Dozens of unionized Seattle Times workers picketed near the newsroom on Denny Way yesterday after they say the newspaper’s owners refused to satisfactorily raise wages or agree not to replace workers with AI during contract negotiations.

The picket is the Seattle Times’ first big labor action in decades, and a sign that disagreements between those who make the newspaper and the company that profits off them has reached an inflection point.

One main point of contention in ongoing contract negotiations is something any working Seattleite can understand: Seattle Times journalists say the company doesn’t pay them enough to live in our expensive city.

According to the Seattle Times Union, which is repped by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, as are Noisy Union workers at The Stranger, the company’s most recent offer would raise wages for the more than 160 represented employees by only $1,250 a year, or $48 per paycheck before taxes—that’s two quarters and a dime per hour. That’s a less than 2 percent raise for most union members, which alongside the region’s high 4.4 percent inflation (per the Seattle Times own reporting) means the company is offering workers a pay cut to their real wages.

For contrast, Seattle’s minimum wage is tied to inflation and set to increase by 3.9 percent in 2027, meaning Seattle Times workers have been offered percentage raises below what Seattle is required to pay its poorest workers.

Ryan Nguyen, an education reporter who has been at the Seattle Times for 5 years, says affordability has been one of the newsroom’s main pillars of coverage for the past year. He recently reported on the Seattle teachers union’s struggles with wages that didn’t keep up with costs, a topic that can feel strange to cover as an important issue when the company doesn’t deem its own employees underpayment noteworthy.

“There is a lot of cognitive dissonance between the topics that we cover and our day-to-day lives,” he says.