The News Media Guild met with The Associated Press on Wednesday to discuss the Editorial Unit contract. This was a heated meeting at times as the Guild and company butted heads over its economic wage proposal.
Here is a breakdown of our conversation:
At the request of the Guild, sports writers Teresa Walker and Jimmy Golen opened the meeting to share their objections and concerns with the company’s proposal to eliminate OT pay while covering the Olympics and other international sporting events. Walker shared having to work 20 hour days with very little food and support from management. Golen discussed the financial hardships being gone for weeks can have on a family.
As experts and veterans of covering sporting events, they made it clear to the company that AP will lose valuable institutional knowledge if they eliminate OT because the most experienced reporters will not cover these assignments. “It felt like a slap in the face,” Walker told AP.
The company had no immediate response to their comments.
The company then recited a long statement in response to the Guild’s economic wage proposal. In that statement, the company declared that no other news outlet is structure like AP and therefor we cannot compare AP’s salaries to any other outlet. The company dismissed any comparisons to NYT, WaPo, Reuters, CNN nor even ProPublica (where the company said that it’s not a news outlet).
The company repeated multiple times that it is not cheap and listed several examples of how it has invested in its employees, like giving staff cameras and other equipment and helping staffers and freelancers cross some international borders. The guild said the company wage proposal does not address the buying power lost to the soaring inflation during the pandemic. The Guild and the company went back and forth over this statement. The Guild disagrees and pushed back that AP was really investing in its staffers and asked for the company to prove that it cannot afford more than their 2% raise proposals.
The company also rejected that wage stagnation was a problem at AP, pointing out that the contract has built in raises. The Guild disagreed, countering that many of the raises have not kept up with inflation or have been negated with spikes in health insurance premiums.
More disagreements occurred when the topic turned to paid parental leave. The company continues to maintain that its current proposal is
not discriminatory and lashed out when provided examples of Guild members who would be treated differently under the company’s proposal. The Guild’s position remains steadfast that everyone
should receive 20 weeks of paid parental leave. The company is pushing that those who give birth would receive 20 weeks of leave (12 weeks of paid parental leave and 8 weeks of short term paid disability leave); adoptive parents would receive 20 weeks of leave (12 weeks of paid parental leave and 8 weeks of adoptive bonding paid leave); and
non-birthing partners would receive 12 weeks.
The remainder of the meeting focused on other economic issues, including expenses, physical offices and clarifying information provided by the company.