As a media educator and former print journalist, I am very sensitive to how press covers issues. This is the first time, however, that I feel compelled to speak publicly about an issue of bias.
I continue to be appalled at how thoughtlessly much of the media portrays the compensation earned by autoworkers and others represented by unions. Today's nytimes.com, for instance, reports that "U.A.W. Deal Cuts Hourly Rate to $55" in its headline. It's not until the bottom of the second paragraph that the article explains that the total includes the cost of benefits. Also consider "Ford-UAW deal cuts wages to $55 an hour," a Reuters article that appears today on washingtonpost.com. Reports of a $55-an-hour wage perpetuate the myth of the American autoworker as overpaid. This inflated calculation is extremely prejudicial during times of economic hardship and it unfairly makes these workers sound spoiled and greedy.
More after the break.
Although several commentators, including a few on these pages, addressed the unfairness of MSM coverage of UAW members during the bailout hearings before Congress last fall, I would like to enlarge the discussion to include a critique of the implicit double standard implied by this coverage.
The double standard to which I refer involves treating the hourly wages of "blue-collar" workers very differently than those of "white-collar" workers. What "white-collar" workers include their benefits totals when discussing their annual salaries? I know my salary as a college professor would look much more generous if I added in my benefits. I also know that if I tried to report that new total as income on, say, a home loan application, I would be accused of fraud, and rightly so. Most of the journalists who report on the auto industry bailout are salaried workers, and I am fairly certain that they do not factor in employer-paid benefits when reporting their pay on job applications or credit histories. So why do these same journalists uncritically report these totals for their "blue-collar" counterparts? Don't they realize that a $55-an-hour wage is much more out of line with the expectations of a typical American worker (regardless of "collar color") than, say, a $35-an-hour wage? Granted, a story may go on to explain that the reported total includes benefits. But does this explanation provide a fair balance to the $55-an-hour sticker shock in the headline? I don't think so.
If journalists were to leave benefits out of the equation, what would the autoworkers' hourly wage be? I did a little research on the Web, and, although I didn't find an exact figure for the workers at Ford, I did come up with some numbers that may provide an approximate answer. According to a December 2008 report from the US Bureau of Labor statistics (view the .pdf here), a little more than 30 percent of a private sector worker's total compensation is in benefits: insurance, workers compensation, social security, medicare, etc. According to US labor data compiled by the UAW last month, the benefits portion of a unionized worker in "goods-producing" industries is even higher, around 40 percent (view the report in .pdf). That amounts to $22 out of the $55 hourly wage that Ford workers will earn under their agreed pay cuts. Sans benefits, the pay would be $33 an hour, which sounds a lot more in line with what many middle class Americans bring home in their paychecks (those who are lucky enough to have jobs, anyway).
I believe the press has an obligation to report wage and salary information consistently for all types of workers and that reports should remain critical in evaluating salary data. Someone needs to develop a set of standards for dealing with this type of information. Ideas?