The writers at The Wall Street Journal really don’t want to see Dow Jones (DJ) get taken over by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS)

With reports suggesting that a News Corp. deal to acquire the company could be sealed within a matter of weeks, provided the controlling Bancroft family agrees, the union that represents workers at Dow Jones staged a sickout Thursday morning.

The union issued the following statement:

Wall Street Journal reporters across the country chose not to show up to work this morning.

We did so for two reasons.

First, The Wall Street Journal’s long tradition of independence, which has been the hallmark of our news coverage for decades, is threatened today. We, along with hundreds of other Dow Jones employees represented by the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees, want to demonstrate our conviction that the Journal’s editorial integrity depends on an owner committed to journalistic independence.

Second, by our absence from newsrooms around the country, we are reminding Dow Jones management that the quality of its publications depends on a top-quality professional staff. Dow Jones currently is in contract negotiations with its primary union, seeking severe cutbacks in our health benefits and limits on our pay. It is beyond debate that the professionals who create The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications every day deserve a fair contract that rewards their achievements. At a time when Dow Jones is finding the resources to award golden parachutes to 135 top executives, it should not be seeking to eviscerate employees’ health benefits and impose salary adjustments that amount to a pay cut.

We put the reputation of The Wall Street Journal and the needs of its readers first. That’s why we will be back at our desks this afternoon, producing the day’s news reports. But we hope this demonstration will remind those entrusted with the future of Dow Jones that our publications’ integrity must be protected, and sustained, from top to bottom.

Will this mini-strike work? It seems unlikely. For one, after taking a quick look at the WSJ’s Web site on Thursday morning, it didn’t appear that there was any indication that people weren’t working. Breaking stories were covered by writers there and not just wire stories.

However, one Dow Jones employee e-mailed me Thursday afternoon to point out that several of the stories on the WSJ home page were written either by Dow Jones Newswires staffers, who were not included in Thursday’s work stoppage even though they are also union members, or were written by WSJ reporters on Wednesday for publication in Thursday’s paper.

And when I spoke to Jim Browning, a reporter in the money and investing section and chair of the union’s bargaining committee, he conceded that it was hard to tell just now how many reporters decided to stay home. He was not in the office at the time and suggested I check back in later today for an update on how many reporters avoided the office.

Still, this move by the Journal staffers shows that they could make life difficult for News Corp. Even though there was a report in The New York Times suggesting that part of Murdoch’s pact with the Dow Jones board on matters of independence would let Murdoch hire and fire editors at will, what is Murdoch going to do if the entire staff revolts? He can’t simply fire them all and easily replace them with people just out of journalism school.

The WSJ’s strength is its brand and that comes from its reporting and editing talent. So if Murdoch succeeds in winning control of Dow Jones, he’s really going to have to extend an olive branch to the union, stat, or he may quickly find that he just threw $5 billion of his shareholders’ money down the drain.