I am a journalism student who has been “lucky” enough to get a few opportunities in real newsrooms. I started at a student-led organization, moved to the city level, and got on with a website or two. The school paid slave wages. The daily city paper paid $11 an hour. The graphic designer I sat next to at that job had been working there for over ten years and had barely gotten a $2 raise from $11 an hour to $13.10 an hour. The unpopular website expected me to work for free.
Most recently, I transferred universities and secured a job at a paper half an hour away from my home. I was excited by the opportunity. Most of my experience is in writing, but they brought me on as an advertising account executive. I learned that, in this position, I would get $12 an hour base pay plus commission. Any other position would pay significantly less in the long run. Advertising account executives go to school for just as long as journalists AND sales requires a lot less skill than writing and editing, which is what news is supposed to be about, yet the writers and editors are paid significantly less than the people who sort and sale unoriginal content?
When I got to work on my first day, I had a stack of paperwork waiting for me. In the employee handbook, I found in their policy the following: Employees are not to discuss pay with other employees. Employees do not know nor could they understand the various aspects that go into determining one’s pay. Failure to comply will result in discipline including and up to termination.
As many of you probably already know, that is an illegal policy. It has been reported to the National Labor Relations Board and they are on the job. The reason behind this policy is not only to make it easier for them to discriminate against their own employees, but it makes the nepotism they already have going on much more easy to hide.
There was no plan to train me on my first day. When I finished with the paperwork, I was made to sit in on a pointless, hour-long meeting with the head editor who had the tendency to repeat the exact same words in the exact same pattern as if we weren’t giving him our full attention the entire time.
I got one hour of job-related instruction from my manager before I was made to sit in the newsroom. The news editor was supposed to be showing me things while my manager went to her lunch break but all he showed me was that the company is too cheap to upgrade from Quark to InDesign. Their content writer quit so they had a presumably unpaid high school intern filling in (despite being very close to several universities).
When the classifieds person came back from break, she had the weird, out-of-nowhere idea to tell me not to work for Dial America or any other telemarketing company in my area. Somehow, the conversation went to high turnover in my position. They said the last girl simply never came back after her lunch break. The one before her lived less than 20 minutes away, which was too far of a drive for him. When I had told them I had driven from Athens, they looked at me funny.
I guess I never did the math as to how much gas I was wasting getting to and from the job alone. It was in my career field and I’ve been commuting half an hour for over five years so I hadn’t thought anything of it but they made me completely reconsider. I’m terrified that I’m working towards a degree that will land me in an overworked, underpaid, and unrecognized profession.