Long ago I wrote of the shortage fraud and how Speech-to-Text Institute was exaggerating and exacerbating the shortage, making it seem like it was impossible to solve while focusing business owners toward digital reporting.
The message got lost. Many believed I was saying there was no shortage. Untrue. I admit, and continue to admit, there are localized shortages. There are also surpluses in some places. The state of the industry is so state specific, and region specific, that it is impossible to make a blanket statement that is wholly accurate.
But what I would like people to understand is that the end of the retirement cliff (2033) is not the end of our problems. It is a new beginning to a whole new problem.
You see, as it stands, our stenographic retirements are being eaten up by steno, voice, digital, and some AI. We’re basically dividing the retirements four ways. That means fewer stenographers. That means associations that rely on stenographers funding them will face a choice: Convert or die. Our political power as stenographers alone, independent of the other two major methods, will be diluted. We will be forced to work together or watch what we have built collapse.
Now, please note, I am hoping National Court Reporters Association members are super stubborn and continue to vote no on allowing voice writers and digitals, because an organization that lies to its members and acts against their best interests deserves to collapse. A cowardly, ineffective, and pathetic organization, that is too inert to even address the allegation that it lied to its members over the course of decades, let alone lead the way for the working reporter.
Regardless of what happens there, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts zero growth, which means that our field’s demand is entirely supported by the retirements. Retirements that will stop surging in 2033. Retirements that are being eaten up by four different methods of speech-to-text transcription. Retirements that have caused a wave of recruiting that the field had not seen in at least 30 years.
Many of those recruits will not have jobs.
We will go from shortage to glut. Agencies will have all the leverage to withhold work from people who don’t play by their rules. The individual reporter will have far less power over their own destiny. The associations do not have a legal structure that allows them to do anything about this.
I’m working on my unionization proposal. I’ve kinda sorta laid out my idea for rolling Stenonymous into a media company that plays rough with the people that are about to steamroll court reporters and their wages. In the end, if people want to keep giving NCRA millions of dollars over many years to lie to them, I can’t stop that.
I’ve made peace with not getting my way.
But I still hold out some hope that together we can stop what I have predicted from coming to pass.