Some of you have already responded to my request for salary information. Thanks and I'm going to continue to gather for a couple weeks before I report the findings.
However, one person was quick to point out something I forgot.
In the past three years, there have been no raises for the staff at all. Instead of a raise, the company has gone to a 1 percent or 1.5 percent additional bonus at the beginning of each year.
As nice as that is, it does nothing to improve your eventual retirement calculations as those are based on your base salary.
There has been suspicion that editors and other higher ups have continued to be rewarded at a rate higher than the reporters. I don't mention that with any authority or actual information, but if you have that kind of information I would welcome that as well.
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In addition to the lump sum vs. step increase that the Journal implemented in recent years, I bet you'll also discover that the "new crop" of reporters is working demonstrably more hours per week.
So, Jim, if we use 160 hours as the "old" average work month w/o overtime and multiply that by 12, that's about 1,920 hours a year. With the 53rd week of pay your base at buyout was about $54K. Divide that by 1,920 hours and you get $28 an hour. If you work 2,000 hours, which takes into account a few five-week months, it's still almost $27 per hour.
Now let's take the "new" scale for new hires. Let's presume that Booth didn't buy out $54K/year employees only to bring in new $54K/year employees.
So let's say that the new rate is ... say ... about $23,000. And let's also assume that the new hires are working 50 hours a week, longer than the people they replaced. (Of course, they're salaried professionals, so there's no federal OT protections.) Divide 2,600 hours into $23,000 and you get $8.84 cents an hour, a buck or so more than minimum wage. Oh yeah, and that's pre-tax. On the bright side, these new employees might be eligible for food stamps.
In fact, maybe this is Booth's new family planning program -- as in, if you're planning to have a family, you better plan to moonlight at Fuddrucker's to pay for your Pampers.
Even at $30,000, a 50-hour-week nets out to $11.53 an hour -- still pretty paltry in the World of $5 Gas.
Here's hoping the new hires don't have college loans to pay off ... and let's also hope they didn't major in math. It might add up to one depressing story.
Well, Jim, a fine reporter known to both you and me who recently, happily,
left the employ of the Journal said that she was told by new reporters being
hired in for the paper's weeklies that they were making $12 an hour. Don't
give up your Walmart jobs, kids, and see if you can get a few shifts per
week slinging hash or waiting tables at the local Coney!
I spent my adult life as a reporter for the Journal, and by the end of it I
was making mid-50sk. Can you imagine, we worked all our lives to get to the
average American salary of a person with a four-year degree -- the average!
Of course, we did it because we enjoyed it, we worked for a reasonably
professional organization that had (used to have) resources --
photographers, artists, librarians, designers, a couple of editors who
actually knew what they were doing and a staff that was large enough,
experienced and sophisticated enough to be able to cover the news and
develop decent longer range stories without being completely worked to
death. You would work hard, but you didn't mind because you were treated
fairly, most of the time.
But all that's gone, gone, gone.
Let's face it, professional reporting by anybody approaching middle age is
going to join the dinosaur on the ashdump of failed species history.
Reporting will be something practiced by college kids and interns who will
do it for a couple of years while they decide what they want to do when they
grow up.
Rufus T. Firefly
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