Executive Summary
Workers at television stations owned by Nexstar – the largest TV broadcasting company in the U.S. – are forming unions to address low wages and disrespect. Instead of bargaining in good faith, Nexstar has fired workers for organizing and refused to recognize unions even after workers voted overwhelmingly in favor of them in National Labor Relations Board-supervised elections.
This report documents the low wages at Nexstar through a survey of workers and analysis of labor market data. NABET-CWA conducted the survey between February and June of 2025 and received 109 responses from Nexstar broadcasting employees. Respondents reported poverty wages and widespread worry about meeting basic financial obligations like housing, medical care, and groceries.
- The majority (62%) of Nexstar workers earn less than a living wage for their metro area for a single person without children and 89% earn less than a living wage for their metro area for a single person with one child.
- A majority (63%) of workers rely on family, friends or public assistance to get by.
- A majority of survey respondents feel financially insecure: 87% worried about meeting financial obligations sometimes (57%) or often (30%).
- The majority of survey respondents report delaying necessary medical care (55%) and buying groceries (53%) among their struggles to get by on Nexstar’s low wages.
- A majority (54%) of survey respondents report that they sometimes or often rely on overtime to make ends meet, while 38% of respondents rely on a second job.
- Twenty-two percent of survey respondents reported that they rely on both overtime at Nexstar and working a second job.
The wages reported by workers indicate that Nexstar pays well below its peers in the industry – Nexstar pays 22% less than the median wage, on average, for the most common occupations surveyed. Workers also report that they have to skip breaks and often work in understaffed departments.
Meanwhile, Nexstar is very profitable and seeks to grow through more acquisitions of local broadcast stations. To do this the Company is actively lobbying to eliminate the federal cap on the number of stations a single company can own, a longstanding protection for localism and competition in the broadcast market.
NABET-CWA is calling on Nexstar to negotiate fair contracts with its employees that provide livable wages. We also urge Congress to prevent the Trump administration from eliminating the existing standards for broadcast ownership and call on the FCC to stay firm against industry’s efforts to change the current standards through rulemaking.
Introduction
Workers who make Nexstar Media Group a successful television broadcaster across the United States are unionizing with NABET-CWA to address low wages and unsustainable working conditions. Nexstar exploits the passion its employees have for the work of producing local news to keep wages low. This report summarizes the findings of a survey of more than a hundred Nexstar workers about how they make ends meet on Nexstar’s poverty pay and why so many of them are fighting to make their jobs better — because they love the work of broadcasting.
Nexstar workers have organized unions for a variety of reasons, from callous management to poor building conditions -- but the universal constant is low pay. Many Nexstar employees work in jobs that required a college degree when they were hired, yet still earn wages less than $20 per hour. Raises, when given, are tiny. Station management claims the company does not have money for more staff positions or increased pay despite massive profitability.
Workers at Nexstar stations say they stay in these jobs because they care about their colleagues and the work they do in producing local news for their communities. NABET-CWA members at Nexstar are concerned with the direction that the company is taking toward growth through acquisitions and not providing newsrooms with appropriate staffing levels and compensating staff. NABET-CWA members across employers are concerned with the way Nexstar is using its scale to drive down wages industry wide.
Workers at three stations in Rochester, New York; Denver, Colorado; and Henderson, Kentucky and one production hub in Denver, CO have recently won union elections, joining broadcast employees at thirty five other bargaining units at Nexstar. NABET-CWA members work in all aspects of local news including as on-air anchors, producers, directors, broadcast engineers, technicians, and others.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found that Nexstar illegally refused to recognize these workers’ unions and their right to bargain a contract at WROC (Rochester, NY), KDVR (Denver, CO), and the Denver Hub (Denver, CO), despite each group voting in favor of having a union by strong margins.[1] Nexstar has appealed these NLRB rulings to federal court, further obstructing their legal responsibility to bargain with their employees.[2] At WEHT, NABET-CWA has filed a charge with the NLRB over Nexstar’s refusal to bargain and the charge is currently under investigation.
Instead of bargaining constructively with their workers’ unions, Nexstar has engaged in a campaign of union busting. NABET-CWA has filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB challenging the company’s refusal to bargain over changes to working conditions, laying off workers without bargaining, denying workers a union steward in disciplinary meetings and even explicitly firing workers for engaging in protected union activity.[3] Three employees in Denver were fired for minor offenses in retaliation for their union work, while two employees in Kentucky were fired for their union activity outright.[4]
Nexstar is among the employers - including SpaceX and Amazon - who have argued in legal proceedings that the entire federal legal framework for collective bargaining is unconstitutional.[5] This attitude towards the law is reflected in every aspect of their interaction with the union.
