Sad, Sad, Sad.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/10/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At NPR, an Army of Temps Resents a Workplace Full of Anxiety and Insecurity
By Paul Farhi, The Washington Post
09 December 18
Julia Botero was happy to catch on, and determined to stay on, at NPR.
After
completing an internship at the public broadcasting organization in
Washington in 2013, she began a year-long stint as a temporary employee,
moving between producing jobs at NPR’s signature news programs, “All Things
Considered” and “Morning Edition.”
Botero quickly realized what she was up against. As a “temp,” she floated
among unfamiliar co-workers and faced an ever-changing set of
responsibilities, some of which she’d never been trained for. Her work
contracts were sometimes as brief as two weeks, at the end of which she’d
have to persuade a manager to extend her.
Worse was the sense of constant competition among her fellow temps, many of
whom were angling to be hired for a limited number of permanent positions.
“The only person I felt I could trust,” she said, “was the person I was
dating, who was in the same position I was.” After a year of such
uncertainty, she left, taking a job as a reporter for a group of public
radio stations in New York state.
What’s surprising about Botero’s experience is how unsurprising it is at
NPR.
For decades, the public broadcaster has relied on a cadre of temporary
journalists to produce its hourly newscasts and popular news programs.
Without temporary workers — who are subject to termination without cause —
NPR would probably be unable to be NPR. Temps do almost every important job
in NPR’s newsroom: they pitch ideas, assign stories, edit them, report and
produce them. Temps not only book the guests heard in interviews, they
often
write the questions the hosts ask the guests.
And there are a lot of them. According to union representatives, between 20
and 22 percent of NPR’s 483 union-covered newsroom workforce — or one in
five people — are temps. The number varies week to week, as temps come and
go.
NPR’s management cites a somewhat lower figure, 16 percent, although its
count reflects managers and interns and other employees in departments that
aren’t represented by the union. NPR says the overall ratio of temporary
workers to permanent employees has remained more or less stable for several
years.
Resentment among temps about their status has boiled beneath the surface at
NPR for years, but the tensions have begun to bubble up over the past
several months. Some temporary employees raised complaints in the wake of a
sexual harassment scandal involving Michael Oreskes, the former head of
NPR’s newsroom. Oreskes was accused by several women, including a
then-temporary employee, of misconduct. Oreskes was forced to resign by NPR
last year; several women said his behavior highlighted the vulnerability of
temporary employees, who fear they could be blackballed for complaining or
resisting an overly aggressive manager.
The outrage over Oreskes coalesced into a broader employee inquiry into the
status of temps at NPR. Following a series of “listening sessions”
conducted
among 40 current and former temporary journalists, NPR employees produced a
report in May detailing a number of grievances and allegedly abusive
practices.
Among them: Temps were often left in the dark about how long their
assignments would last, how much they’d be paid, who they were reporting
to,
or what their title is. They also said they received little feedback from
supervisors after completing an assignment, and were “routinely” overlooked
in NPR’s recruiting efforts.
Several temps interviewed for this story use the same word to describe
NPR’s
temp system: “Exploitative.”
By any measure, NPR is unusual among broadcast media organizations in the
size of its temporary workforce.
About 5 percent of the staff at a typical TV station was employed on a
part-time or temporary basis, according to a survey conducted last year by
the Radio Television Digital News Association. Radio stations, which
usually
have much smaller staffs than TV stations, reported an average of just one
part-timer or temp in the survey. The number of temporary workers among
stations has declined steadily over the past 10 years as the recession has
eased, said Robert Papper, who conducted the survey.
Other kinds of news organizations employ few temps. The only journalists
officially designated as temporary in The Washington Post’s newsroom are
six
“extended interns,” who are employed with the expectation that they will
someday fill a permanent job when an appropriate one opens, Managing Editor
Tracy Grant said.
NPR hires temps to address “a range of needs,” said Loren Mayor, president
of operations. She said temporary workers fill in for permanent staffers
when the latter go on vacation, take sick leave or parental leave, or when
news events warrant.
