Digital Pay Parity Would End The Shortage

I’ve had quite a journey over the years in terms of my mindset when it comes to digital recording. At one time I was completely against it, as many in my audience are and will be. I saw it as taking jobs from stenographers, and to some degree, I still do.

But I grapple with certain realities. Reality, the big boxes are calling digital realtime. Reality, Veritext advertised for digital pretty much every day for two or three years by my count. Reality, the people that lend large corporations money want digital because they believe it will increase the bottom line. Sorry for not linking sources, but trust me when I say it’s all been covered on this blog ad nauseam. Conclusion, barring some massive change in my funding, there’s nothing I can do to “stop digital.”

For me, the question becomes what I can do to improve the outcomes of our stenography students. And hilariously, it turns out that advocating for digital pay parity would do just that. Facts are facts, the average stenographer is more efficient and better trained — our communities online and off assure that. If the companies are paying the same, suddenly there’s no more incentive to prioritize the digital. All the time, money, and energy spent by the corporations to promote digital is wasted, and eventually, the lenders stop lending to the big guys altogether, effectively killing big boxes, or the lenders get on board with us, at which point the money is behind us, and we might see a revival of the field in terms of new businesses and schools for stenographers.

One of the saddest things about this realization is the concurrent realization that so many of us are ignorant to these market realities. We seem to have two major camps in steno. Toxic positivity and anti-digital. Neither camp really cares about or accounts for the market realities I’ve made plain. Toxic positivity is happy to do our outreach and bring evermore stenographers into the market without realizing or caring that their opportunities are being systematically eliminated. Anti-digital is happy to dehumanize and deride the digital reporters, never acknowledging that by doing so we play directly into the hands of the corporate powers that want us to compete with each other.

And make no mistake, the corporate players do account for, and firmly understand, market realities. This puts them at a constant advantage. Someone like me can liaise with lawyers and spread information about the benefits of unionization, but unless the message carries, we all remain at a disadvantage because we are decentralized, and at the end of the day, easy to control, herd, predict, and take advantage of.

My world view has been shattered over the years. I believed that people armed with information would make the right choices. The simple truth is people prefer their delusions and comforts. Many of you reading will chant “I am irreplaceable” right up until you are replaced, and possibly thereafter. For what little it’s worth, I tried to help, and the writers and readers of this blog did a lot with so little.

Trust me when I say that if the funding situation ever changes, our communities will thrive.

Perhaps there’s a silver lining for me. Free of my own delusion that people are better than they are, I get to prepare my son better for the world.

Reader, we’ve come a long way together.

Never lose hope.

But always have a backup plan.