There was a Reuters article on this that was stupidly political, so I’m going to use an HR website.
This was an issue that the National Court Reporters Association urged people to submit feedback against. As some will remember, I disagreed with the organization, because it was wrong on this one. Maybe that should give everyone pause because I’m a 33-year-old man who reads the law for fun and they’re a national association that I thought had people with legal training on the payroll. But, hey, it’s cool.
It boils down to the idea that employers cannot contract out their labor force. The government failed to enforce the law in any meaningful fashion for a long, long time, and industries like ours suffered because of that.
You’re either going to read about this or you’re not. I encourage you to. It impacts a good 70% of us and gives incredible weight to the plan I unveiled to unionize deposition reporters in New York City.
Hey, Big Box, how do you plan to get out of bullet five if court reporters ever start exercising their rights?
“Some things are worth fighting for. Some feelings never die.”
So now they have incentive to go digital
Digitals would be employees too and can just as easily be unionized. So you can take your scare tactics elsewhere.
I think it’s difficult to organize digitals just as freelance translators in the US have never been successfully unionized despite a very similar relationship to translation agencies. But the freelancers of any stripe are isolated and separated and rarely meet up anywhere except online where it’s impossible to tell who’s listening. The main difference, I think, is that everyone believes they can translate, but most people wouldn’t believe they can serve as a court reporter without any training (and maybe not even then).
I see your point. And I agree that things are difficult. But I do think that, with today’s tech, just about anything is possible.
But people have to want it. They have to try. Will they try?
One of life’s mysteries.