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Washington Post - Guild News

Oct. 6, 2005

What Does the Post Know -- And When Did It Know It?

Every day, Washington Post reporters go out on the streets and demand information from others: How much did you spend on this program? Did you do what you promised? Do you treat your employees fairly? We expect -- in fact, we demand -- answers. When possible, we sift through reams of records to do our own analyses.

It’s what we do. But the owners and managers of The Post, for whom we do all this work, don’t think the newspaper ought to be held to the same standard as those we cover. Here’s why we say that:

Every three years, the Guild gets crude salary information about Guild-covered employees as the result of a National Labor Relations Board settlement nearly two decades ago. That information does not include employees’ names (which is fine with the Guild), but it allows the Guild to watch for compensation trends and patterns at The Post. It’s what the Guild used last year to provide employees with information about how they stack up next to others. As reported in a series of bulletins, the Guild found wide disparities in pay based on race and gender, with average pay differences as high as $10,000 a year in some cases for people who do essentially the same job.

To their credit, the senior members of Post management have consistently said they have every intention of erasing any disparities that exist. But at Wednesday’s bargaining session for a new labor contract, a day when the Guild bargaining team offered proposals to reach tentative agreement on several contract articles, Post managers repeated their longstanding refusal to make three improvements sought by the Guild:

  • We want the company to provide compensation data annually instead of every three years.
  • We want the data broken down into slightly finer categories (for example, “metro reporter” or “national reporter” rather than simply “reporter,” so we can compare these subgroups)
  • And we want this information in electronic form rather than on printouts, so we can more easily and accurately analyze the data.

Trish Dunn, who is The Post’s lead negotiator, went further than just rejecting the Guild’s proposal. She told Guild bargainers that, based on an analysis ordered up by the company, the paper does not believe the disparities identified by the Guild exist.

Our answer? Show us your numbers. The Post declined. Their argument, thus far, is that we signed this deal in the late 1980s after a period of contentious labor strife and they are not prepared to do anything more than they agreed to in 1988.

That’s regrettable, given that we are in the information business. Our proposal, we believe, is fair. Indeed, it is far less onerous than the kinds of information requests Post reporters routinely make of others in the course of our jobs. When the subjects of Post inquiries refuse to tell what they know and when they knew it, there is often a presumption that there is something to hide. What does The Post have to hide? As a compromise, the Guild on Wednesday raised the possibility of a joint effort to sort and analyze employee compensation data so that neither side could dispute the numbers. It’s called transparency, and that’s all we’re asking for. Dunn did not leap at the opportunity, but we hope that, one way or another, there is still room to achieve the goal that The Post says it wants as much as the Guild does: the documented reduction and elimination of discriminatory disparities at The Washington Post.

As always, let us know what you think.

-- Robert Pierre

"No Worker Left Behind"


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