Dozens of CBS News employees walked off the job Tuesday after union contracts broke down during negotiations with MAGA-curious boss Bari Weiss.
The network’s streaming service’s 60-person unionized staff launched a 24-hour strike at its New York headquarters and the KPIX-TV CBS News Bay Area office in San Francisco.
Contract negotiations between “CBS News 24/7” staff and leadership imploded last week after both sides could not reach an agreement on raises, defined schedules, and severance, leaving their three-year contract to expire, The Wrap reported.
“We agree that streaming news is definitely the future,” Jordan Lilly, a CBS News 24/7 producer and member of its bargaining committee, told The Wrap.
“We’ve been doing it here for 12 years. Glad that the rest of the world is catching up,” he added. But if that’s going to be where they stake their claim as the future of the company, they need to invest accordingly.”
Lilly also said that managers have demanded that some employees work weekend shifts, often up to 12 hours, even though CBS News 24/7 does not have weekend-specific programming. He said the new demands from the higher-ups come with a “get on board or get out” mentality.
“We generally get treated like we are lucky to be here even though we are the ones that make everything show up on your screen,” he said.
It is Weiss’s first time negotiating with a union, as her anti-woke website, the Free Press, is not unionized. Last year, CBS News acquired her news and opinion blog for $150 miliion and installed Weiss as CBS News editor-in-chief, despite her having no prior experience in TV news.
Weiss has previously shown little regard for unions as she crossed the picket line to participate in a puff piece on herself in her hometown paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, while employees were engaged in a years-long strike there.
A CBS News spokesperson told the Daily Beast in a statement, “We continue to negotiate in good faith and hope to reach a fair resolution quickly. ”
Tiffany Hudson, another CBS News 24/7 producer, said Weiss’s interactions with CBS News 24/7 staff have been very limited.
“Our members have been hearing things essentially through trade publications, in the rumor mill, about changes to our workplace,” she said. “With this contract, we want to make sure that the protections that we’re fighting for are in it, so no matter what happens, we at least have comfort in knowing that we have strong protections around severance, strong protections on overtime, things like that.”
Improving severance remains one of the most important issues for union members, as the network has plans to lay off 15 percent of its staff as Weiss restructures CBS. The fear of layoffs has become even more evident after Paramount announced a $110 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.
But Lilly and Hudson both said that managers have remained quiet about what cuts could look like.
“With the prospect of layoffs, with or without that merger sort of perpetually on the horizon,” Lilly said, “the best way to insulate our colleagues from damage is to just make sure that they have an equitable exit package should they lose their job.”
The Daily Beast reached out to CBS News for comment.
Weiss’s time running CBS News has been nothing short of tumultuous, as top talent has departed the network, ratings for its signature news programming have been abysmal, and the network has been highly criticized for making itself more Trump-friendly.
CBS News has four main bargaining units, including the Writers Guild of America, which represents CBS News 24/7.
The Writers Guild of America previously told employees that they did not have to comply with a demand from Weiss, who requested that they provide her with a DOGE-style list of what they work on each day.
The union said in a statement at the time, “We are aware that Bari Weiss sent an email asking CBS employees to provide information about their jobs and feedback about CBS News. Many of you have expressed concern to us about the purpose of the email, and we share those concerns.”
