A contract is required. Court reporters are not exempt. The law becomes effective on August 24, 2024.
As told by the link I posted:
A summary of what is required in New York freelance contracts
A contract outlines all your rights and obligations under a business agreement, so if there’s something you want, make sure it’s in the contract or not excluded by the contract.
Enjoy your day, all.
P.S.
Enjoy one of my favorite fictional scenes.
Stenonymous posts the V for Vendetta Dominos Fall scene, which Christopher Day takes some inspiration from.
Creative musing:
Inside our box I trembled. We have such a rigid culture. Could others accept someone who is different? But others felt that way too.
And when we stuck together, others in our box took notice. And when we struck a nerve, they did their best not to flinch.
But do you let go of the crocodile’s mouth? If it opens, will our box be crushed? I shudder. The art of silencing others was never in my heart. But I saw how the crocodile silenced you.
I leapt from our box to protect you. Outside our box my grip grew weaker, but you stood beside me.
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?
Bullet points on what the Department of Labor will look at with regard to whether a worker is a misclassified employee or independent contractor.
Sometime at the end of last year, a Stenonymous source leaked Lexitas’s independent contractor agreement to me.
This kind of thing wasn’t a thing historically. Even when NYC passed that law where independent contractors needed a contract, a lot of “freelancers” didn’t get one.
You know what’s changed in the last 13 years? A popular court reporting blog popped up and started talking about employee misclassification and unionization. Safe bet that these people are paying attention and they’re afraid. Their misclassification of you is a massive liability. Let’s just say the workers comp insurers would have a field day if people were more assertive in exercising their rights.
First of all, let’s just say that in the event of a misclassification claim, hopefully a fact finder would consider who writes the contract. The more powerful entity, by far, is Lexitas. You want work? You’re gonna work on their terms. Of course you’re gonna sign the contract. They even go out of their way to say they’re not forming an agency relationship with the independent contractor. So court reporting agencies don’t want to call themselves agencies when it means you might be a misclassifiedemployee.
The second laughable thing is that this contract has no consideration. There’s no point in signing it. They’re not promising you a damn thing. It says, in brief:
1. You’re an independent contractor.
2. You pay your own taxes.
3. You don’t solicit their clients, employees, or other independent contractors.
4. You use their formatting and submission portal. A/K/A they have direction and control over you for submission and completion of work. Just so we’re clear, independent contractors are supposed to be free of direction and control.
5. You’ll give them all your work products and notes when you’re done “independent contractoring” for them.
6. You’ll pay for all damages and attorney fees if you breach the agreement.
“We have no relationship, you’re independent from us, but you do everything in the way we like it and pay us if you don’t.”
Lexitas, fuck you (as an entity. Conceded many of your employees are going to be good people.) I hope every single “independent contractor” you had sign this sham goes right to a lawyer, claims misclassification, and gets their self-employment taxes back right out of your wallet and your workers comp insurance skyrockets because they realize you’ve misclassified a whole segment of your workforce. And I hope that when your dipshit lawyer brings this agreement into court, the misclassified employee’s lawyer brings my blog post into court and says “look, judge, even this idiot with the blog knows this is a scam meant to cover the ass of the agency while giving nothing to my client.” While I’m at it, let me put it out there that when another agency was challenged on this, they settled rather than get their ass kicked in court.
Alice Halbert’s class action settlement notice in a matter involving Atkinson-Baker
I may be on the losing side because my fellow court reporters can’t be bothered to protect their own interests in any substantial way, but hey, I tried. And lucky for me, if you keep doing what corporations do, squeezing and squeezing, eventually, they might try too, because the “pain” of trying something new will pale in comparison to the pain of all the revenue they’re generating for you being sucked away from them and their families by mankind’s greatest wealth-extraction device, the corporation.
For the record, I’m not opposed to making money. I’m as capitalist as they come and hoping that someday my writing is recognized, ahem, monetarily. I’m opposed to making money at the expense of all else. This isn’t limited to private sector. I’m opposed to the habitual collars for dollars crowd too.
Alleged Veritext script provided to digital court reporters.
I really need to take you on a quick time machine ride. It’s 2010. New stenographers are graduating in New York City, and many of us are told there are too many reporters and not enough work. When we do get work with an agency, we’re thrown into whatever job regardless of skill level. A true trial by fire. I lucked out, my first was an interpreter job. One acquaintance of mine was put on a med mal or something beyond her skill level and immediately quit the field to become a dental technician. We were also, by any sane metric, being underpaid. When I write about this stuff, I do it with all those memories in my heart. We fought hard through school, and a lot of us didn’t make it in the working world. I know the knee-jerk reaction of reporters is to play into survivorship bias and say “well, others made it, they could have too!” Congratulations! Some of us made it through a rigged game! Good for us! It’s time to use our position as survivors of the rigged game to unrig it so that we’re not chuckle-fucks telling students what a great field this is only to have the income drop through the floor.
These companies did everything in their power to drive us out and drive sole proprietors under, running down the page rates and running up other costs to siphon more and more of the money in this field away from the reporter and into their pockets under the guise of “competition.” Now they’re doing everything in their power to build digital. According to multiple sources I’ve talked to in the last few years, they’re told to say digital is the future or something similar when questioned about steno v digital.
Digital reporters, I know this sounds like good news because some stenographers have been nasty to some of you. The reason it’s bad is they’re pushing all this recruitment and holding your hands through the early stages so they can “diversify” the worker pool and pit us against each other, decreasing rates across the board. The companies would rather let me call them frauds than defend their reputation. That’s how much money is at stake here. It’s fairly easy to come to this conclusion. Company executives have a duty to make decisions that make companies more profitable. Their compensation is often tied to company performance in some way. The finance guys think digital is like 50% more profitable. Supply and demand, supply of reporters goes up, demand stays about the same, price goes down. That price is your income, just so we’re clear. Even if you don’t buy into believing it’s fraud, you have to see the clear money incentive these companies have.
Consumers, if you’re reading, this pretty much demonstrates why stenographers are making all this noise. You’re comparing a workforce of people that had to self-teach anything the 2-year education didn’t cover with people that are scripted after whatever the training program time is (6 weeks?) And they are pretty much going to charge you the same prices for both while pocketing, allegedly, 50% more profit. I get that everyone thinks our steno lobbying is the only thing that keeps us afloat, but I gotta be honest, our associations would find it difficult to be less effective. I’m not saying it’s all their fault, but let’s look at the reality: We’re losing jobs even in states with heavy licensing requirements like California and Texas. Digital has come into play even where it’s illegal. If our lobby can’t combat illegal activity, it’s pretty fucking weak. For contrast, your organizations kill robot lawyers with zeal and efficiency.
If it’s not our lobby keeping us afloat, what could it be, I wonder? Could it be that even in 2023 modern stenography is more efficient than the other methods? Hmm…
