Labor disputes are often about compensation-- salary and/or benefits. Management claims its employees are actually doing just fine, workers say otherwise. 45,000 Verizon workers are on strike on the East Coast over salary, pension and health benefits and collective bargaining rights.

One would hope that reporters would try to referee such disputes over compensation.  In the New York Times, Steven Greenhouse prints the claims side by side.

Yesterday:

Verizon called its unionized employees well paid, saying that many field technicians earn more than $100,000 a year, including overtime, with an additional $50,000 in benefits. But union officials say that the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 before overtime and that benefits come to well under $50,000 a year.

Today:

Verizon says its unionized employees are well paid, with many field technicians earning more than $90,000 a year, including overtime, with an additional $50,000 in benefits. Union officials say the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 a year before overtime and that benefits come to far less than $50,000 a year.

Now a careful reader might figure out the difference between Verizon saying that "many" tech workers earn more than $90,000, and the union saying the same workers "generally" earn about 1/3 less.  It's the same as saying  "many" Americans are millionaires;  generally Americans are not.

If the company is wildly overstating what its employees are making, news accounts should get to the bottom of it.

UPDATE: Greenhouse digs into these compensation figures a bit more today,  and it's hard not to conclude that Verizon's doing some funny math:

The financials of Verizon’s landline business are not the only set of numbers that company and union are fighting over. Union officials dispute the company’s estimate that each employee receives $50,000 worth of benefits each year. In that number, the company includes $14,700 for medical and dental insurance, $10,900 for retiree health care and life insurance, $10,800 for pension and $7,500 for time off.

Union officials say total benefits average $25,000 a year. Mr. Kohl, the union official, disputed the $10,800 yearly figure for pensions, noting that Verizon’s annual report said the company’s 2010 contributions to the union’s defined benefit plans “were not significant.” Verizon officials said the $10,800 was an average annual amount.

Mr. Kohl also said the $10,900 retiree health care figure was greatly exaggerated, asserting that many retirees had worked years to pay for that care so the cost should not be attributed to current employees.

Mr. Kohl also quarreled with Verizon saying the value of time off — vacation, sick days and personal days — was $7,500. He dismissed that as double-counting because that number was already counted in wages.

So the company's counting sick days and vacation as paid compensation? We've seen companies claim retiree healthcare as part of current workers benefits before. In any case, Greenhouse is doing today what reporters should be doing when covering this kind of dispute.

Yesterday New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse (6/16/11) reported on efforts in several states to get public-sector workers to increase contributions to state pension funds--or, to put it more bluntly, to take a pay cut.

Political leaders are claiming this is simply the only thing they can do--and Greenhouse helps them make their case. Right from the start, Greenhouse frames the political shift as "the most definitive sign yet that the era of generous compensation for public-sector employees is ending." Many studies have shown that public sector compensation isn't actually all that generous, and such workers might lag slightly behind their private-sector counterparts.

Greenhouse presents the case:

The Pew Center on the States estimates there is a more than $1 trillion funding gap for government workers' retirement benefits in the 50 states. At the same time, many voters resent that public employee pensions are generally better than their own.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. But over what period of time? And is that figure correct in the first place? Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote a great paper (2/11) explaining the origins of the crisis--which is rooted mostly the housing bubble--and that the estimates of one or two trillion dollars were misleading in at least two ways: Such figures might not fully account for a recovery in stock prices (which would improve the outlook for pension funds, and thus reduce the funding gap), and expressing funding gaps as a dollar figure absent any context is rather useless.

Express the gap as a share of the economy, and things aren't so alarming. As Baker wrote:

The size of the projected state and local government shortfalls measured as a share of future gross state products appear manageable. The total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product over the next 30 years for most states. Even in the cases of the states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product.

But it's Greenhouse's language near the end of the piece that might be the most galling part:

But with tales of six-figure pensions and public employees comfortably retiring in their early 50s, many lawmakers say it is outrageous that some of these workers pay nothing out of pocket toward their pensions.

Six-figure pensions are, as you'd imagine, quite rare. And workers who "pay nothing" for their pensions actually do pay something--they get some of their compensation in the form of a retirement package instead of wages. But these very exceptional cases get a lot of attention, as Dean Baker noted in his critique of Greenhouse's piece:

The media have been repeating tales circulated by right-wing and business organizations who are attacking public-sector workers and public-sector unions. In fact, the vast majority of public-sector workers do not retiree in their early 50s and do not enjoy especially generous benefits....

If the media had been doing a competent job reporting on this issue, legislators would be hearing tales of 70-year old retirees trying to get by on less than $20,000 a year. (Roughly 30 percent of public sector employees do not get Social Security.)

Journalists are supposed to challenge conventional wisdom and political rhetoric--not reinforce it. McClatchy's Kevin Hall wrote an exceptional piece on state pensions on March 6. We'd be having a very different political debate if more reporters were following his lead.

In a mostly informative "news analysis" ("Ohio's Anti-Union Law Is Tougher Than Wisconsin's," New York Times, 4/1/11) comparing new anti-union laws that restrict collective bargaining rights in Ohio and Wisconsin, New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse seems at one point to adopt the framing and language of anti-labor politicians and pundits:

Moreover, at a time of huge budget deficits and of Republican dominance in many states, including states like Ohio and Wisconsin where unions once had swaggering power, the pendulum has swung toward the taxpayer instead of the government workers paid by the taxpayer.

Pitting "swaggering" unionized public workers against "taxpayers"--who are, in fact, mostly other workers--may be a tried-and-true strategy of anti-labor forces, but it doesn't accurately reflect the way the public see the issues. As the Times' own polling expert points out, Americans seem to be siding with public workers on the the issue of collective bargaining rights. 

Considering the fact that this isn't the only time the paper has pushed a false divide between government workers and nearly everybody else, perhaps Greenhouse would have more accurately portrayed the divisions had he written, "The pendulum has swung toward anti-labor activists and journalists, and away from public workers and the majority of the public who support them."