Support KQED Strike

Red illustration of a four legged creature with a pointy tail and a smile with red text above and below on a white background

KQED, covering the San Francisco area, is one of the country’s top public broadcasting stations. In late 1974 and early 1975, 80 employees of their TV and radio stations went on strike, marking the first major strike against any public broadcasting station in history. The strikers and their union, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, churned out buttons, bumper stickers, t-shirts, posters and leaflets with this image which helped to gain popular support for KQED’s engineers, camera operators, announcers and others. The strikers held rallies and popular demonstrations, which garnered hundreds of letters of support demanding refunds for network contributions and vowing to discontinue donations if the strike was not settled fairly for the employees. The cause was even supported by popular folk singer Joan Baez, union leader Cesar Chavez, and then-State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. Sadly, the strike ended with employees only getting their most basic demand for union contracts, but little else.