One, two, three ... up to 149. Ever since last Friday, the staff at El País newspaper have followed the same daily ritual of counting aloud, vigorously, the number of redundancies the company has announced. It began spontaneously, after observing a few minutes of silence, and has since then become our voice of protest. At 6pm each day we gather outside the office of the senior editors as the they meet to decide what tomorrow's front page will look like. Counting out the numbers, slowly and solemnly, allows us to give voice to the magnitude of the redundancies plan, and gives a sense of the types of people who are going to be put out the street.

This daily ritual has become a standard of dignity for an editorial team that is more united than ever in the face of the redundancies carried out in the toughest possible terms permitted by the new labour laws implemented by the conservative prime minister, Mariano Rajoy.

One in three members of the staff will be left without work, in one of the sectors that has been hardest hit by unemployment, in a country with 6 million already unemployed. The harshness of these measures has been particularly difficult to swallow given that El País has been one of the world's most profitable newspapers and one of the few that has not yet filed losses during the crisis.

Founded in 1976, just a year after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, El País helped build democracy in Spain and modernise a country emerging from a 40-year dictatorship. It represented the spirit of the transition and defended progressive values, becoming one of the central pillars of Spanish journalism.

Sadly, the current dispute has opened a huge gap between the editorial team and the newspaper's management, and the relationship seems very difficult to rebuild today.

One of the first measures taken by the workers' assembly was to remove reporters' bylines from articles on certain days. The protest was irrelevant to the final product, as all of the journalists continued to enshrine the same degree of professionalism to every article.

The company responded with threats, aimed especially at correspondents – with some foreign reporters warned that they could be sent back to Madrid the next day if they removed their names from their stories. The rest of the staff also came under pressure, many receiving letters threatening disciplinary action for disobeying management's orders.

A number of highly respected contributors have shown their solidarity with the staff, and several of them, including Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, have signed a letter expressing concern about the "deterioration of the founding values of a newspaper that is now more necessary than ever" and specific cases of "censorship" that have occurred in opinion pieces which made reference to the dispute of the newspaper.

Juan Luis Cebrian, chief executive of Pirsa, publisher of El País , and the paper's first editor, is now author of the redundancy plan. He justified the decision in light of the country's economic crisis and the troubles facing the newspaper business. Last year he earned €13m, including salary, bonuses and company stock. Cebrian was a legend in Spanish journalism for years until he became a businessman. In the past five years he has destroyed the great work he built up over three decades. It's fair to say that the staff feels they have been betrayed by him.

We know well the severity of the current economic crisis and the problems facing the media – especially print media – but we have shown time and again our willingness to pitch in to keep this newspaper going. We know that, for years, we had the best working conditions in the sector, and we have offered several times to reduce our wages to compensate for any losses in the company this year and in 2013.

However, the company's bosses have other plans. The newspaper's editor, Javier Moreno, who has been discredited – like Cebrian – by the union representing the newspaper's staff, told us a few weeks ago that this dispute is not like the previous ones, because before they were always about how to distribute the profits, and now it is all about the very survival of the newspaper. We disagree. We believe that this is exactly the same problem: before the management resisted sharing the profits and now they are reluctant to share the losses.

This text was written by many people on Thursday night, while waiting for the results of the negotiations between their representatives and the company. At this time there is still no agreement. In any case, the question we now ask is how things will go from now on, and if we will be able to heal the wounds.