Category Archives: 2020-2024 contract negotiations

Members of the Indianapolis News Guild held a funeral service on Wednesday to memorialize their collective bargaining agreement, which expired September 1, 2020.

They gathered in the newsroom dressed in black and took turns sharing eulogies, accompanied by bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.” Below the photo gallery, the Guild’s contract is memorialized in an obituary written by Guild vice president Binghui Huang.

As the two year anniversary of the contract’s expiration approaches, the Guild continues to push for a fair contract for journalists at IndyStar.

In loving memory…

The Indianapolis News Guild contract, of Indianapolis, died on September 1, 2020.

Born out of the hard work and desire for a safe and happy workplace, the contract lived a hard life. She was held back from achieving her full potential by Gannett, the parent company of the IndyStar employees she represented.

All she ever wanted was to protect IndyStar journalists from unfair treatment, ensure they were paid fairly and equitably, provide lifesaving health care and give them a voice in making decisions about their work lives. 

But at a young age, Gannett started to strip away her power.

She watched as the company forced pay cuts. She watched as part of her work, work that was rightfully hers, was later transferred to a new “digital optimization team.”

A few years before her death, the healthcare insurance she provided was taken away, which meant some journalists had to pay thousands more annually for insurance. She never recovered from that. 

As journalists fought to keep her strong, the company sought to gut her more. As she was weakened, so was the newsroom, its journalism and the public accountability that Indianapolis desperately needed. 

We mourn your expiration, contract. 

You ensured we were paid a bare minimum. You gave us some control over our schedules. You made it easier to work this stressful job and have a family. You made sure we had a voice when things changed, as they inevitably do. You made sure we were treated fairly. 

We look forward to the day when a new contract is ratified in your honor.

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We have a special anniversary coming up.

In just over a month, our contract will be 2 years expired.

Gannett has been slow to come to the table, and has, at times, come unprepared despite having many months to prepare. Our guild has attempted to move toward the company with its proposals, with little movement from Gannett.

While the company has yet to respond to our economics-related proposals to increase pay for reporters and photographers, and bring our pay scales up-to-date, the company’s response to salary proposals made by the Arizona Republic Guild, for example, has been discouraging.

We will no longer be silent.

Today, our members are dressed in styles from past decades to draw attention to the woefully outdated pay scales in our contract. Forget recent record inflation — these minimum pay requirements haven’t been updated in years.

The minimum salary in our current pay scale is $32,000, which is tens of thousands of dollars lower than the median income in Indiana. To account for inflation alone, that number should be at least $40,000.  

Meanwhile, Gannett’s CEO Mike Reed brought home $7.74 million in 2021.

We think some things should stay in the 2000s — low-rise jeans, crimped hair, Nickelback’s music… and most importantly, our pay scales. We’re telling Gannett to get with the times.

The Indianapolis Newspaper Guild, which represents 45 front-line journalists and workers in the IndyStar newsroom and production plant, is fighting to create a better and safer workplace.  But in contract negotiations with IndyStar’s parent company, Gannett, management has refused to acknowledge our very real concerns about inequities in our newsroom; the potential erosion of local journalism expertise; and the risks and dangers associated with our work during a pandemic.   

On Tuesday afternoon, IndyStar employees took a 10-minute break to collectively storm Twitter and explain why this contract proposal is so important. We will meet at the virtual table with Gannett again Wednesday. These are our demands:

Build a more diverse workforce. Gannett pledged newsrooms would represent our communities by 2025. We’re holding them accountable. 

We want to close wage gaps between white employees and employees of color, and between male and female employees. We want Gannett to commit to considering  members of underrepresented groups when hiring, and to work to retain them by creating a mentorship program to help new employees thrive. We’ve also asked for a pay study, in part, to confirm the discrepancies we have discovered in our own analysis.

In response to our requests so far, the company argued pay studies don’t work. Any difference in wages is due to market forces, the company says, not decades of systemic racism or sexism. 

Publicly, Gannett committed to creating a more diverse newsroom. It’s time to follow through on that promise. Representation matters. Diversity and inclusion should be a priority as IndyStar works to gain the trust of our Black, Latino and LGBTQ and all underrepresented communities we serve. 

Commit to local journalists with expertise. 

It can take years for a local journalist to develop the skills, sourcing and knowledge that our community demands of us. We are asking for a defined process for the times when management reassigns journalists from their positions. Sometimes they are even asked to take on jobs they have never been trained for. Our community expects better from us. 

We are also fighting to keep our journalism in local hands. The company is creating a Midwest Digital Optimization Team (DOT). Gannett has not clearly defined what tasks the DOT would perform, but job descriptions for its employees overlap with some of the duties of our newsroom digital producers. This puts their jobs at risk. We saw a similar process play out when Gannett slashed numerous local design and editing jobs in the past.

Digital producers live, work and play in Central Indiana. They are Hoosiers like you. They keep track of the content you want to read. They write the personalized newsletters you love and find in your inbox every week. They give you a bird’s eye view of Indianapolis when needed as certified drone pilots. They send you weather, sports, traffic and other breaking news alerts and much more. And their jobs should remain local. 

We deserve to feel safe, especially during a pandemic.

Many of our journalists continue to work on risky  assignments despite the dangers associated with the ongoing pandemic. Some of us are considered at-risk. Earlier this year, many of us also covered events this year where pepper gas and riot gear were used. 

All we’re asking for is to feel safe. We’re requesting basic employee rights to consider the safety of an assignment, and to receive a small amount of hazard pay when our committed journalists still dive into those conditions as we’ve routinely done in the past.  It’s only fair.

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