There is a version of this story that KGW’s corporate parent, TEGNA Inc., would prefer you read. In that version, a well-meaning company expressed its views about unionization, workers made a free and informed choice, and whatever happens next is just the normal mechanics of labor law playing out. That version is fiction. What actually happened at KGW-TV over the past several months, what was done to the producers and content coordinators who work behind the scenes of Portland’s NBC affiliate, is a story about power, intimidation, and ultimately, the remarkable stubbornness of workers who refused to be moved.
I have been in the labor movement for nearly 20 years. I have seen employers resist organizing campaigns with everything at their disposal: lawyers, consultants, captive audience meetings, late-night phone calls. I have seen the playbook deployed in full, in industries from construction and chemical manufacturing to healthcare to broadcasting. What KGW and its parent company TEGNA have done during this campaign is not merely a page from that playbook. It is among the most relentless, cynical, and sustained anti-union efforts I have witnessed in two decades of this work. And it failed, spectacularly, unambiguously, by a vote of seventeen to three.
But before we get to that vote, we need to talk about why these workers organized in the first place. Union drives do not happen in a vacuum. Workers do not decide on a whim to take on the considerable risk and effort of an organizing campaign unless something has gone wrong, and often, unless many things have gone wrong for a long time. At KGW, the grievances were real and documented. Workers in the producer and content coordinator workgroup had been living with scheduling practices that were unpredictable and inconsistent, making it difficult to plan their lives. They had watched pay disparities accumulate across the work group, not a single isolated case, but a pattern affecting multiple employees, including documented instances in which workers raised concerns about gender-based wage discrimination and were turned away without meaningful response. These were not abstract complaints. These were the daily conditions under which people were showing up to put the news on the air for this city, day after day, without any meaningful mechanism to address them.
A union is not a luxury. For these workers, it was the only available answer to problems management had made clear it had no interest in solving.
And so, beginning in July 2025, those workers began organizing. They sought to join IBEW Local 48, a union already present at KGW, already representing their colleagues, already at the bargaining table. The logic was straightforward: the producer and content coordinator work group shared a community of interest with the existing unit, and joining it was the most direct path to having a voice. When IBEW Local 48 presented KGW with a petition for voluntary recognition in December 2025, an invitation to acknowledge that reality without the need for a formal election, management refused to accept the paperwork. The documents were returned to our union hall, unsigned.
That refusal set the tone for everything that followed. Rather than engage honestly with the concerns driving the organizing effort, KGW chose to fight. And the weapon it chose was propaganda, a word I do not use lightly, but which is the only accurate description for what came next.
Between December 19, 2025, and the eve of the Feb. 19 election, KGW management distributed more than a dozen anti-union flyers, emails, and written communications to bargaining-eligible employees. The sheer volume alone would be remarkable. But it is the content and the tactics that reveal the true character of this campaign. Fliers misrepresented how union dues are collected and used. Fliers made false claims about IBEW Local 48’s record of protecting members’ jobs. One communication singled out an individual KGW employee by name, the shop steward for the existing bargaining unit, in a manner that the union can only describe as an attempt to intimidate and harass. Management held meetings, framed as voluntary, to press its case against the union. When workers pushed back, when they emailed management to point out specific factual errors in the anti-union materials, they were met not with corrections, but with hostility and doubling down.
And then there were the letters. On February 18, 2026, the day before workers were scheduled to vote, KGW management hand-delivered individual letters to bargaining-eligible employees urging them to vote no. Not a flier on a corkboard. Not a mass email. Individual letters, placed directly in the hands of workers, the night before the election. In 20 years, I have seen a great deal. I have rarely seen an employer make so naked a display of the lengths it was willing to go to in order to suppress a vote.
There was also, in early February, a recorded meeting, agreed to by all parties, in which management called a worker in and spent the session attempting to talk her out of supporting the union. When she raised her concerns about pay discrimination, those concerns were brushed aside. She had documentation showing she had never received substantive feedback during her performance reviews, the reviews that were supposed to justify merit increases and still, management dismissed her. That recording exists. It is part of the evidentiary record now before the National Labor Relations Board and Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.