“As a media company that strives to be innovative and nimble, we need
talented people who can come in on a short-term basis to help us experiment
with a new idea or pilot a new program,” Mayor said. “As a breaking news
organization, we need additional reporters and editors to staff up for
targeted news events like elections.”
In a lengthy response via email, Mayor made no mention of any financial
advantage in employing temps. But the potential seems obvious: Temporary
employees are only paid when they work, and only work when managers decide.
This gives NPR, a nonprofit organization, flexibility in managing its
payroll and broad discretion over work assignments.
In a follow-up interview, a spokeswoman, Isabel Lara, said costs aren’t a
factor in NPR’s employment of temporary journalists.
NPR’s temps are guaranteed minimum wages under a contract with the Screen
Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
(SAG-AFTRA), the labor union that represents most employees. The pay scale
starts at around $21.63 an hour, or about $45,000 per year based on 52
weeks
of full-time work. Temporary employees also qualify for health insurance
and
other benefits if they work more than 30 hours per week in a two-week pay
period.
But not much else is assured for this group.
In interviews, eight current and former temps described their employment at
NPR as a stressful, precarious experience. Most spoke on the condition of
anonymity to not jeopardize current or future assignments.
Like Botero, several said they didn’t feel prepared for some of the
assignments they were given. They also described a sense of vulnerability
and insecurity, given that NPR maintains a large pools of temps who can
easily replace them.
“I felt like I could never make a mistake because, if I did, they’d just
hire someone else,” said a former employee, who temped for two years before
moving on. “I felt like I couldn’t take Christmas off, I can’t go to my
high
school reunion. Because if I do, I’ll be out of the loop.”
For temps who don’t land a longer work assignment, NPR’s system all but
guarantees financial uncertainty, several said. A week’s employment, for
example, might be followed by a longer, uncompensated layoff followed by
another call to return. A long stretch between assignments not only plays
havoc with a temp employee’s income, it also threatens to leave them with
gaps in their insurance coverage.
“There were many weeks when I wasn’t sure if I was coming back,” said Becky
Sullivan, who temped for 2½ years before becoming a permanent producer on
“All Things Considered.” Sullivan, who is a union shop steward, says, “It’s
an experience I hope I never have to repeat.”
Under the SAG-AFTRA contract, management can terminate a temporary employee
without cause, whenever necessary, and without explanation.
What’s more, NPR is under no obligation to offer a temp a permanent job,
even after years of employment. Some employees have been temps for so long
they’re known as “permatemps.”
One former temp said she spent three years in various jobs at “Morning
Edition,” “All Things Considered” and its weekend version before giving up
hope of landing a permanent position. Her responsibilities ran the gamut:
editing, research, pitching story ideas, writing segment introductions,
mixing recordings, doing interviews.
She applied for jobs when they came open, but never got hired permanently.
“At that point, I was really frustrated,” she said. “You ask yourself, Why
am I still doing this and no one will hire me?”
She left, and eventually landed a job as a producer at a podcasting
company.
Another temp described her frustrations to union organizers earlier this
year this way: “You feel like you have the boyfriend who’s never going to
put a ring on it.”
According to Sullivan, Mayor never responded directly to the group of temps
that made the recommendations in the wake of Oreskes’s forced resignation.
But Mayor said NPR has begun to implement a series of reforms to improve
the
lot of temps.
The most significant change: NPR in April converted 26 positions that had
been filled by temporary employees into permanent jobs (the union said all
of the positions were held by temps who’d be on the job for more than a
year). Mayor said more temp jobs will be made permanent in the future,
although she offered no commitment to a number or timetable.
NPR’s union representatives remain guarded, however. They note that during
bruising negotiations over a new three-year contract last year, NPR’s
management proposed eliminating all benefits for temps (except those
required by law), including health insurance and holiday pay. Those
proposals were withdrawn amid broad staff opposition.
Mayor says NPR’s goal is “not to eliminate the use of temps, but to make
sure we are employing temps for the right reasons.”
She added, “We are aware that it can be challenging for people to deal with
the insecurity temporary employment brings and we want to work with our
union to find ways to address this.”
Email This Page
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
