Tag: CSR board

California CSR Board: We’re Going to Violate the Law and Sweep It Under the Rug. You Cool With That?

Came to my attention that under 2422 California test takers were allowed to review their dictation licensing test. At least one source has stated that since 2020, CSR candidates have not been entitled to review their test.

Since the CA CSR Board has been violating the law for at least four years, they’ve decided to correct that by changing the rules so that they simply won’t allow people to review their test. Ana Fatima Costa is spearheading some activism related to this. Allowing our students to review errors can only improve pass rates. If you want to help, go take a look now. This is really something that you want all your state legislators and the people on Ana’s list to be looking at, because it’s a good example of how government should not be doing its business. It’s shady. I’ll demonstrate how:

Word on the street is that this is about preventing cheating. Oh, I’m glad that we’re worried about cheating suddenly after all these decades and not the alleged shortage of doom that allegedly requires the wholesale replacement of stenographic court reporters with digital court reporters. It’s not our fault you only have 20 tests in the vault and can’t be bothered to periodically write more. Sounds like you manufactured a problem to get a desired result, at least to anyone that thinks about it for more than five seconds.

The CA CSR Board is the poster child for my corruption arguments. Let’s put it this way: If the Board is 100% uncorrupted, they’ve done everything in their power to look as dirty as possible. The CA CSR Board is known for failing to protect consumers and crushing working people. If you’re using all of your regulatory power, authority, and trust to make it harder for us to license actual court reporters, laying down the law on solo practitioners, and hurriedly looking away when the multiverse of corporate America breaks the law by using digital, then you are effectively handicapping our side of the market and the motivations for that become fair game for discussion. Yeah, I get it, it’s pretty lucrative for the government to ignore these things, let these businesses spend some money trying their luck at taking that work off the plates of California CSRs using the companies’ illegal business models, and take a slice every time a dollar gets spent in that competition while simultaneously milking the CSRs for their dues. Does that make it right? Does that mean that we should treat corporations better than people wherever it’s economically convenient?

First Amendment was made for issues like ours.

P.S.

Excerpt from a letter detailing the experience of a California CSR candidate submitted by a Stenonymous source.

I know digital court reporters can’t be court reporters in California. I use the verbiage I do for the standardization of language and so that when people find out digital court reporting is a scam, they don’t get confused! It also picks up better in search engines. It’s like the typing/writing thing. We can’t force the whole world to use the language we want them to use. We can, however, stand up and speak out against state-sanctioned lawbreaking. We can share why we prefer the language we prefer.

I’ve been told a participant in a public hearing was muted because they asked when survey results from a survey done by the board would be published. I sure wish I could use my government-granted powers to silence people that ask questions I don’t like. That’s the American dream, baby.

If any of you have lawyer friends, maybe it’s time for us to crowdfund some writs, or lobbying, or whatever makes us enough of a headache that the games and obvious deflections end. I guarantee you that your success is directly related to how many people you can get to take action.

You cool with that?

Stenographer: The Shortage is Not What Was Forecasted.

Cassandra Caldarella reached out to me a while ago with some information about California. Given my relative lack of familiarity with California’s court reporting laws and statistics, the interaction was very welcome. I’ve said it many times, but I would be nowhere without information sent in by readers.

The first thing I was told was that in 2013 there were 7,100 active CSRs in California and that there are now 6,580 CSRs in 2023, a loss of 520, or about 8%. A loss of about 50 per year, or 0.7% of that 7,100 total. The Ducker Report told us something like 70% of reporters would be retiring between 2013 and 2023, so about 2.3% a year. 4.67% per year if you count from 2018, when the shortage was supposed to start getting bad. What does all this mean? The California shortage may be half as bad as it was forecasted to be.

An explanation of CSR license numbers from Cassandra Caldarella.

We can pull straight from Ducker to confirm something is off.

Ducker Report, Forecasted Supply for CA in 2018, 6,110.

There was a 6,110 supply of stenographers forecasted in 2018, and it was supposed to get worse and worse every year until 2018. If it is accurate that there are now 6,580, then we are doing much better than the forecast.

Cassandra went on to explain that these were not straight losses and that there were a lot of new CSRs coming in.

I was then given a yearly breakdown of out-of-state CA CSR licensees. The average before COVID was about 10 per year. 2020 to 2023, that jumps to about 16.

Out-of-state California CSR licenares per year according to Cassandra Caldarella.

I did go snooping for these numbers, because I don’t like to publish without some fact checking, and I did find at least one piece of information from SB662 that seems to contradict or call into question these numbers.

2022, 5,605 CSRs according to SB662 bill text. 4.,829 listed an address in California. 8,004 in 2000. 7,503 in 2010. 6,085 in 2020.

That’s a much more grim outlook. But perhaps it’s just market forces at work? Unless 30% of the workforce has been replaced by digital, it means that the demand for court reporters is simply lower than it once was or that there was not enough demand in the market for those 8,004 CSRs. A lot of people believe in the self-correction of markets. Why is our labor market any different? We could blame it on government regulation. Then again, we could also blame it on the larger corporations that stood by and did basically nothing for half a decade. If there was a retirement cliff, they sure weren’t worried about it, and I think that says a lot.

Let’s work with the most relevant numbers presented here. 7,503 in 2010. 1,418 drop from 2010 to 2020. A loss of about 19%, 1.7% a year. Still below the 2.3% to 4.7% it was supposed to be, but not quite as rosy as the 0.7% figure I was hoping for.

I’d really like to get the discussion going here. Are there more accurate direct sources I’ve missed? Has anybody run these numbers and come up with similar results? Have I gotten something completely wrong?

The comments are open.

Addendum:

Some edits were done to the images and text in this post after it went live. Subsequently, I was sent a spreadsheet that purports to show about 6,849 California CSRs active as of May 10, 2023. So, after seeing that, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that we are in much better shape than was forecasted.