The Confluence.” But now, with the negotiations wrapped up and a deal finalized, the bargaining unit says it has achieved its original goals.
“This is a historic day for PCBC, for those of us who work here, and for the community we serve,” the bargaining group said in its statement. “We want to thank the management of PCBC both for their good-faith negotiations and for recognizing the value of the people who call PCBC home.”
‘Peace of mind’
On the issue of pay equity, the contract includes higher starting salaries to help attract top talent to WESA and WYEP. It also includes “across-the-board raises” for everyone in the bargaining unit, according to Koscinski. Current and former PCBC staffers said they were proud of these gains because they ensure workers are paid their full worth while keeping up with inflation.
Historically, “people's salaries were kind of all over the place,” Koscinski said. “Now there's a little bit more uniformity, and a little bit more pay equity, in the new structure we've set out.”
Both the bargaining unit and management said conversations about equity were never about reducing top earners’ salaries. “Executive pay cuts were not a matter of discussion at any time in our negotiations with SAG-AFTRA,” O’Reilly wrote in an email.
The contract awards an additional week of vacation for longtime employees, preserves workers’ flexibility to work from home, and expands the company’s parental leave policy. Organizers and management also formalized compensation rules for content creators working more than 40 hours per week. “Our reporters, they want to go above and beyond for the story, and now they can do so without the anxiety that they won't be compensated for it,” Koscinski said.
Staffers said the contract addresses their concerns about racial equity and inclusion with its broader provisions around wage floors and fair pay, in addition to specific language reaffirming a shared commitment to diversity.
Workplace protections for the digital age
Another key provision: no replacing reporters with robots. Ditto for DJs, producers and editors.
“I think everyone is asking questions about how artificial intelligence is going to impact journalism and news organizations. But we got an agreement that guards against the use of artificial intelligence instead of waiting to find out,” Koscinski said.
AI-generated interview transcriptions are already standard practice in public radio; in fact, this reporter’s interview with Koscinski was transcribed by an AI-powered app called Descript. But Koscinski explained that she and her colleagues were troubled by reports of media organizations and journalists using the technology more broadly in their work.
In one such story covered by the Associated Press this year, a newspaper reporter in Wyoming used a chatbot to generate false quotes and robotic copy across seven different news articles. (The Cody Enterprise has since apologized.) Meanwhile, an online video channel launched by a California startup promises 24-hour news coverage reported by AI correspondents and anchors.
Under the new contract, management is prohibited from using a worker’s likeness or voice in new AI products and cannot use people’s original work for machine learning or synthetic content creation. And if the company wants to expand its use of the technology, the union gets to reopen the contract. SAG-AFTRA says the agreement’s “rules governing the use of artificial intelligence offer some of the strongest protections in the country.”
Moving forward after a difficult chapter
The contract approval comes more than two years after the initial vote to unionize in November 2022.
One former staffer accused management of dragging its feet in the negotiations, but President O’Reilly and the union both said the negotiations were in good faith. Union organizers explained that the broader contract talks took a backseat while the bargaining unit worked with the company on more immediate financial concerns.
In 2023, O’Reilly said, the company was facing “rapidly rising costs and flattening revenues” requiring the station to undertake “difficult reductions” in staff. That meant ending WESA's daily news program “The Confluence” and layoffs that included host Kevin Gavin, editor/producer Marylee Williams, producer Laura Tsutsui, and WYEP digital content manager Nick Wright. Veteran WESA reporters An-Li Herring and Sarah Schneider also left the station through a voluntary buyout. All six were part of the bargaining unit, but a non-unionized employee — marketing director Michele Klingensmith — was also let go during the staff reductions.
“Anytime you lose colleagues in a downsizing like that, it's a huge blow to morale,” Koscinski said. “We needed to step in and make sure that people were getting a fair deal. And that took time.” The bargaining unit negotiated the buyout and severance packages for the six unionized employees.
Today, some staffers are feeling a greater sense of stability.
“A union contract gives us all a little bit more confidence that we can have a say in the future of public radio and public radio journalism here in Pittsburgh. And I think that’s really important,” Koscinski said.
