Thread by @piescarcega

Last night, after nearly 6 anxious months of being told "the company will have a response for you shortly," my employer, @latimes, finally handed me a decision on the pay discrimination claim I filed through my union.

The two-page memo that @latimes sent me yesterday was extremely painful to read.

In the memo, the L.A. Times said I am not worth the same as my male or white colleagues.

The letter says I deserve to make only two-thirds of what my co-critic is paid -- even though we have the exact same job responsibilities -- because I do not bring prestige to the paper, and because the company says our job classifications aren't the same.

Without telling me, the company classified me as a junior critic upon hire, even though I was told repeatedly by managers that I was equal to my co-critic, and I have always been expected to do the same work, and held to the same expectations and standards.

The @latimes has consistently advertised us as “co-critics.”

This decision is a sharp reversal of what the @latimes indicated over the summer, when I was informally told that it was working on a resolution, and when an @latimes manager called me in June to tell me that the company was “fixing” the Grand Canyon-size pay gap between its…

…two restaurant critics.

Systemic bias and discrimination is too sanitary and too kind a term for this ugliness. Pay discrimination is rampant in newsrooms, but it is also highly personal, the product of many people’s individual decisions.

This week, many people at the L.A. Times put their heads together and wrote me a letter that said: Your work is not worth the same as a white man’s.

This is a cruel fiction.

It sends a heart-breaking message to every Latinx kid like me, who dreamed of some day writing for the @latimes; to our readers, who deserve a paper where Latinx and women are valued and paid the same as their white male counterparts (and where the emotional toll and pain of…

…discrimination has been compounded by months of icy indifference and well-documented abusive behavior from my former managers); and to all readers and students of journalism, who deserve a paper that acts honestly, ethically and in good faith, rather than a company intent on…

…weaponizing the concept of “prestige” in order to try to get away with what one colleague privately described to me as the biggest pay gap she has ever seen at the Los Angeles Times.

Why hire the first Latinx restaurant critic in the history of the @latimes, and then pay them so much less for doing the exact same work?

I refuse to let this discrimination stand. It is immoral, unethical, and illegal.

I realize discrimination is rampant in journalism and food media, and that the @latimes has a history of making women and journalists of color feel like dispensable workhorses. But ubiquity does not make discrimination okay.

I would appreciate any RTs or signal boosts.

Thank you for reading. I plan to keep writing about this, because I have been keeping notes for months of every racially insensitive comment my former managers hurled my way, and I have many painful but instructive stories to share about my tenure so far @latimes.

The only way I can make sense of this kind of pain is to write about it honestly and share it with anyone who will listen.