I wrote a month or two ago that the Asheville Citizen-Times was moving toward a system to install a time clock and have hourly workers start punching the clock. I was wrong. It’s a thumb clock.
We’re living in a digital age now, so Citizen-Times hourly employees simply press a thumb up against a pad to clock in and out.
What does this mean for employees? Well: Want to go outside and smoke a cig? Push your thumb to the pad on your way. Eating lunch? Give ’em the thumb. Need to run down to the bank? Yeah, you know the drill.
In the newspaper business, editors are almost exclusively salaried employees — they work hard and long hours, regardless of the time put it. But reporters are almost exclusively paid by the hour. When I came up in the journalism world, most good reporters I knew rarely worried about time. The work was viewed as a creative endeavor, and you did it because you loved it, and not for the pay.
If you wanted to put extra work into crafting a story, you did, and you didn’t worry about the hours. Now if there was a breaking news event, or an editor asked you to stay late for some reason, you recorded that. Because any reporter worth her salt knew that overtime pay was sweet, sweet pay.
Most of the time, things worked out. If a reporter stayed late one night on a story, he knew he could leave a couple of hours early the next day. That works fine when everyone participates, but it leaves some room for abuse. Here’s a hypothetical: management demands more and more work from reporters, while stating outright that no overtime will be paid. That’s a formula for disaster.
Federal wage and hour officials have long kept their eyes on the newspaper industry because of that potential for abuse. I’ve worked for two newspapers that were investigated for wage and hour law abuse, and those newspaper were forced to pay thousands of dollars in back pay to reporters.
The thumb clock is yet another indication of how desperate newspapers are for any and all cost-cutting measures. And as I’ve said before, it demeans journalists. Journalism is a profession, a calling, (at least it should be), not assembly line drudgery.
2 Comments
Just saw this one, Ash! Yeah, I really hate that thumb clock!! I loved the freedom of journalism when I got into it and the clock makes me feel like an unvalued peon. On the other hand, I’m afraid to move up the ranks for fear of being laid off. You’re right – journalism is a creative endeavor and a profession that most of us do because we love it. To stick us on an actual clock makes us feel less like loving what we do and more like a blue-collar factory worker (no offense to the workers out there.)
Wow.