More than 700 Washington Post staffers walked off the job on Thursday, a historic work stoppage to protest stalled union contract negotiations—and, for some, to voice grievances with leadership more broadly. “There’s just a lot of anguish about a lot of things,” one Post employee told me.

The 24-hour strike—something that hasn’t happened at the paper since the 1970s, according to Post Guild leaders—kicked off at midnight on Thursday. The walkout is “in protest of the company’s efforts to bargain in bad faith” and “unilaterally end negotiations over the contract, and with the buyouts that were announced earlier this year,” said Post climate reporter Sarah Kaplan. “This is a declaration by hundreds of Washington Post staffers saying that the company has to work with us fairly,” and “respect the fact that this news organization does not work without all of us.” A picket line was erected outside the paper’s HQ in Washington, where participating staff, organizing in shifts, began demonstrating in the early morning.

“Fact: Jeff Bezos bought our newspaper a decade ago,” said Katie Mettler, a Metro reporter and longtime cochair of the Post Guild, during an afternoon rally at the picket line. “Fact: He bought us hoping that we would break even or become profitable. Fact: We became profitable. We did our jobs. We met our goals. And then our former publisher Fred Ryan”—prompting boos from the crowd—“squandered our profits, and now we are here, being asked to take accountability for the company’s mistakes. And I don’t think that’s right—I don’t think we should have to bear the burden of their mismanagement.” Mettler continued: “Fred Ryan had one boss and it was Jeff Bezos, so I think that it is reasonable for us to hold him accountable…he has the power to instruct the people who are currently running this company…to come back to the bargaining table.”

Post Guild, the employee union, has been bargaining with the company for 18 months. In that time, Ryan departed, Bezos named former Microsoft executive and longtime confidant Patty Stonesifer as interim CEO, and Stonesifer appointed Will Lewis, former CEO of Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, as the paper’s next publisher. The Post’s business struggles have also become clear in that time, with The New York Times reporting that the paper was set to lose $100 million this year, and, in mid-October, the Post offering buyouts to 240 employees across its staff.

Last week, however, Stonesifer told staff that “involuntary layoffs” may be necessary to meet the goal of 240 acceptances in the separation package, which, by that point, only 120 employees had accepted. The company initially put caps on every team they offered buyouts to, meaning they’d only accept buyouts on a certain team up to that limit, but Stonesifer in her memo last week said that they would “consider raising caps where we can minimize impact to our mission and product.” Staffers, meanwhile, have sought clarity about the long-term strategy, as I previously reported, both as a business and editorially. “People are disgusted with the company’s actions. Both in terms of the pretend voluntary buyouts, which are really layoffs, and the lack of progress on a reasonable contract,” the Post employee said.

The Guild is asking for 4% raises a year for three years, while the company is offering 2.25% for the first year of the contract, and 2% the next two years. “We deserve a contract that has job security protections and that respects seniority and the value of the employees who have given multiple decades of their lives to this company,” said Kaplan. “We deserve a buyout process that is fair and truly voluntary, and that is not deceptively a worse deal than the company claims it is. And most of all we just deserve to be dealt with fairly by our employer.”

“We respect the rights of our Guild-covered colleagues to engage in this planned one-day strike. We will make sure our readers and customers are as unaffected as possible,” a Post spokesperson said in a statement. “The Post’s goal remains the same as it has from the start of our negotiations: to reach an agreement with the Guild that meets the needs of our employees and the needs of our business.”

With hundreds of staffers pledging support for the walkout earlier this week, a second Post staffer said “it’s going to be noticeable,” but questioned “whether it’s going to be effective.” In some cases, entire departments, such as the Metro and investigative teams, committed to walking out, Post reporter Marissa Lang said, as did “colleagues on the commercial side, and in the print plant,” who walked off their jobs in the early hours of Thursday morning. “A walkout of 750 people touches every part of the Washington Post organization,” said Lang. Earlier this week, Post Guild released an open letter asking readers to “respect our walkout by not crossing the picket line,” meaning “do not engage with any Washington Post content.” If you did read the Post on Thursday, though, you may have noticed some stories—like one about a new crime center in DC to the paper’s own coverage of its labor protest —had a general byline: “By Washington Post Staff.” Either reporters had their names stripped off stories, or the generically bylined pieces were written by editors.

Staffers I spoke to had mixed feelings about how much this action will really do. “I think people are genuinely impressed by how this young contention of leaders has revived the union, and doubled its membership,” said a third Post staffer. But “a lot of the same people are disappointed to see that they’re acting out in this way that doesn't seem to be connected to any real prospect of progress on pay of jobs.” I’m told that there was internal second-guessing on Thursday among reporters who’d agreed to walk out but were now wondering, among other things, what would come next. Some high-profile staffers signed onto the strike out of fear of being publicly called out if they didn’t participate, according to a Post staffer. A piece in Semafor did just that to two top New York Times reporters, Peter Baker and Michael Shear, last year when the two opted out of the Gray Lady union’s walkout—an article, the Post staffer said, that had been circulating in recent days.

Asked about the Guild’s plan following the strike, Lang said they would “extend another one-day invitation to the company to sit down with us and meaningfully bargain over the terms of our contract. If they refuse and continue to engage in some of the behavior we’ve seen, we’re prepared to continue to pressure them,” she said.

The Post Guild’s decision to walk off the job amid lagging contract negotiations comes nearly one year to the day that the Times’s unionized staffers rallied outside the newspaper’s headquarters in their own historic act of protest. Several months later, the Times’s bitter labor fight came to an end as the staff union and company agreed to a contract. In August, Axios reported that members of the Times union briefed staffers from the Post union as the Post considered a walkout of its own.

There are distinctions between the staff appeals at the two papers. Part of the Times union’s rallying call last year was tied to the company having increased compensation for some top officers and increased its dividend payout to shareholders. The Post’s walkout, on the other hand, comes as the company has admitted it’s been operating on faulty financial projections and is buying out—or, potentially, laying off—about 10% of its workforce. While one Post staffer acknowledged its New York–based rival is on firmer financial footing these days, they also pointed out the Times is “not owned by the second richest guy in the world.”