More than 750 Washington Post employees said they had walked off the job Thursday, refusing to work for 24 hours in the biggest labor protest at the company in nearly half a century.

Workers marched in a picket line outside The Post’s offices in downtown Washington, D.C., waving “Strike” signs, ringing bells, blowing horns, beating drums and chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, our salary floor is much too low!”

But even as strikers asked readers to abstain from the newspaper and its website for the day in solidarity, editors and other managers carried on with many of the tasks to produce a daily news report, from writing articles to operating printing presses.

Union members said they are protesting a stalemate in bargaining with the company that has left workers without a contract for 18 months. They also object to the company’s recent offer of cost-saving buyouts to staff members, saying terms are stingy and the ostensibly voluntary packages are being coerced by a threat of layoffs.

“This is a declaration by hundreds of Washington Post staffers saying that if the company is to work with us fairly, it has to respect its employees,” said Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter and steward for The Washington Post Guild.

“I know they will still try to get a paper out,” she added. “But they can’t get a good paper out without us.”

Company executives deny the union’s claim it has bargained in “bad faith” and say they still hope to reach a contract agreement by the end of the month.

“We respect the rights of our Guild-covered colleagues to engage in this planned one-day strike,” a company spokesperson said. “We will make sure our readers and customers are as unaffected as possible.”

The company expressed confidence it will be able to print and deliver newspapers as usual Thursday and Friday, while keeping its website updated as well.

The walkout comes as The Post is grappling with leadership turnover as well as the same economic challenges that have rocked the media industry worldwide.

After a decade of rapid growth under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, executives acknowledged this fall the company had expanded too far and it would be forced to cut back after optimistic financial projections didn’t materialize.

The Post is set to lose $100 million this year — the impetus for the buyout offers, which executives hope will result in 240 voluntary departures, or about 10% of the current staff. About half of those cuts would come from the newsroom.

Meanwhile, the company will get a new publisher and chief executive in January. William Lewis, a British-born longtime media executive most recently with the

Wall Street Journal, was tapped last month to replace Fred Ryan, who stepped down earlier this year.

It has been 48 years since the last major labor walkout at The Post. In fall 1975, printing press workers led a strike that lasted 20 chaotic weeks while company executives operated the machinery and printed the newspapers themselves. Most journalists, though, did not participate in the strike, and ultimately, Publisher Katharine Graham hired replacement workers to run the presses, essentially breaking their union.

Today, though, Guild members say enthusiasm for organizing is on the rise. About 75% of eligible Post employees are now dues-paying union member, up from about 40% five years ago.

The walkout at The Post mirrors one almost exactly a year ago at The New York Times, where more than 1,100 employees ceased work for a day to protest deadlocked contract negotiations. The two sides settled on a new contract five months later.