Employment Trends in the Communications and Media Industries

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund - July 2006

Introduction

For many Americans, the American dream includes membership in a vast middle class, a society in which the basic necessities of food, shelter, health care, and education are available to all, with enough left over for a comfortable life.

For years, as a result of 60 years of collective bargaining, the wired telecommunications carriers provided a path to middle class membership for workers, including women and minorities, by providing jobs to non-college graduates that afforded opportunities for training and advancement, decent wages and benefits, and basic workplace rights and representation.

However, significant changes affecting jobs and working conditions—including changes in both regulation and technology—have occurred in the telecommunications industry over the past two decades. At the same time, the concentration of control of media resources—including those relating to broadcast, cable, and print, as well as telecommunications—has had an impact on the diversity of employment and quality of jobs in these industries. If these trends continue, membership in the middle class for minority and female workers in these sectors may soon be a much more elusive dream.

While much has been written about the impact that a changed policy environment—most notably, the Telecommunications Act of 1996—has had on consumer prices and competition for service, little attention has been paid to the Act’s impact, if any, on employment, with a particular focus on women and minorities.

As policymakers consider legislative and regulatory changes in the communications and media industries, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund believes that issues of employment opportunity and economic security should be part of the debate.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund calls attention to a new study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), which can help inform this debate. It examines the effect that regulatory, industry, and technological changes are having on both the quality and quantity of jobs for women and minorities in the communications and media industries.

The study finds that despite the explosion in new information technologies, overall job growth in the communications and media sector has lagged behind job growth in the rest of the economy. Between 1990 and 2005, overall employment grew by 22 percent, but jobs in the communications and media sector grew by only 14 percent. Job growth in the “new” communications and media sectors of wireless, Internet service, and cable has not offset decline in the “old” wired telecommunications sector.

The study also finds that while other newer industries, such as wireless telecom and cable, are providing jobs for women and minorities, compensation in these industries lags far behind that in the wired telecom industry. Unionization plays a critical role here, bringing a significant earnings premium to workers. Wired telecom is significantly more unionized than the other communications and media industries, and pay is significantly higher in the wired telecom industry than in the wireless, cable/radio/TV, and Internet service sectors,. Cingular Wireless is the only union wireless company.

The report also finds that women and minorities in wired telecom, the most highly unionized sector, have the highest earnings. Yet, wage disparities by race and gender persist, with any narrowing of the race or gender pay gap seemingly due to lower white or male earnings rather than higher earnings for all demographic groups. Thus, the female/male and the minority/white pay gap appears wider in the highest paying sectors of wired and wireless telecom, than in the lowest paying sectors of radio/TV/cable broadcasting, newspaper publishing, and motion pictures/video.

In addition, the IWPR study examines the possible impact of the 1996 Telecommunications Act on employment. Minority employment represents a larger share of the growing, lower-paid cable and wireless industries than in the declining, higher paid wired telecommunications industry, raising concerns about the quality of minority employment as “new” technologies compete with the “old” telecommunications sector. Women’s share of all jobs declined in the gender segmented communications and media sectors during a period of time when women’s employment in the economy remained stable.

The study also finds that minorities and women – historically under-represented in the radio and television workforce - lost ground in the period of rapid media consolidation over the past decade. Based on an analysis of EEO data, the IWPR study reports that minority employment in radio and TV has trailed minority employment in the overall economy in every year since 1990, with the gap accelerating since passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. By 2002, minority employment in radio and TV was 9.7 percentage points lower than minority employment in the rest of the economy. Similarly, female employment in the cable industry has declined since passage of the 1996 Act.

These findings are consistent with the results of the annual Radio TV News Directors Association (RTDNA) annual survey of minority and female employment in radio and TV news. Since 1998, when the FCC weakened EEO rules and media ownership rules, the RTDNA survey found a 60 percent decline in the minority representation on radio news staff, while minority representation among TV news staff failed to keep pace with the rate of growth of minority workers in the overall economy. If Spanish-language news media are excluded from these numbers, the decline in the minority workforce in radio and TV news is all the more striking. Similarly, the proportion of women among radio news staff dropped by 33 percent over the 2001-2006 period.

Why This Data is Important

The IWPR report is directly relevant to how communications policy impacts core civil rights concerns. While the changing communications, media, and information environment has prompted much debate, little has been heard about the impact of these changes on jobs, working conditions, or diversity. The data presented by IWPR underscores the consequences of ignoring these issues, indicating that achieving the American dream may prove to be elusive for minority and female workers in the communications, information, and media industries.

Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights states, “The communications and media industries, as leading sectors of the 21^st century economy, should lead the way for minorities and women. Historically, high union rates in the wired telecommunications industry provided a path to the middle class for women and minorities, and all workers, in these sectors. Yet, employer resistance to unionization in the “new” telecom industries such as cable and Internet service threatens to undermine this progress. In the media industries, where the voice of minorities and women is so critical, we find growing concentration blocks that voice. This underscores the critical importance of strong media ownership rules.”

Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA notes, “Women and minorities bring different viewpoints to news and entertainment that is absolutely essential to our diverse democracy. Concentration of media ownership by corporate giants exacerbates the historic under-representation of women and minorities in our media industries. Preserving and expanding diversity of media ownership is absolutely critical to growing employment for women and minorities in the media industry.”

