Laura Slattery: 2022 was the year when even journalists went on strike

It made for an unusual sight: a crowd of striking employees of the New York Times holding placards reading “fair wages”, “all the news not fit to print” and “honk if you love unions” outside its midtown Manhattan skyscraper.

Aside from a 6½-hour downing of tools in 1981, a stoppage like this hadn’t shut down its newsroom since the 1970s.

But because this isn’t the 1970s, there was also a “digital picket line”, with subscribers asked to ignore online links, skip the crossword and break their Wordle streaks.

Notably, last Thursday’s 24-hour strike action at one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers hasn’t been the only walkout in the news media this year.

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Irish staff of British news publisher Reach – owner of the Irish Daily Mirror, Irish Sunday Mirror and Irish Daily Star – were among some 1,150 employees who went on strike on the last day of August, calling for “fair pay now”.

But industrial relations in the media don’t regularly proceed to full-scale industrial action – or, at least, they haven’t much in recent decades. This is especially true at the newspaper end of the business, where realistic hope for more favourable pay and conditions has been suppressed by an overwhelming sense of resignation that things can only get worse.

These strikes are about more than just a fall in real wages. They’re also about working conditions for those who cling on to the jobs they still love while colleagues are forced to depart for higher-paying industries

Still, the New York Times is meant to be, if not immune, then certainly less exposed to the vulnerabilities that have swept through other news publishers not blessed with its immense scale.

Its strike action, like the now settled Reach one, revolves around the pursuit of better pay and conditions, as most strikes do. But “better” doesn’t necessarily signal better than what workers have at the moment, as sky-high inflation means wages have declined and will continue to decline in real terms. It just means better than management’s first proposal.

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The two strikes share another common catalyst: the knowledge that the company’s paltry offer is that bit paltrier compared to the bumper remuneration packages taken home by top executives.

Alongside the “we know what we’re worth” signs carried by some of the 1,100-plus members of the NewsGuild of New York on strike last week, there was another message: “the corporate greed we expose shouldn’t be our own.”

Two years without a pay rise was even more galling because chairman and publisher AG Sulzberger’s package increased 50 per cent to $3.6 million (€3.4 million) in 2021, while chief executive Meredith Kopit Levin’s pay swelled from $4.4 million to $5.8 million.

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Irish Times Current Affairs Editor Arthur Beesley joins Ciarán Hancock to discuss the recent spike in applications by wealthy Chinese citizens to the Immigrant Investor Programme. The scheme allows applicants, with a minimum net worth of €2 million, to obtain residency in the State, if they invest in the Irish economy. With the number of applications almost tripling in the first nine months of the year, speculation is mounting that the scheme could be closed off. Later on, we hear from Economics Correspondent Cliff Taylor who discusses how rising interest rates, coupled with a slowdown in construction are impacting the housing market.

“Hey AG and Meredith, when do we get a piece of the pie?” read one picket-line poster next to images culled from a pie-tastic New York Times article. An open letter to readers cited its projected annual operating profit of at least $320 million and recent approval of $150 million in stock buy-backs to investors.

At Reach, where average pay is somewhat lower than it is at the “Gray Lady”, it wasn’t just chief executive Jim Mullen’s £4 million (€4.6 million) pay package that proved incendiary, it was the perception of “breathtaking” hypocrisy.

In June, a front-page Daily Mirror splash on “fat-cat” pay attacked five chief executives at companies facing strikes, including Network Rail and Royal Mail, for earning up to 86 times their average workers’ pay. Awkwardly, as the National Union of Journalists pointed out, Mullen’s pay package was 107 times that of the average Reach worker.

Reach’s corporate policy wasn’t just “a bit rich”, in the union’s view, it was eroding the credibility of the Mirror’s “voice of working people” editorial line.

The subsequently struck pay deal was a clear improvement on the original 3 per cent offer, with “significant pay rises” agreed for more than 700 journalists, while the company also agreed to work with the NUJ to develop collective bargaining processes in the Republic.

Nevertheless, the unrest at the New York Times and Reach is not quite typical of the media industry in 2022, with employees at many unionised workplaces accepting below-inflation offers on the grounds that employers coping with both non-labour costs woes and structural decline are frankly never going to keep pace with this year’s surge in the cost of living.

Members of the RTÉ Trade Union Group, for example, are now voting in a ballot on a proposed 6 per cent pay increase over two years. If accepted, RTÉ employees will receive a 3 per cent increase in January 2023, a 1.5 per cent increase in October 2023 and a 1.5 per cent in April 2024, supplemented by a non-taxable voucher of up to €1,000 in early 2023 and a €500 voucher in January 2024.

Amid a glut of content in the online age, some consumers may simply be bemused by the idea of journalists going on strike.

The deal on the table falls short of the 9.5 per cent pay increase that unions sought. It is also below the rate of inflation, which the Government forecast in September to clock in at 7 per cent in 2023 after an 8.5 per cent rise in consumer prices this year.

But it will also be the first pay increase at RTÉ in 16 years, which makes it more rather than less likely to be accepted, and seems to be about as good as it gets across much of the Irish media sector these days.

As journalism students learn, “it doesn’t happen every day” amplifies the level of coverage bestowed upon a story, but so too can “oh, now, it’s happening everywhere, every day”.

This year’s newspaper walkouts tick both boxes, being outliers in their own sector yet part of a pattern of strikes in the UK and the US across a vast breadth of industries.

These strikes are about more than just a fall in real wages. They’re also about working conditions for those who cling on to the jobs they still love while colleagues are forced to depart for higher-paying industries.

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Just as striking health and transport workers highlight the impact of overstretched systems on public safety, media workers can argue that a deterioration in newsroom resources helps misinformation to flourish.

But the cause-and-effect is harder to prove, and political pressure on employers to reopen negotiations will be slight at best. Amid a glut of content in the online age, some consumers may simply be bemused by the idea of journalists going on strike.

This means news media picket lines, digital or otherwise, will likely remain sporadic even as strike momentum gathers elsewhere. The industry will be marked less by flashpoints than it is by slow, quiet attrition.