Nothing says union solidarity like signing your name to a petition! Please check any of the following to sign. Adding your name to all of them is highly encouraged. Guild members and non-members can sign. If you don’t have the private link to sign the petitions, reach out to your steward.

 

Wage Proposal Petition

Dear Daisy Veerasingham and Julie Pace:

Working at The Associated Press is among the highest honors for any journalist. Guild members are privileged to contribute to the report in myriad ways, and we are cognizant of the preeminent role we all play in the world’s news ecosystem.

Our contract negotiations are taking place at a time of record inflation, with real estate prices and living expenses rising far faster than our salaries. The current wage minima, as well as AP’s new 2% raise proposal, are not sustainable in this economy, nor in line with our competitors or even recent AP job postings. 

Our Guild workforce is full of experts across beats and in breaking news. More than half of us have over 19.6 years of journalism experience. Yet our median base salary is an embarrassing $83,644. It’s even worse when you consider that the median AP employee has been here for 17.6 years — the vast majority of their career.

Because of the current pay structure, which tops out at six years of experience – roughly equivalent to that of someone in their late 20s – longtime staffers and mid-career hires are in effect penalized for their longevity in this industry. Our wages have been stagnant for years at best and decades at worst.

Our members are increasingly unable to afford staying at the AP, and this year alone, we’ve lost a wave of top talent. With every person who leaves, the company loses another type of expertise that strengthens the wire, and it has to then burn time and resources to find and train replacements.

Recently, our own Guild-covered job postings listed pay ranges well above the contract’s wage minimums – proving that management is aware of the need to increase salaries to keep up with inflation and the evolving landscape of news media. 

We work at the AP because it’s an honor and many of us have devoted our entire careers to this organization. Most chose to stay in nonmanagement roles, to fulfill our journalism dreams of being on-the-ground when news breaks, and we are punished financially for it.

Many AP staffers cannot afford to rent their own apartments, buy homes, obtain child care or pay AP healthcare premiums – let alone save for retirement.

Simply put, we cannot afford to work for the AP at these salaries any longer.

We deserve better. #WeAreAP

 

Class A Cities Differential Petition

Dear Daisy Veerasingham and Julie Pace:

The Guild stands strongly behind adding Seattle; Miami; Sacramento, California; and Portland, Oregon, to the Class A Cities differential list.

By almost any measure, housing costs have risen sharply in recent years, gobbling up an increasingly bigger share of incomes for many Americans. The median asking rent for the top 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas has swelled nearly 25% over the past four years, reaching $1,759 in July, according to Realtor.com. Guild members living in these four cities have been particularly hard hit.

Rent increases over the last four years have ranged from 11% in Seattle to nearly 16% in Oregon to nearly 29% in Sacramento. The median rent in Miami now exceeds $2,400, chewing up more than 44% of the area’s median income, a greater percentage than in Los Angeles.

In an April article, Kiplinger’s (founded by a former AP business reporter in 1920) listed Seattle as the nation’s eighth most-expensive city. The cost of living in Seattle is 49.9% above the U.S. average. 

Rising rents have worsened a long-term disparity between rent and income growth: Between 1999 and 2022, U.S. rents soared 135%, while income grew 77%, according to data from Moody’s Analytics.

As of July, tenants in eight of the nation’s biggest metro areas – including Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Boston – were paying roughly 30% or more of their household monthly income to cover the local median rent, according to Realtor.com. That’s HUD’s threshold for unaffordable housing. Los Angeles, New York and Boston are on the AP’s cost differential list, while Miami is not.

This does not account for the many renters who are trying to save to buy a home, for whom the road to homeownership grows increasingly disheartening.  

As of July, the national median sales price stood at $406,700, according to the National Association of Realtors. That’s a 45% increase since July 2019. In Seattle alone, Kiplinger’s reports the median home value as $848,100.

Factoring in a persistently low supply of homes on the market, an average 7% rate on a 30-year mortgage — the highest level in more than 20 years, and a 20% down payment, a homebuyer purchasing a median-priced home would have a monthly payment that’s more than double what it was four years ago.

The problem comes back to wages. Borrower incomes in the U.S. are rising too slowly to fully offset growing mortgage costs, according to analysts at Moody’s Investors Service.

In addition to AP’s stagnating wages, its failure to expand its Class A differential list to include the above cities has put undue financial hardship on the guild members living there. This must be remedied.

We deserve better. #WeAreAP

Night and Sunday Differentials

Dear Daisy Veerasingham and Julie Pace:

The Guild is strongly opposed to eliminating night and Sunday differentials.

Many of us started at The Associated Press on night and weekend shifts, in some cases earning the company’s lowest salaries. These differentials not only make a key difference in the wages of early-career professionals, but also encourage later-career professionals to take on atypical schedules.

Additionally, many staffers on the photo and sports desks exclusively work nights and weekends. Slashing the differentials unfairly hurts those AP employees.

We need to incentivize – not discourage and devalue – workers who staff these unpopular shifts. They deserve to be paid more for working these hours, which often involve skeleton crews that are forced to handle more responsibilities with fewer resources.

With staggering inflation in recent years, chronic understaffing on these shifts in particular and rampant wage stagnation, this small boost is long overdue and should be paid to veterans of these shifts as well as workers assigned to them for the first time.

We deserve better. #WeAreAP