KGW spent months telling its workers that IBEW Local 48 could not be trusted. What workers witnessed, instead, was an employer that could not be trusted.
I want to be precise about what I mean when I call this propaganda, because the word carries weight. I do not mean simply that KGW communicated its opposition to unionization. Employers have a legal right to do that, and honest communication, even in opposition, is part of a functioning democratic process. What I mean is that KGW repeatedly and deliberately communicated falsehoods; that it used the machinery of employment, the power differential between a corporation and the individuals who depend on it for their livelihoods, to create an atmosphere of fear and surveillance; and that it targeted individual workers in ways calculated to make them feel exposed and alone. That is not persuasion. That is coercion dressed in the language of information.
None of it worked. On Feb. 19, 2026, the workers of KGW’s producer and content coordinator workgroup cast their ballots. Seventeen voted yes. Three voted no. It was not a close call. It was not a signal that more persuasion was needed in either direction. It was a declaration; clear, decisive, and democratic, that these workers wanted union representation.
I have seen this dynamic before, and it is worth naming. When management campaigns are this aggressive, when employers overplay their hand this badly, they often produce the opposite of their intended effect. Workers who might have been uncertain look at the intensity of their employer’s opposition and ask themselves what, exactly, the company is so afraid of. They see the personalized handouts, the home mailers, the eve-of-election letters, and they understand that an employer willing to go this far to stop them from organizing is precisely the kind of employer they need a union to protect them from. Solidarity is not extinguished by pressure. More often than not, it is forged by it.
That is what happened at KGW. The campaign did not break these workers. It bound them together. And when they walked into that election, they walked in as a coalition, as a union, and voted like one.
KGW’s response to the result has been to contest it. The company filed five objections to the election, seeking to have it set aside and re-run. Four of those five objections have already been dismissed by the NLRB’s regional director as lacking the evidentiary foundation required to warrant overturning an election. A fifth remains pending. Separately, KGW has moved to withhold merit increases and performance reviews from bargaining unit employees during the pendency of those objections, a move the NLRB’s regional director has explicitly warned constitutes a prohibited unilateral change to terms and conditions of employment. IBEW Local 48 has demanded, in writing, that KGW reverse course. If it does not, we will pursue every remedy the law provides.
This pattern — contesting the result, delaying certification, and using the objection process to continue exerting pressure on workers — is not unique to this campaign. It is a strategy designed to exhaust workers, to make them question whether the fight is worth it, to run out the clock on solidarity built during an organizing drive. It will not work here. But Portland deserves to know that it is being tried.
This city was built by workers who organized. Its identity did not come from the goodwill of corporations. It came from people who stood together and demanded to be treated with dignity.
Portland is a progressive, pro-labor city. The people of the Pacific Northwest have, over generations, built a culture that takes seriously the proposition that workers are not simply inputs in a production process, that they are human beings entitled to fair pay, predictable schedules, and a voice in the conditions of their employment. The viewers who tune into KGW each morning for their news do so, in many cases, because they believe in the institution of local journalism and the people who make it possible. They deserve to know what is happening to those people. They deserve to know that the workers who produce their news have been fighting, with patience and courage against a well-funded corporate resistance, simply for the right to have that voice.
KGW can file objections. TEGNA can retain its lawyers and run out its legal options. But the workers have already spoken. Seventeen to three is not a close election. It is a mandate. IBEW Local 48 will be right there, shoulder to shoulder, through every hearing, every filing, every frustrating delay, and every hard-fought step forward. Because solidarity isn’t something we switch on when it’s convenient. It’s who we are. We will fight alongside these workers today, tomorrow, and for as long as justice demands it, until that mandate is honored and every worker gets what they’ve earned.
The people of Portland deserve better from their local news station. So do the workers who make it.
Tara McElligott is a business representative at IBEW Local 48. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and represent the position of IBEW Local 48, not necessarily those of every represented KGW employee.
UPDATE: The Labor Press learned May 5 that KGW has resumed merit increases for bargaining employees.
