July 10, 2003

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Continuous News Blues

There is something hollow in Post management’s recent call for all of us in the newsroom to get pumped up and excited about the newly dawning age of Continuous News Coverage.

It would be one thing if Post management had spent some energy in the past year or two building up the trust and cooperation that so painlessly fosters employee enthusiasm and a general willingness to sacrifice personally for the greater good of The Post. But considering last fall’s contract negotiations -- in which Post management insisted not only on squeezing us economically but also hacking away at the vacation plan and trying to weaken the union through changes in membership rules and bans on labor-related e-mail – the recent demand for more and more work, ever earlier in the day, strikes some of us as shamefully exploitative.

All of us, of course, have a big stake in The Post’s survival and prominence. We have that stake directly, because if The Post goes down, we go with it. And even more important, we have it on an emotional level. Most of us here love the paper and what it stands for and would do almost anything to make it better.

But working at The Post is also a job. It is work, and it is work that is covered by a labor contract. That contract lays out our hours and wages and working conditions. And anybody who wants to change those details significantly must do so through negotiations. Our contract, by the way, also spells out who we work for, namely The Washington Post -- not WPNI or some other Web company that takes our copy and sends it off, never to be seen in the newspaper.

How did we get into this strange situation where our jobs are morphing before our eyes without us having any say at all over what those changes mean for us, or are worth to The Post? A manager recently mentioned scoldingly to a Guild-loyal reporter that the Guild has little right to complain about these changes because “The Guild has never been willing to talk about these issues with management.” Oh yeah? Let’s review the history.

The Guild has made made four major attempts to put Web work on the labor agenda with Post managers, in every instance to no avail. The first was back in 1999, as we were bargaining the contract that expired last year, when we proposed to cover writers for Digital Ink and Washingtonpost.com under the Guild contract. That could have started the process of unifying compensation structures for reporters and editors on both sides of the river. At the time, however, (and to this day, at least when it suits Post management) vice president for labor relations Trish Dunn claimed there was “a firewall” between The Post and washingtonpost.com. She claimed to have no authority to bargain for the Web workers who worked, she said, “for a separate subsidiary of The Post.”

Somehow, though, that subsidiary is not so separate that we can’t be made to write for it.

We raised the issue again a couple of years ago, when Steve Coll first promulgated the idea that all of us in the newsroom were going to be asked to write a little more and a little earlier to feed the Web’s “PM Extra” edition. At that time the Guild made a modest proposal to the top editors at The Post: Howzabout The Post and the Guild co-sponsoring a brownbag lunch to talk about some of the issues raised by Web journalism? Tracy Grant, who was then the main Web-meister (and a Guild member before she took that exempt position) was game. But the plan got nixed by Len Downie, who said he had no interest in co-sponsoring such an event with the Guild.

Later, when the burdens of Web work were becoming even more clear, the Guild made a formal request to Post management to talk about the issue, to include some discussion of the possibility, at least, of working toward a system of compensation for frequent contributors to the Web. Steve Coll did agree to talk to Guild officers, but he was unwilling in that conversation to engage in a substantive discussion about workloads or compensation. And when we pushed again to have management discuss these issues, labor VP Dunn invoked a clause in the contract that says, in essence, that either side can refuse to consider contractual matters in between contract negotiations, which happen about every three years. In other words, we had to wait until the contract expired and new contract negotiations were under way before we were going to be allowed to have a conversation abut Web issues. So we waited.

Then contract talks came up and we put the issue squarely on the table. At first we proposed contract language that would have required The Post to develop a system of compensation for Web writing. Later, as it became clear that our proposal was going to go nowhere, we downgraded it a few times until finally all we sought was a promise from Post managers that they would at least talk to us about how working for the Web might someday be made more equitable—a promise to do nothing, really, except initiate a dialogue. The Post would not even agree to this noncommittal language. Ultimately, the contract we signed had nothing in it requiring The Post to face the issue at all.

Now, surprise, just a few months later comes the word that we are all going to be asked to give even more of ourselves to the Web – above and beyond early deadlines for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and even earlier deadlines for the Asian Wall Street Journal. Moreover, for the first time, management is acknowledging that merit pay decisions will take into account our individual Web contributions, giving the lie to the line that writing for the Web is voluntary. What’s voluntary about a “donation” of labor that, if not made, can harm your chances of getting a raise? (For that matter, what’s voluntary about the freedom to say ‘No’ and to thereby alienate the editors upon whose good favor we all depend?).

Of course, the whole idea that writing for the Web is going to significantly increase your salary via merit pay recognition should be taken with a big shaker of salt. As the Guild has repeatedly spelled out in past – and as has been painfully clear to most people in the newsroom over the years – merit pay increases are rare birds, and they are not distributed evenly to everyone who is doing good work at The Post. In fact, a preliminary analysis of merit pay data complied by the Guild last year indicated that only one in three Guild-covered employees got any merit award during the most recent three-year contract. (Stand by for a much more complete analysis of Post salaries and merit pay, now being completed by the Guild.) And at a recent meeting with national news staffers, Coll declined to answer the question of whether the merit pay pot was going to grow now that Web writing is coming into the equation.

The Guild intends to raise these issues with management again.

Meanwhile, keep track of your work. Take notes when you’re asked to “volunteer,” and share that information with a Guild officer or representative. Don’t march lemming-like over the cliff of virtually infinite work while The Post tightens its purse strings and wages war against those vexing “labor costs.” Good labor is valuable. Those who want it should pay for it, fair and square.

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