I previously published a history of the court reporter and captioning jobs summary provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show our median pay was falling despite the demand claimed by the fraudsters I call the STTI Bloc.
I later published that BLS statistics on our field may be unreliable.
Well, today I would like to share this.
I’m just not quite sure how to interpret things anymore. If you glance back at the median pay article the jobs and job outlook were all over the place. At face value this would indicate a loss of 3,800 jobs over 2 years — which is over a tenth of our field even by the rosiest estimates in existence (~30,000). That would mean either a tenth of our field went jobless and nobody’s talking about it, a tenth of our field retired in two years and those jobs evaporated with them, or…. maybe it’s all just bullshit and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is worthless. Can we get the Department of Government Efficiency over here? (Joke).
But for the sake of truthseeking, look at this infographic I pulled from old STTI materials.
So even using the fraudsters’ materials, coupled with the BLS statistics, there should be enough stenographers to cover just about every courtroom vacancy in this country up until 2028.
Yeah, you read that correctly.
The bottom line is none of this adds up to me. If it does to you, I want your comment. Because quite frankly if this is accurate we are lying to our students when we tell them there will be a job for them, and that is something I will never take part in.
I once again must point to our media and messaging. I know my methods are unorthodox, but ask yourself who killed the Speech-to-Text Institute? Private people like me or Trey Perez. Where are you getting this information from? Me. Doesn’t this seem like the kind of thing your National Court Reporters Association should be talking about? You pay an executive director hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to charm you and you pay me a couple grand in a good year to bring you the facts and the hard takes and do the publishing work that everyone else is terrified to do — Steno Imperium excepted! Maybe if I had hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, given my track record for caring about people that I’ll never know, your page rates would be higher and your companies would be off your asses when it came to the ridiculous deadlines and expectations they sometimes have. Maybe the good companies that don’t break the law would win investors and expand to swallow the big box brigade of today.
And maybe you just trust and have faith that everything will work out and be okay. And I guess that’s fine. But just remember that if all of us have your attitude, the people running the show can cut you at any time for any reason, and you’ll be met with the same apathy. Too bad, so sad, good luck.
Would that I could be capable of being so blind.