Today we are launching a national, coordinated campaign to win fair contracts with wage increases for the nearly 1,000 Guild-represented employees of Digital First Media. The campaign will build on the strength of our 13 bargaining units at DFM publications and online news sites across the United States, united by a central theme: News Matters.
With most of our contracts expired or soon-to expire, we will continue to work collectively until all our members have received long-overdue pay increases. Raises at DFM papers have not been granted for at least seven — and as long as 10 years.
Our campaign is historic. We are among the roughly 30 percent of print and digital newsroom workers in the United States who are represented by a union, according to The Newspaper Guild's estimates. Yet to our knowledge, at no time in recent history has a nationwide force of print media workers come together on this scale, across so many newsrooms, to collectively demand wage increases.
We are taking this action because we see no other alternative. Isolated as individual bargaining units, we have faced total shut-out from DFM on raises, even as valued employees leave the papers, week after week, in search of more equitable workplaces. And we believe — with all our members' support as we escalate the campaign in the coming weeks — that together, we will be far more effective making real gains for employees.
DFM managers answer to Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, making our challenge all the more formidable.
A company of national scope needs to sit down at the bargaining table across from a national newspaper union, and this campaign is a message to our members that we have that heft — and we are going to take advantage of it. "There's a power in all of us being together," Faliano said.
Here's the power we represent: We are staff of a dozen daily newspapers across the country — from Silicon Valley to St. Paul and suburban Philadelphia. We are reporters, photographers, editors, sales reps, designers, and clerks. We are the people who keep the second-largest newspaper group in the United States in business.
More importantly, we produce and distribute news that keeps people safe, and informed: When mass shooters invade movie theaters. When floods and droughts reach epic proportions. When the simple cost of dying in a hospital guts seniors' life savings.
Together, we've won Pulitzers, inspired legislation and kept watch on local governments and police departments. We've reviewed local theater and dance productions, tracked stadium building plans and introduced readers to unknown stories about athletes, performers and artists. We've taken them inside riverbank homeless encampments and to mountain top ski resorts, documenting life unfolding around our communities with high-quality professional photography, day after day.
We've quickly adapted and learned new skills in the age of digital media, in both sales and newsgathering. Daily Freeman reporters in Kingston, New York were the first in the state to live-tweet proceedings in a courtroom trial. And The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News have created award-winning full-length video documentaries never before produced by newspaper staff.
But we, the employees of these DFM papers, are making unreasonable sacrifices to a profitable company that has consistently failed to treat its employees fairly at the bargaining table. Some DFM employees — such as staff at four papers in the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia — have gone as long as 10 years without a raise. Workers at all other papers are reaching that 10-year mark soon, struggling to pay mortgages and put kids through school with rising health care costs and frugal retirement accounts.
At the Bay Area News Group in the East Bay, employees have had to fight hard for hourly wages of $18.75 — less than half what most journalists in the region earn. And that pay minimum hasn't budged over the past eight years — since it was established in the East Bay unit's initial contract.
Across the San Francisco Bay at the Mercury News, employee compensation has declined 19 percent since 2008, due to a convergence of wage and benefit reductions. That amounts to more than a $12,000 per year loss for many employees. Meanwhile, although the Mercury News' bargaining unit has shrunk 71 percent — from 378 employees to just 108 today — there have been no resulting benefits for the few, and fiercely loyal, employees who remain.
At the Macomb Daily and The Daily Tribune, covering the suburbs outside of Detroit, Guild membership is down 45 percent since April 2013. Following a 12.5 percent pay cut seven years ago, employees salaries have not been this low since 2001.
Reporter Patricia Doxsey, president of the Kingston Newsguild, represents the unionized members of the Daily Freeman and covers a county beat. Staff at her midsize daily paper — serving readers in the region from the Hudson River Valley to the Catskills — have not had a raise in eight years.
At the Denver Post, longtime reporter Kieran Nicholson has shared in the glory of his paper's Pulitzer prize for the Aurora theater shootings, and its in-depth coverage of the legalization of marijuana and the environment. But like other employees, he's acutely aware of the threats to professional journalism, as well.
Today, and in the coming weeks, we are asking you, our 1,000 members and your friends and supporters, to please stay tuned as we roll out the News Matters campaign.
You will be hearing soon about meetings at your paper that we hope you will attend. We need to hear from you, our members, as we plan next steps and as negotiations move forward.
A bunch of bull. If you had any balls you would call for a strike and shut these slave owners down. This is the most pathetic example of a labor union I have ever seen.
How can we, the average citizen, help with this issue??
There are those of us who have been displaced by an industry we loved; some of us are willing to help even though we're no longer part of the active force.