Former Tampa Trib sports writer suing Media General

Media General does a great job of making their employees feel like the lowest form of scum possible.

 

Especially in this industry, working the extra hours isn't going to 'improve your station in life'. And there is really no place to move up nowadays anyways.

The only thing that you are doing in working unpaid overtime is having money taken out of your pocket and put in the corporate's.

 

Everybody in this business should log all of their own hours, even if you tell nobody that you're doing it.

When I got bought out/let go, I got a few weeks of extra severance because I went to them with a notebook and was able to document how much I had worked and that I was entitled to extra "comp time"

When I did that, the ME said, "Well, you're probably counting 24 hours for any day when you were on the road."

I flipped open my book to the last road trip of the season which said, "30 minutes drive to airport. five hours travel time, wrote story on plane, 45 minute cab to hotel, six hours and 15 minutes total."

Every beat writer in the country should be doing this. Everybody at my old shop did it because they had fucked over a couple people.

Papers are scared to death of it because they're labor practices are and always have been illegal for anyone who covers a beat.

 

I want to see a paper where none of the beat writers are working more than 40 hours a week.

Unless your paper is overstaffed (yeah, right...) there's no way it happens.

 

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!

I can't believe that anyone, despite all evidence to the contrary, believes that working for free illegally is somehow going to save their career.

There's plenty of people on this site who have been burned by that, but at least they had the excuse of not having all those examples in front of them proving it wrong.

 

Anyone working in that environment should be begging to get fired. They'd own the place after the lawsuit.

 

I never minded the hours. I always thought it was worth it if they honored the comp time during the off-season. Most of the places I worked were usually pretty good about it. I did get fucked when I switched beats one year, but it was worth it to get as far away from covering baseball as possible.

 

Like most of us on here, I once fell into the category of "comp timed" employees. My last shop -- which by all accounts was pretty good in taking care of me -- eliminated OT a few months after I originally started. A while later, when I left, I had so much comp time stored up that I had nearly all of my regular vacation days left and some of my comp days, and that was the same week the team I covered was starting fall camp. Needless to say, had I stayed, I would have rolled comp days into the next year because I would have racked up more during football season.

I say all this because I'm surprised at some of the peoples' tones on here. A guy who worked along side of us and finally stood up to one of the practices that led to newspapers' downfall is getting a lack of support from people he could eventually help.

How many full-timers would not burn out if they got the help they deserved? How better would the stories be? How many more people would read (and potentially pay) for the content?

Nothing is ideal in suing your former employer, but this is a case that could help out a lot of folks here who are still in the daily grind. You guys should be happy that this dude is going to do a lot of other peoples' dirty work for them. Instead, people are further defending the industry that turned off a lot of people to wanting to be a part of.

Statements like "He should be happy to have a job," and "He should just work his 60-hour weeks and be fine with it," are simply ridiculous.

 

I have to think MG battles this hard - lose it, and you open the door to hundreds of similar lawsuits. When I was hourly, there was an understood difference between the overtime you actually worked and the overtime you put on your timecard.

Fall for a college football writer is months without "weekends" or "days off," but at same time I find it hard to believe that most college football writers log 40-hour weeks in May and June ...

 

They won't let it get that far. They'll throw a few grand at McMurphy and settle it.

I'd love it if he fought them, but I don't blame him for a second if he doesn't. We're all just trying to survive.

 

I'd think that MG would probably settle this very quietly, in the hopes that other employees don't hear about it and get the same idea.

 

I can promise you that other employees are hearing about it.