“I personally wanted to organize, because of the fact that my coworkers were hurting. Hurting mentally, emotionally, physically & financially. This hurt was an outward force. They didn’t always feel that way. It was a product of the environment in their workplace that had grown and festered into an overwhelmingly toxic & hindering culture. Before I was fired for exercising my protected rights & freedom of speech, what I enjoyed about my job was not just the work of creating commercials. Not just creating promotional material. Not just creating long form interviews to help tell stories across our region. I truly enjoyed the team I worked with. I loved so many things about my job. But the thing that’s really hard to replace is the people you did the work with.”
– Brody Shaffer, WEHT
Nexstar Media Group: A Profitable Behemoth in the Broadcast Industry, Seeking to Grow Even Bigger
Nexstar Media Group (Nexstar) is a behemoth in the broadcast television industry; like Amazon it drives down standards across the sector. Nexstar operates the United States’ largest local television broadcasting chain with 201 owned or partner stations in 117 U.S. markets in 40 states and the District of Columbia reaching over 220 million people. It is the largest broadcaster in the United States by number of markets, coverage, and revenue.[6] Nexstar’s national television properties include cable channels The CW and NewsNation, entertainment multicast networks Antenna TV and REWIND TV, and a minority ownership stake in TV Food Network. The company’s digital assets include news outlet The Hill, Nexstar’s local TV station websites, and NewsNationNow.com.[7]
Nexstar’s strategy has been rapid acquisition of smaller chains in the broadcasting industry. Nexstar was formed in 1999 by its current CEO and Chairman Perry Sook with financing from private equity firm ABRY Partners. Between 1999 and 2015, the company grew from one station into a chain of 113 stations. In 2016, Nexstar started to acquire larger broadcasting chains, first Media General in 2016 (58 stations) and then Tribune Media in 2018 (42 stations).
But today, Nexstar cannot get any bigger due to federal laws meant to protect the integrity of news and competition within the broadcast ownership market. Because broadcast television and radio rely on public airwaves and play a unique role in local news, federal law sets a “national cap” on broadcast station ownership, preventing any station group from owning television stations that reach more than 39% of U.S. households, and sets a “top four rule,” prohibiting an entity from owning two television stations in the same local market if both of the stations are among the top-four rated stations in the area.[8] Nexstar and other companies have chipped away at these standards over the years and Nexstar has stated that removing these laws on broadcast ownership is far and away “the No. 1 legislative priority” of the company, informing shareholders it has established a government relations presence in Washington, DC focused on pushing for these rules to be removed.[9] In June 2025, the FCC announced action in its National Cap proceeding.[10] If the cap is removed, undoubtedly Nexstar will engage in an aggressive round of acquisitions, the broadcast media market will become even more consolidated, and their power to set wages for broadcast workers will increase.
Despite claims of intense competition from streaming platforms, Nexstar is a very profitable company with a 23.5 percent operating margin in 2024 on revenue of $5.4 billion.[11] In the last two years, Nexstar paid out $410 million in dividends and $1.2 billion in stock buybacks to shareholders. Nexstar is even more profitable than its peers in the television broadcast industry, with Gray Media turning an 11.8% operating margin[12] and Scripps a 5.2% operating margin.[13]
CEO and Chairman Perry Sook is benefiting handsomely from this success, with total compensation for 2024 of $35.9 million. The ratio of Sook’s compensation to Nexstar’s median employee was 517 to 1.[14]
Nexstar Pays Low Wages to Long-term, Experienced Employees
To document Nexstar workers’ experience making ends meet, NABET-CWA conducted a survey of 109 Nexstar employees at 14 stations across the country between February 20th and June 4th, 2025. The survey confirmed that workers struggle to get by on Nexstar’s low wages and do not receive adequate raises or opportunities for advancement. Survey respondents reported an average hourly wage of $22.88 and a median wage of $20.13. Twenty-five percent of respondents reported earning less than $18/hour.
This analysis was hampered by Nexstar’s unwillingness to provide complete information to the union. NABET-CWA requested wage data for newly represented workers at Nexstar, but the company refused to provide data for the newly organized stations.
Television broadcast careers typically require significant education credentials and on-the-job training.[15] Workers at Nexstar are no exception and, in fact, exceed the average tenure for workers in the sector despite their low wages. Survey respondents reported an average of 7.9 years experience in the industry and 7 years working for Nexstar. This compares to the industry’s average tenure of 3.8 years at one employer, suggesting that workers value their jobs and do not have many other good options where they live.[16]
"I've decided to organize a union due to many factors, but chief among them are three key issues. The first and most important issue is the the automation of many positions around the workplace, which has caused many of our best workers to lose their jobs, which is bad enough, but it also leaves the remaining staff to deal with unmanageable workloads that causes an already stressful workspace to be unmanageable.
