Writers and producers on the CBS News 24/7 team in San Francisco are set to strike on Tuesday/17, after negotiations with Paramount/CBS News stalled out last week.
Tuesday’s strike would be the first real labor challenge to CBS News since the landmark Paramount Warner Bros. Discovery merger and the first worker action at the legacy news station since Bari Weiss took the helm of the national corporation.
On March 10, the Writers Guild of America East bargaining unit delivered a strike pledge to management asking for a “fair deal with our union by the end of today.” That day was the last scheduled bargaining date and 95 percent of the 60-person bargaining unit had signed the strike pledge at that point.
By Saturday, the entire bargaining unit signed the strike pledge, which outlined management’s failure to find common ground with workers during negotiations. The key issues for the bargaining unit are “guaranteed wage increases, meaningful overtime rules, protected union jurisdiction, and flexible work from home protections.”
The bargaining unit’s contract, which included a no-strike clause, expired last Monday which opened the team up for a strike. CBS’s 24/7 team is, as it sounds, a 24-hour streaming news program launched in 2014.
One member of the team, who spoke to 48hills on a condition of anonymity, detailed the difficult negotiations. They said that the bargaining unit’s request for a guaranteed wage increase in line with inflation was dismissed and management only offered a 1.75 percent increase
“All we want is fair pay and work protections. We bend over backwards for this company. For example, our San Francisco team, which has less than a dozen people representing WGA East, provides hours worth of content for CBS News 24/7. Paramount tells us they value the 24/7 program. But the contract they are offering does not reflect that sentiment,” they said in a statement.
The worker noted that there are now 10 WGA East members on the San Francisco team handling roughly 5 1/2 hours of shows.
This raise management offered does not even meet the 2.4 percent rise in Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the past 12 months and is paltry when contextualized with ever expanding rent increases in Bay Area over the past year. The insider confirmed that the publicly reported layoffs, up to 15 percent of staff, have been carried out albeit with whole shows being cut rather than individual workers.
These layoffs — in conjunction with a hiring freeze —have, unsurprisingly, caused staffing issues. The worker I spoke to was asked to change their shift for at least a month in response to the shortage of workers.
News Director Lisa White did not respond to a request for comment.
Weiss was reportedly handpicked to run CBS News by David Ellison after his $8 billion dollar acquisition from the Redstone family. Speculation abounds about why exactly she was picked, but, given her stance as an “anti-woke” millennial media mogul, there is reason to assume it’s political.
Ellison the younger and his father have been on a quieter political tear over the past 18 months or so. On Aug. 7, 2025, Skydance Media and Paramount Global announced a hallmark media merger that gave the Ellisons, the younger and the older, a vast media empire spanning everything from MTV to CBS.
Executives promised Wall Street investors $2 billion in savings. Roughly two months later, Paramount announced thousands of layoffs although it wasn’t clear how CBS News would be affected at that point.
In late February, Paramount Skydance announced a $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The most recent merger augers another round of layoffs and a swing to the right for formerly WB Discovery owned CNN, as was the case with CBS News under Weiss’ leadership.
Workers at the elder Ellison’s Oracle staged a walkout protest in February 2020 over his support for Donald Trump, which they deemed a misalignment of the company’s values. While neither Oracle nor Ellison formerly responded, the website used for organizing the protest was briefly blocked on company computers. The company stated this was a technical error related to the McAfee anti-virus software and not an attempt to break up the protest.
WGA Rep Tina Timmerberg put it this way:
Members are fighting to protect their livelihoods during a period of uncertainty in broadcast news. Layoffs, editorial interference and political pressure have all become existential threats following the Paramount Skydance merger, and those same concerns have escalated with a possible merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. The bargaining unit is demanding fair pay, respect and a sustainable work-life balance.
