Adam Schultz/Biden for President (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
An attendee holds sign at a United Automobile Workers strike in Kansas City, Kansas, September 2019.
As we gear up for another hellish election cycle, replete with the breathless horse-race commentary already well covered in this issue, your friendly neighborhood labor reporters are bracing for the resurgence of a particular kind of bad journalism: the (white) working-class “safari” piece.
Reporters travel to far-flung corners of so-called swing states looking for voters who both epitomize—and at the same time confound—their stereotypes of who votes Democrat and who votes Republican. They find what they seek, inevitably, and what they seek is a tribune of the working man (and it is, so often, a man).
I have amply critiqued this process elsewhere, so I don’t want to spend much time on it other than to note that it is a symptom of the problem I’m actually here to address: the lack of respect and support for the labor beat.
Yes, I’m writing this in my regular column here at The Progressive, where I do, in fact, receive support for regularly covering labor, but the space I have here is all too rare in a news media that tends to treat working people as either consumers first or visitors from another planet worth covering only when the polls open. The ins and outs of working-class life, including workers’ struggles inside and outside of labor unions, are too often otherwise absent from the pages and pixels of major news outlets.
As media scholar Christopher R. Martin argued in No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, the labor beat was once a vibrant part of the daily (and weekly and monthly) news. But since the 1970s, and the reorganization of capitalism that we have come to call neoliberalism, the news business has restructured itself to suit the needs of shareholder profit. News companies consolidated, broke their unions, and molded coverage to appeal to an affluent consumer who was more likely to need advice on investments than on how to win a strike.
The decline of the labor beat came alongside that of organized labor. At the peak of their power, labor unions represented about one-third of the private-sector workforce in the United States. Most newspaper readers were very likely to be in a union, or related to someone who was. Today, the number of private-sector workers in a union is about 6 percent. (It’s higher in the public sector, which has staved off a total collapse of unions in the country.)
It’s worth noting that labor coverage has long had a blind spot that laid the groundwork for the past decade’s obsession with the white working class. As historian David Roediger noted in The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right, “When the term [white working class] is used, the accent will always fall on ‘white’ and the mumbling on ‘working class.’ ” Even in the heyday of the labor movement, the working class’s whiteness, Martin pointed out, was taken for granted: White newspaper owners ignored the Black working class, effectively redlining its coverage.
But at least there were skilled labor reporters who knew their local union leaders and understood the byzantine web that is labor law. Not only that, but as veteran British labor reporter Nicholas Jones explained, they learned the details of the industries they covered as well as any business writer, studying shifts in production and accumulation in order to understand the impact on workers. (The British press, much like its counterpart in the United States, has lost most of its labor beat writers due to the same set of conditions.) Most importantly, labor reporters understand that our readers and subjects are the same people.
As I observed a decade ago, writing about workers tends to treat them as subjects under a microscope rather than people who can speak for themselves just fine. Home health care and food service are two of the most common jobs in the United States, but you wouldn’t know it from the way those workers are described. They are required to bargain, always, for their importance to the country, and to the reader, and are too often portrayed as an inconvenience and pitted against the consumer, as though these are separate identities one can hold, rather than different roles that each of us plays at different times.
The return of the working class in the era of Donald Trump, and its attendant, breathlessly misleading coverage, was a result of all of these structural flaws. Working people, an inconvenience once again, had failed to do the expected thing and vote Democrat, and the press went on the hunt for representative stories. I joined the waves of reporters who, in the early months of the Trump Administration, traveled to Indiana to talk to Chuck Jones and his members of United Steelworkers Local 1999. Jones had dared to criticize Trump’s deal to “save” the Carrier furnace factory, which was slated to close and have its production lines reopened in Mexico. I met workers who, unsurprisingly, belied all of the stereotypes being peddled elsewhere. As Martin noted, more than half of the Carrier workforce was, at the time, Black, and nearly half were women. The union had endorsed independent Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. Whitewashing this workforce into some sort of ideal-type Trump voter was a mistake on all levels, even if I did speak to Carrier workers who had decided to give Trump a chance.