The second issue is the poor communication of our managers not just with their employees, but also with each other, which has caused regular scheduling errors and a lack of understanding of who is supposed to be doing what job in which department; a problem that has only gotten worse with the elimination of positions and job cuts.
Lastly, most workers at my station live off insultingly low paychecks that have caused me to hear many horror stories about my colleagues having to choose between rent and groceries.
I find all of this extremely disheartening since I truly love my profession and the people I work with, many of whom I consider to be friends. This is why I decided years ago to help my fellow workers organize so that we can hopefully make their lives more manageable and so we can do our jobs to the best of our ability without having to worry about job cuts or not being able to pay rent."
– David Birge, WEHT
Nexstar is a Low Wage Outlier in the Broadcast Industry
Nexstar pays wages significantly below the Broadcast Industry.[17] The largest occupational groups of survey respondents reported average wages between 6% and 32% below the average wage for these occupations in the broadcast industry, or 22% on average:
| Occupational Title | Avg. Hourly Rate (Nexstar Survey Respondents) | Median Industry Hourly Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Director/Producer | $20.25 | $29.99 |
| Anchor/Reporter | $22.68 | $31.57 |
| Studio Technician | $22.36 | $23.71 |
| Photographer | $25.47 | $29.91 |
| Engineer | $27.00 | $37.30 |
Union representatives see evidence that Nexstar’s market power depresses wages across the industry. At the bargaining table, other broadcast companies tell NABET-CWA members that, in order to stay competitive with Nexstar, they can’t offer workers more.
"When I started at my TV station over 30 years ago, I was under the belief that loyalty would be rewarded. I have found out that people that start out doing the same job I do at another Union station in town have an hourly rate that starts $3.56 more per hour than I make after 30 years at my workplace. That’s more than $7,400 per year that would help me take care of my family.”
– Bob Pastecki, WROC
Overworked and Underpaid: Nexstar Employees Report Poor Working Conditions
Nexstar workers report stressful conditions that squeeze more work from understaffed departments. Survey respondents reported experiencing the following issues in the last three months:
- 44% were not able to take meal or rest breaks during their shift
- 27% were required to perform work while off the clock (for example, working before or after punching out, or working through breaks)
- 25% worked in a role with a pay grade higher than their own and were not compensated for it
- 12% worked more than 40 hours in a week but were not paid at overtime rates
- 14% experienced three or more of these issues in the last three months.
Survey Shows That Pay at Nexstar Is Not Enough to Make Ends Meet
Workers reported that they struggle to make ends meet with their current wages. Survey respondents' comments reflect that Nexstar workers care about their coworkers’ wellbeing, the success of the company, and their work producing and broadcasting local news, but also worry their compensation cannot adequately support them.
- 87% worried about meeting financial obligations sometimes (57%) or often (30%)
- 35% had variable hours in a work week that cause financial hardship sometimes (28%) or often (7%)
- 54% rely on overtime sometimes (37%) or often (17%)
- 38% rely on a second job; another 6% have two other jobs
- 22% rely on both OT and a second job
Workers reported delaying basic expenses due to low wages:
- 53% have delayed buying groceries while working at Nexstar
- 55% delayed medical care
- 31% went without necessary medications
A majority of workers (53%) reported that they would be unable to pay their housing costs (either rent or mortgage) if they missed seven days of work for any reason. Four respondents reported experiencing homelessness while being employed at Nexstar.
Since wages are not enough to cover living expenses for most of the workers, 54% rely on spouses, family, or friends to help them make ends meet. Nine percent of respondents reported enrolling in some form of public assistance, the most common programs being housing assistance, EBT (food stamps), and Medicaid.
NEXSTAR DOES NOT PAY LIVING WAGES Sixty-two percent of Nexstar workers reported wages below a living wage for a single adult with no kids in their metro area and 89% reported earning less than a living wage for a single adult with one child.
The Economic Policy Institute Family Budget Calculator provides living wage data:[18] | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Metro Area | Nexstar Avg. Wage | Living Wage (Single Adult, No Kids) | Living Wage (Single Adult, One Kid) |
| Rochester, NY | $19.03 | $22.91 | $40.11 |
| Henderson, KY | $17.18 | $20.34 | $32.08 |
| Denver, CO | $23.10 | $29.03 | $49.11 |
| Youngstown, OH | $21.53 | $18.72 | $31.34 |
Survey respondents reported serious hardships living on Nexstar’s low wages, describing experiences such as:
- Working an additional 30 hours weekly as a rideshare driver to get by;
- Relying on a food pantry for groceries while working at Nexstar;
- Both a Nexstar employee and their wife working three jobs each;
- Living with parents and having no time or resources for recreation;
- Donating blood and plasma to pay for groceries and family essentials on numerous occasions;
- Not receiving a raise for eight years.
