Pay Disparity, in Any Language

Although Los Angeles has the nation’s largest Spanish-speaking population, broadcasters at Spanish-language stations here are paid significantly less than their counterparts at rival English-language stations, according to the first academic study of pay disparity in the local broadcast news business.

The study was released Wednesday by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center, and it points to “a dramatic disparity between Spanish-speaking broadcasters and their English-language counterparts, particularly in terms of income, benefits, working conditions and union representation.”

The report’s principle author, Abel Valenzuela Jr., an associate professor of Chicano studies and urban planning, took salary surveys from 114 local Spanish-language broadcasters in L.A. over the last year and conducted in-depth interviews with 14 of the respondents.

“They had a pretty good inclination that they were making less than their English-language counterparts,” Valenzuela said. “The industry is small enough that broadcasters talk to one another and, frankly, word gets around.”

For English-language broadcasters’ salaries, UCLA relied on data from the broadcasters’ union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which now includes a Spanish-language media project.

According to AFTRA, on-air talent at English-language TV stations have a median salary of $200,000 and on-air talent at English-language radio stations have a median salary of $90,000. That’s 70% more than their competitors at Spanish-language TV stations, whose median income averages $60,001 and Spanish-language radio broadcasters, whose median income average hovers around $41,000.

“We’re not talking about a difference of a few thousand dollars,” Venezuela said Wednesday. “We’re talking three times the amount in TV and two times the amount in radio.”

Valenzuela and coauthor Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and the director of UCLA’s Center for African American Studies, used median salaries, not averages, because they wanted to avoid skewed data as a result of high salaries paid to anchormen and -women.

The UCLA report shows differences are stark with regard to organizing workers. Every English-language TV station in L.A. has had representation, many for 60 years, but only two Spanish-language broadcast companies in L.A. have union representation.

One of those, Metro Networks, a subcontractor owned by Westwood One that provides traffic and news reports to Spanish-and English-language radio stations, organized this year.

KMEX-TV, the flagship of Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language television network, has had a union for some time.

That station’s main competitors, KVEA-TV and KWHY-TV, are owned by the country’s second-largest Spanish-language television network, Telemundo.

Last year, Telemundo was purchased by NBC, which promised cross-promotional news segments. So far, that has worked well. Bilingual reporters at NBC’s Miami affiliate helped host a telethon on Telemundo last month, and bilingual Telemundo broadcaster Maria Celeste Arraras hosted a segment on NBC’s “Dateline” earlier this month about conjoined twins separated during a lengthy surgery at UCLA.

But the union situation has not gone as smoothly. AFTRA asked NBC to allow the 36 on-air employees at KVEA and KWHY to organize and join their English-language counterparts who are already members of the union.

“The response we’ve received from NBC was a flat ‘No,’ ” said Leslie Simon, director of AFTRA’s Spanish-language media project, “but we expect them to reach an agreement with us.”

NBC executives said there were no obstacles for Telemundo employees to organize.

“If they want to organize and join the union, we say, ‘Get the requisite number of people in the affected group--the on-air folks.’ Then they vote in a secret election ballot through the National Labor Relations Board,” said Paula Madison, president and general manager of KNBC and regional general manager of KVEA and KWHY. “If they say they don’t want to affiliate, then there’s no union.”

Madison added that when discussing salary parity among Spanish-and English-language stations, the academics must consider the fact that advertisers pay much lower rates for placement on the Spanish-language stations.

According to the UCLA study, the lack of representation at Spanish-language TV and radio stations left respondents feeling insecure about their jobs. Thirty percent said they had been fired at some point in their careers with no explanation.