“My personal opinion is that it’s union-busting,” said Lisa Gusty, a Washington Post senior software engineer and co-vice chair of The Washington Post Tech Guild. “They’re trying to sow confusion and sort of pit us against one another.”
The Guild represents employees in engineering, product design and data roles at the Washington Post.
Gusty commented in the wake of a wave of layoffs and access restrictions that have shaken the newspaper’s technology workforce in recent days and raised questions about whether management’s actions comply with federal labor law.
On Feb. 4, the Washington Post announced it would lay off more than a quarter of its technology staff. Seventy-six of roughly 280 Tech Guild members were slated for termination. Gusty — a software engineer with 26 years of tenure at the Post — was among those selected.
Less than a week later, on Feb. 10, Gusty was at a dinner party when the union’s Slack “blew up.” Members clogged the channels, reacting to an email from the Post’s chief technology officer informing tech employees slated for dismissal that management had locked them out of both its offices and “core engineering systems.”
Rushing home, Gusty discovered she could no longer access the company systems for which she was responsible.
“I guess my first thought was they’re going to proceed with this illegal layoff,” Gusty said.
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