Rail workers, dockers and barristers are all striking, as are journalists, including some working on newspapers that traditionally take a dim view of strike action. Editorial meetings must be interesting there.
Employers complain of reasonable pay offers being rejected although any offer which is below the rate of inflation, which they all are, is arguably a pay cut.
In the next issue of InPublishing magazine, the NUJ’s Tim Dawson laments journalists’ poor pay. Without wanting to steal his thunder, he points out that journalists get paid dramatically less than comparable occupations.
He references a 2019 NCTJ survey of people who had completed its diploma three years earlier. Only 66% were still in journalism-related jobs.
“Similar analysis of teaching and nursing careers show a significantly higher retention three years post-qualification,” he wrote.
So meagre is pay, he says, that many journalists are too embarrassed to disclose their incomes.
This is not good. If content is king, then we must not pay those who create it like paupers.
The UK and the US are in an interesting place right now. Decades of legislation to limit union power allied to light-touch regulation has allowed pay differentials to spiral.
In January, Rupert Neate, the Guardian’s wealth correspondent reported: “FTSE 100 chief executives were paid £2.7m on average in 2020 (the latest full-year figures available), which works out at 86 times the £31,285 average salary for full-time UK workers, according to Office for National Statistics figures.”
I’m all for senior management being paid very well, but 86 times?
The economics of publishing might need revisiting. Yes, top people need to be paid well; yes, shareholders need their dividend; but when dividing up the pot, the starting assumption should be that the people who create the content upon which the business is based need to be paid a competitive wage.
That’s not unreasonable.
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