According to David Honig, executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, “Longitudinal data is vital to the understanding of employment trends. In the information industries, diversity should be increasing at a more rapid pace than in the nation’s heritage industries, with their long histories of grandfathered privilege. Yet relative to the rest of the economy, information sector employment diversity appears to be stagnant.”

What’s Missing—the Problem of Limited Data

It is important to acknowledge the limitations of existing data. The IWPR report notes that for the detailed industry and occupation analyses it has undertaken, sample sizes were sufficient to identify only two race/ethnicity categories: Non-Hispanic White and Minorities.

Karen K. Narasaki, president of the Asian American Justice Center, notes, “The fact that there is very limited data highlights a problem that we in the Asian American community often face with regard to data collection. Asian Americans are often lumped into the ‘other’ category or not reported at all. Limited and aggregated data mask the real problems. For an accurate picture of the current employment trends, detailed information is critical to ensuring equal opportunity in the communications industry.”

“Although the Latino workforce continues to be increasingly integral to the American economy, Latino labor remains concentrated in certain industries and vastly underrepresented in others,” says Shaheena Ahmad Simons, D.C. regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Complete and meaningful data will be essential to assessing this segregation, and to promoting the advancement of Latinos in fields such as the communications industry.”

Beyond the limitations regarding race/ethnicity data, data covering the disability community is lacking. Andrew Imparato, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), says, “Since there is no requirement to collect data affirmatively about persons with disabilities working in the television cable systems, such as is required for race and sex in Sec. 634 of the Communications Act, it is difficult to ascertain the employment situation for persons with disabilities in this industry. However, based on anecdotal reports, and the continuing overwhelmingly high levels of unemployment among persons with disabilities, AAPD believes that this industry could voluntarily take steps to hire more persons with disabilities. AAPD stands ready to assist the communications sector in this regard."

Policy Recommendations

LCCREF makes the following recommendations:

Support diversity in media ownership. Corporate media consolidation drives a focus on the bottom line rather than investment in quality journalism and entertainment. Cost-cutting reduces both the number and quality of jobs, with particularly negative impact on minorities. Weakening of ownership limits has led to massive consolidation in the radio, TV, and cable industries, with devastating impact on overall employment and minority and female employment in particular. Media consolidation threatens the very essence of our democracy that depends on the dissemination of diverse information and viewpoints from a variety of sources. Particularly threatened by media consolidation are media outlets oriented toward minorities and women. Preserving cable and broadcast ownership limits and the ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership is essential to maintain diversity, quality, and good jobs in the media sectors.
Support the right of workers to organize and bargaining collectively. Union organization and collective bargaining historically have secured a middle-class living standard and career opportunity for women and minorities in the communications, media, and information industries. Yet, employer opposition to union organization threatens to undermine this progress. The Employee Free Choice Act (S.842, H.R. 1696) will ensure that employees have the right to select union representation without experiencing intimidation, indoctrination or misinformation. As emerging technologies drive job growth in new sectors of the communications, media, and information industries, women and minorities will have the opportunity to join together to turn these jobs into high-quality jobs.
Strengthen equal employment opportunity reporting and enforcement. There have been dramatic decreases in minority employment in radio and television news over the past decade – reflecting the uncontestable fact that the FCC has virtually stopped enforcing its equal employment rules. Last year, there were only three very minor broadcast EEO decisions, and each of them was for a minor technical rule violation. In 2004, the FCC’s own Federal Advisory Committee on Diversity proposed stronger EEO rules aimed at job retention rather than just job recruitment; two years later, the FCC has still not responded to this recommendation.
Support and train women and minorities for non-traditional employment and career advancement. Gender and race-based occupational segmentation continue to characterize the communications, media, and information industries. Most technicians, engineers, and computer science professionals are men, and most customer service and clerical employees are women. Training programs, goals, and timetables to provide women and minorities opportunities to advance to the more highly-paid technical, engineering, and computer science positions will help overcome inequities based on gender- and race-based occupational segmentation.
Support career employment for communications and media workers. Outsourcing and offshoring undermine career opportunities for communications workers, leading to poor customer service and insecure telephone and Internet transaction. Legislation that requires service providers to tell customers where they are calling and to whom they are talking would protect customers and U.S. workers. Policymakers should also ensure that low-wage contractors and offshore companies do not receive tax breaks, government contracts, or other public subsidies, and that governments pay prevailing wages and benefits in their communications contracts. The growing use of temporary daily hires in the broadcasting industry undermines career employment and health and retirement security for workers.
Require EEO and detailed industry data collection. Good policy requires good information. From 1971 to 2000, TV and radio broadcasters and cable operators were required to provide detailed employment data by race and gender broken down by occupation to the Federal Communications Commission, and to make this information available in the public file in the local community. In 2001, on the flimsiest of grounds, the FCC ended its profoundly useful three-decade longitudinal survey of broadcast industry employment. Apparently, the FCC’s way of dealing with a loss of diversity in the nation’s most influential industries is to stop knowing anything about it. The data reporting requirement should be reinstated. In addition, the Census Bureau’s surveys should separately track data on the cable, TV, and radio sub-industry sectors.
Enforce strong service standards and consumer protections. Strong service standards and consumer protections continue to be necessary in a competitive environment to ensure that communications providers compete based on quality and services, not by cutting staff, network investment, and corporate standards.
Ensure a level regulatory playing field. With the convergence of voice, video, and data network platforms as well as information and entertainment production across multiple media outlets, policymakers must ensure that competition takes place based on service and technology, not reduced labor costs or through regulatory arbitrage.