Reuters journalists, who cover everything from Washington politics to global business to labor issues, now find themselves in the headlines for a contract dispute of their own.
At a time when print outlets and reporters’ jobs have been rapidly disappearing, the journalists at Reuters have been working for three years under an expired contract.
The common union-management fight over pension plans disappeared “long ago,” said Grant Glickson, president of the journalists’ NewsGuild CWA, “and health care we were able to deal with early on.”
They’re now down to fighting over the most basic benefit: the annual cost-of-living raise.
“It makes no sense to me,” said Glickson. “Thomson Reuters could settle this contract with very little money.”
Unlike many news organizations, Thomson Reuters has several sources of revenue beyond journalism, and according to the first-quarter report released April 28, the company increased its operating profit by 43% — from $310 million to $444 million.
Yet Thomson Reuters began negotiations by offering a 0% wage increase, Glickson said.
Instead of the standard guaranteed cost-of-living raises — usually between 3.5 and 4% annually, according to veteran reporter Steve Gorman — the company wants a system that gives managers discretion as to who gets a raise and how much it should be.
Thompson Reuters declined to comment when contacted by the Daily News.
But in internal documents obtained by The News, the company defended its “merit based” pay system. In a June 13 email, the company said “the merit based raise system enables us to reward people for exceptional performance … it has worked well for six years, delivering millions of dollars in inflation beating annual pay increases to most guild employees.”
The email also said the company had given the union an explanation of how its discretionary increases were determined and a history of how raises had been handed out in the past three years.
“We are ready to finish these negotiations and move forward,” the email concluded.
After months of pushback from the union, Thomson Reuters upped its offer to a 1% annual raise — taken from the collective “merit pool” that would be set aside to fund whatever other raises the company felt like doling out, The Guild said.
“It’s really like a slap in the face,” said Gorman, 58, a wire reporter based in Los Angeles who’s been with the company for more than 20 years.
As part of the national breaking news team, Gorman said, he’s expected to be on the move constantly, chasing big stories.
“When we have one of these major national events and it’s all hands on deck, we all work our brains out, and we even get a ‘herogram’ telling us all, ‘great job, great effort,'” he said. But the praise “just rings hollow because when it comes time to negotiate our pay, it’s ‘We can’t give you a raise.'”
Thomson Reuters was formed in 2008, when the financial information and software firm purchased the global wire and digital news service for $16 billion. The NewsGuild represented the company’s journalists when it was just Reuters and continued to negotiate their three-year contract deals with the new management.
But it quickly became clear it would not be easy.
It took the NewsGuild roughly three years to settle its prior contract with Thomson Reuters, which expired in 2014.
Thanks to an evergreen clause in that deal, the Reuters journalists are still protected by the terms of that contract.
But the clause didn’t cover the annual cost of living increases or other bonuses, said Dan Grebler, 68, an editor at Reuters for 34 years and a Guild unit chair.
That means some Reuters journalists have gone years with no increase, he said, while others have received a discretionary bump from management based on criteria unknown to the union or its members.
“It’s time to take the lid off this,” Grebler said, noting that the work of Reuters journalists has won the company prestigious awards and raised its profile far beyond what it had as a financial information firm.
“CEO Stephen Adler never misses an opportunity to praise the journalists and our work,” Grebler said. “But when it comes to guaranteeing the basic elements of a contract and our personal financial stability, (Adler) hasn’t been interested.”
Hilary Russ, a New York reporter covering public finance and municipal bonds, said Reuters staffers were getting fed up with the waiting game.
“Part of the mystery is, what’s taking so long?” she said. “I know the Guild has put out dates for different meetings and the company comes back and agrees to just one or two of them — the company doesn’t seem to be concerned by that.
“We’d like to see them come to the table soon, and with something real and legitimate — not something insulting. It seems so unprecedented to come to the table with zero.”
Thomson Reuters has always had the ability to hand out extra increases to certain reporters at will — on top of the guaranteed bumps in pay all workers got, and Glickson said there’s nothing the union is asking for now that would change that.
Andy Sullivan, a correspondent for Reuters TV, said there’s a lot that his employer is doing right — even amidst this labor struggle.
“I believe strongly in the company’s commitment to fact-based, impartial journalism, and I believe that the people at the top, like Adler, share those values as well,” Sullivan said. “That’s why it’s so disappointing that they’re expecting us to accept a pay package that’s a clear step backwards from what we had before.”
Sullivan, as a Washington-based correspondent, said he and his colleagues put in a lot of extra effort during the 2016 presidential election — and the first rapid-fire months of the Trump administration.
“In D.C., it’s been a crazy news year, they’ve asked us to work a lot more nights and weekends and we’ve done that without complaint because it’s such an extraordinary time …. We know it’s part of our job,” he said.
“But there’s a cost to this, more times away from family, more things missed.”
He also noted that many of his female colleagues covering the election run-up had to endure threats and harassment — especially online.
“The amount of abuse … was horrific, constant and vile. These women were really tough and brave … and they were on the campaign voluntarily,” he said. “They did an excellent job under really difficult circumstances, and now there’s not really any reward or recognition for it.”
