The outburst came amid a long-standing labor dispute that has intensified in recent months. In December, the journalists union hung a poster reading “Shame on the Blocks!” on an office bulletin board, which angered the publisher, John Robinson Block, employees said.
The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which published four employees’ detailed accounts of the visit on its website, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday and called for Block to be barred from the office.
The union said it had submitted evidence of the outburst directly to Block Communications, the company that owns the Post-Gazette and The Blade in Toledo, Ohio.
Block entered the building with his daughter, who is a minor, around 10 p.m. and immediately began shouting, employees said. He yelled that he wanted a picture taken of himself and his daughter in front of the “Shame on the Blocks!” sign and demanded that it be published on the front page of the next day’s paper, Marianne Mizera, a digital editor, wrote on the union website.
Mizera wrote that she was watching as he “forcefully grabbed” his daughter’s arm to pull her into the picture.
“She was crying, shaking and pleading with her father that she did NOT want to be in ANY photograph,” Mizera wrote.
Carl Remensky, who works on the sports desk, wrote he also saw Block trying to pull his daughter in front of the bulletin board for a photo as she cried and yelled.
Andrew Goldstein, a night police reporter, wrote that, at another point, Block was “screaming in his daughter’s face about the Block family legacy,” saying: “'Do you want to be high class or low class? You’re a Block, you’re one of us! You have to learn how to lead!'”
Alex Miller, a paginator, added that Block punched and slapped the poster and the wall.
“He appeared totally out of control,” Miller wrote. “He was loud and violent, and it was frightening to witness because he was so erratic.”
During the episode, Block berated current and former managers, bemoaned losing millions on the company and threatened to fire employees who were Guild officers, the workers said.
Block Communications did not return calls and emails seeking comment Thursday. But Block’s twin brother, Allan Block, chairman of Block Communications, issued a statement to the website NEXTpittsburgh about the incident.
He called it “an unfortunate exchange” spurred by “frustration over financial and other challenges in the newspaper industry.”
The company “regrets if anyone present may have misconstrued what occurred as anything other than an indication of strong concern and support for the legacy and future of the Post-Gazette,” he wrote.
He added, “We want the entire staff to know that we will continue to value all of our employees and their contributions to the PG.”
The union called that statement “a false narrative.”
Michael Fuoco, a longtime reporter at the paper who is the president of the union, said John Block had returned to the newsroom on Wednesday and Thursday.
“Everybody is on edge,” he said, adding that some fearful employees had not reported to work.
The union’s complaint to the National Labor Relations Board charged that Block “restrained and coerced employees in the exercise of their rights” and that he threatened them “with shop closure or job loss unless they cease engaging in union or other protected activity.”
Employees at the Post-Gazette have been working without a contract for the past two years and have not received a raise in 13 years, the union said. The union also said the company refused to pay a health insurance premium increase.
There have also been disputes over editorial decisions.
In January of last year, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Post-Gazette and its sister paper, The Blade, published an editorial with the headline “Reason as Racism,” which defended President Donald Trump’s stance on immigration despite his vulgar descriptions of several countries.
The editorial drew condemnation from inside the Post-Gazette newsroom — and some shareholders and members of the Block family, who wrote a letter to the editor saying the editorial did not reflect their values.
In June, Rob Rogers, a staff editorial cartoonist who had joined the paper in 1993 and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, was fired. Rogers, whose cartoons are unabashedly liberal, said 19 cartoons or proposals had been rejected by the editorial page editor or the publisher in the months before he was fired.
The Post-Gazette employs about 150 reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the newsroom. The Block family has published the newspaper since 1927.
Fuoco said the union wanted the company to hold Block to the same standards it would any other employee.
“We want to feel safe in our workplace and, right now, many people don’t feel that way,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.