"I have been working in the TV/live events industry since I was 16, and I took broadcasting classes all throughout high school. I work as the Weekend News Producer at WROC News 8 in Rochester. I work on the weekends (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights for the past year). There is not enough staffing (or producers) for much wiggle room on the schedule these days. My station also does not pay differentials for weekend producing shifts or overnight (sunrise shifts).
I work full time at $18 dollars per hour. This job helps me pay my rent, food, heat, bills, and barely enough for savings. I dream about taking a full vacation on an island somewhere and owning a house one day.
The folks working in the industry realize we deserve way more than what we were getting. Sure, we get holiday parties and the occasional free lunch or dinner, but pair that with long hours, a shortage of staffing, and above all else, low pay, we start to lose the glimmer in our eye for this profession. I want to love this job with all my heart but there are drawbacks."
– Bridget Harry, WROC
Recommendations
NABET-CWA is calling on Nexstar to engage constructively with its workers. The union is also inviting members of the public to sign a petition at CWA.Org/NexstarPetition in support of these demands:
- Nexstar must recognize the workers’ unions that have organized and held NLRB elections confirming their choice to bargain collectively. Nexstar is currently stalling negotiating with workers that recently organized unions in Rochester, NY; Henderson, KY; and Denver, CO. Nexstar must recognize these unions and commit to bargaining fairly with all of its employees that choose to collectively bargain.
- Nexstar must bargain fair contracts with workers at all of its stations to bring Nexstar employees pay up to at least average wages in the rest of the industry. To maintain the same standards the public expects from local news broadcasting and to support broadcast workers’ families, Nexstar must commit to paying wages that are in line with the rest of the industry.
- Congress must prevent the Trump administration from eliminating the existing rules around broadcast ownership, and the FCC should not accede to industry’s petitions to loosen or eliminate the ownership rules through rulemaking. Nexstar’s ability to depress wages and lower standards is due largely to its behemoth status in an already highly consolidated industry. If broadcasters are able to merge without limit, we will see low wages, poor work conditions, and further degradation of an already declining local news ecosystem.
Citations
- NLRB Election Cases: 25-RC-347192 (WEHT), 27-RC-333280 (Denver Hub), 03-RC-309322 (WROC); 27-RC-333229 (KDVR)
- Nexstar v. NLRB, 2nd Circuit 24-2818 (WROC-TV) ; 5th Circuit, 24-60658 (KDVR-TV) ; 5th Circuit, 24-60654 (Nexstar)
- NLRB Unfair Labor Practice Cases: 27-CA-340984; 27-CA-340990; 27-CA-361721
- NLRB Unfair Labor Practice Cases: 03-CA-332930 (WROC); 27-CA-342708 (KDVR); 27-CA-342797 (Denver Hub); 25-CA-365619 (WEHT); 25-CA-363552 (WEHT)
- Bloomberg Law, “Nexstar Media Sues Over NLRB Constitutionality in Federal Court,” https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/nexstar-media-sues-over-nlrb-constitutionality-in-federal-court
- “Updated Top 30 Station Groups: Nexstar Retains Top Spot, Gray Now No. 2 As FCC-Rejected Standard General Drops Off”. TV NewsCheck. 8/30/2024. https://tvnewscheck.com/business/article/top-30-station-groups-nexstar-retains-top-spot-after-standard-general-tegna-deal-dies/
- Nexstar, “Corporate Profile,” https://www.nexstar.tv/company/.
- FCC, “FCC Broadcast Ownership Rules,”
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fccs-review-broadcast-ownership-rules. - Communications Daily, “Broadcast Execs Hopeful for Deregulation While Carr Promises Scrutiny,” November 12, 2024.
- Federal Communications Commission, “Media Bureau Seeks to Refresh Record in National Cap Proceeding,” June 18, 2025, https://www.fcc.gov/document/media-bureau-seeks-refresh-record-national-cap-proceeding
- Nexstar FY2024 Form 10-K. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001142417/000095017025028949/nxst-20241231.htm
- Gray Media. 1Q2025 Form 10-Q. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000043196/000143774925015405/gtn20250331_10q.htm
- E.W. Scripps 1Q2025 Form 10-Q. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0000832428/000083242825000026/ssp-20250331.htm#fact-identifier-183
- Nexstar Proxy Statement 2025. https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001142417/000095017025061206/nxst-20250430.htm
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/producers-and-directors.htm ; https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/broadcast-and-sound-engineering-technicians.htm ; https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-correspondents-and-broadcast-news-analysts.htm
- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Television Broadcast Industry/NAICS 516120. https://data.bls.gov/oes/#/industry/516120
- EPI Family Budget Calculator. https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/