Journalist-Turned-Labor Organizer Helps Workers Navigate RTO

Sara Steffens has been the No. 2 official at the Communications Workers of America since 2015. The union represents around 400,000 workers including AT&T Inc. technicians, New York Times reporters and Microsoft Corp. videogame testers. It’s on the front lines of return-to-office conflicts, tech industry organizing and antitrust debates.

Steffens, a former journalist, says she was fired in 2008 after helping lead a successful organizing drive at the Contra Costa Times, the newspaper where she was then working. The paper’s parent company, Bay Area News Group, has previously denied retaliating and has said that terminations including Steffens’s were part of layoffs ...