Here is the Third Street Staff Union’s demand list. The Lexington Times is hosting a PDF copy at this link. It is nine pages. It is dated January 27, 2026 — four months before Pat Gerhard announced she was closing the shop on June 1, giving the staff what the union has characterized as ten days’ notice.
Most of the people who have spent the weekend arguing about the strike haven’t. The most-upvoted line of criticism in the r/lexington thread, repeated across hundreds of comments, is some version of “we don’t even know what they’re asking for, they’ve never published their demands.” That criticism was wrong on the facts the day it was made. The demands were on the union’s Instagram. The owner had a copy. It just hadn’t moved out of that small loop until this column…