I don’t want to be too harsh on the non-beat reporters sent to cover these stories. It’s not their fault that they don’t know what “right-to-work” means, or the ins and outs of the Taylor Law, or which workers are covered by the Railway Labor Act. They are trying, often with little institutional support. They work in an industry where these are not considered important subjects to understand, and where the labor beat is presumed to be easy to pick up, rather than one requiring specialized knowledge and containing its own sprawling sagas and internal dramas. Labor leaders tell me in confidence about the complete rookie questions they are asked when they do manage to grab the fleeting attention of the local or national news. But these leaders often also go running to those same reporters when they have a scoop to offer, rather than give the time and space to those of us who may not have the same glamorous byline but will do the story justice with our years of experience.
But there is still life left in the labor beat. I started to receive calls to write labor stories in 2011, during the Wisconsin uprising against then Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. The Chicago teachers’ strike the following year and the Fight for $15 cemented it as a beat I could actually sustain. In more recent years, the Red for Ed strike wave, the Teamsters’ near-strike at UPS, the thwarted national railroad strike, and the United Auto Workers’ “stand-up” strike at the Big Three automakers have drawn coverage across various media, by dedicated labor reporters like Alex Press, Luis Feliz Leon, Kim Kelly, Hamilton Nolan, Michelle Chen, and Dave Jamieson, as well as more generalist writers. The biggest labor story of the past decade was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, where we learned the term “essential workers” and tracked the spread of the virus through meatpacking plants and nursing homes, watched delivery couriers unionize, and learned that line cooks were initially the most likely to die of SARS-CoV-2.
These labor stories are why I became interested in assembling a conference on labor journalism, which took place on May 2 at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and was hosted by the Media, Inequality and Change Center. The importance of the work of labor and social movement journalists felt heightened by the campus protests in support of Palestine just around the corner, and the faculty unions wearing their Solidarity T-shirts, promising to stand up for their students when administrators threatened to call in the police. In that fraught space, we gathered to discuss the overarching tension: As Kim Kelly said, “It’s a great moment to be covering labor as long as you’re OK with being broke.”
We spoke of artificial intelligence and the need for trauma care (and basic health care) for journalists; of worker cooperatives and nonprofit funders; of what it might mean to build an ecosystem of labor reporters who collaborate rather than compete. Most of all, we talked about trust: how the news media lost the trust of working people, and how each of us has worked to get it back.
The wave of unionization in recent years among digital and legacy media outlets alike has been an important part of a virtuous cycle that is slowly but steadily improving labor coverage. It’s easier to explain right-to-work when management has attempted to impose it on your newsroom. When your editor is an active union member, they can do a better job of editing your labor reporting.
But the biggest problem that I explain to every would-be labor journalist who asks me about the industry (and there are many) is that there’s no money in it. Many of the people I named above, and several others—the labor beat reporters stretching our work across the country and the world—are freelancers. Most of us are scrambling for the same shrinking fragment of publication budgets and the interest of the same handful of editors we don’t have to convince that working people matter. And even those editors often tell us no.
So what is to be done? Young people want to cover labor, and workers want to be seen and read about their own struggles in the newspapers and magazines they buy. The left-of-center media struggles to keep up, and though a few more jobs have emerged for labor writers at mainstream outlets in recent years, we’re still doing more with less. We are, as author and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, famously noted, part of the American working class. Our fortunes will rise and fall together. I take heart from the struggles of Hollywood writers to hold at bay the incursions of so-called artificial intelligence into their jobs, because an industry that is out to automate us away as much as possible is one that will never care about the lives, needs, and struggles of working people. Workers aren’t some strange creatures over there to be found during an election cycle. They’re looking back at us in the mirror.