Labor Reporting



April 7, 2001



BROOKE GLADSTONE: The U.S. Labor Department released its unemployment figures this week. The ranks of the jobless swelled 18,000 to 383,000. That's the highest level in three years. The heaviest losses were in machinery, metals and manufacturing -- industries with the kind of work force that traditionally formed the backbone of America's dwindling unions.

BOB GARFIELD:We mention this because the decline of organized labor has been followed -- mirrored actually -- by the decline of the labor beat. Reporter Susan Wood looked into the changing nature of workplace coverage. [MUSIC]

GUY NUNN: Hi there early birds! Deadline coming up for Massachusetts, Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana -- deadline for what? -- deadline for becoming a citizen!

SUSAN WOOD: In the 1950s, Detroit auto workers could tune in to radio station WDET. A show called Eye Opener, funded by the United Automobile Workers and hosted by one of its staffers, Guy Nunn, served up daily news and commentary with a labor slant. Stanley Aronowitz is professor of sociology and cultural studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

STANLEY ARONOWITZ: At the one point United Automobile Workers was not only interested in their own members' wages and working conditions, but they were also interested in being a major influence, which they still are in the Democratic party of the State of Michigan, and they thought in order to do that they had to have their independent presence in the media, so they started a radio station.

SUSAN WOOD: Here Nunn interviews UAW president Walter Reuther one month before the 1956 election.

GUY NUNN: Walter Republicans claim that everybody's been sharing in this thing which they call prosperity, and they site production indices. What do you say to that?

WALTER REUTHER: Well you've got to get behind their political double talk to find out what the facts are, and I say that the facts indicate beyond challenge that the Eisenhower Republican big business administration has created a lopsided, unsound and uneven prosperity in America.

SUSAN WOOD: By the end of the decade, labor's voice had largely faded from the air waves. Of the hundreds of labor radio shows that flourished at mid-century, only a handful remain today. Likewise, labor is commanding less attention from the mainstream media. Nowhere is this more apparent, critics say, than in the decline of the labor beat. William Serrin who teaches journalism at New York University was the New York Times labor reporter from 1979 to '86. His experience there was a far cry from the '40s when the Times had four full time labor reporters.

WILLIAM SERRIN: Listen, at the New York Times I was one labor reporter, and sometimes we had a half of another person; one and a half labor reporters at the most against what, 60, 70 business reporters. Right now as we're talking there are probably 10, 12 labor journalists in this country.

SUSAN WOOD: Serrin pioneered a course in labor reporting last spring and he's teaching it again this year, though he admits it's not his most popular course. He says it's tough to persuade students to enter a field with so few opportunities for advancement.

WILLIAM SERRIN: Labor journalism is simply not considered at most papers and magazines a high end job, and it's - we shouldn't even talk about radio and television cause they don't do much labor reporting at all. And it's crazy! Cause you have, what, a work force of 130 million in this country and work still makes this country what it is.

SUSAN WOOD: Part of the problem, says Tom Robbins, a staff writer at the Village Voice, is that in the minds of many journalists labor is synonymous with organized labor.

TOM ROBBINS: Both reporters and editors were perceiving it as let's write about unions as such -- whether or not the unions are doing well; whether or not the unions are in trouble; whether or not people are joining unions; whether or not they're leaving unions. They weren't writing about the phenomenon of work.

SUSAN WOOD: Robbins says that when his former employer, the New York Daily News approached him about taking the labor beat, his first impulse was to re-define the assignment. Work is the, you know, all-encompassing phenomenon that everybody does who needs to be able to feed and clothe themselves, and it covered everybody from, you know, the people at the top of the spectrum on Wall Street to the people who were just cleaning up the floors at the Daily News.

SUSAN WOOD: Workplace reporting is the fastest-growing beat at many newspapers around the country, but some papers use it as an excuse not to cover organized labor, according to Janine Jackson, program director for the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [sp?].

JANINE JACKSON: We've seen labor stories replaced with a kind of softer thing called "workplace coverage" which treats workers' issues as if they were almost lifestyle or cultural questions rather than economic questions. So we're not hearing about the minimum wage or about outsourcing. We're hearing about dress down Fridays.

TOM ROBBINS: Sometimes I see business sections at other newspapers using workplace reporters mainly to write stories about what's the best way managers can efficiently use their employees in a way that increases their bottom line.

SUSAN WOOD: Those are legitimate stories, says Steven Greenhouse, who covers labor and workplace issues for the New York Times; but it's only one aspect of the beat. Reporters should look at discrimination, health and safety - labor issues but not specifically union issues. In fact, until recently, unions rarely addressed those concerns. But that's no longer the case, says Edward Ott [sp?], director of public policy for the New York City Central Labor Council.

EDWARD OTT: Trades are more integrated, and they're engaged with the youth of this city in a much different way. Apprentice programs, pre-apprentice programs, trying to get communities that have been traditionally kept out of the trades into the trades. It's a major story. You guys have missed it.

SUSAN WOOD: If stories like these aren't being covered, one reason according the Fair's Janine Jackson is corporate ownership of the media which focuses attention on the bottom line and on the upscale consumers advertisers want to reach.

JANINE JACKSON: With all of these mergers that you hear about, they go along with a lot of cost-cutting! And that cost-cutting hits the newsroom very hard. Reporters tell us I used to have to file 3 stories a week. Now I have to file 3 stories a day. What that means is they simply don't have the resources to go more deeply into a story, and they are that much more reliant on corporate public relations.

SUSAN WOOD: But Steven Bell, managing editor of the Buffalo News, says community service, not corporate strategies, decide what gets covered at his paper even though it's owned by billion investor Warren Buffett. But even in Buffalo where more than a quarter of the work force is unionized, the news no longer has a full time labor reporter, a decision Bell defends.

STEVEN BELL: I think it's a little simplistic to look at does a paper have a labor beat reporter, and if they do, gee that mean-- that means they must cover labor, and if they don't, that means they must not. Between 1998 and today we've written almost 22 hundred stories involving labor unions.

SUSAN WOOD: Bell says labor coverage is actually enhanced by splitting it up among different beats.

STEVEN BELL: It used to be the union beat meant covering what was happening at the steel workers' local and when is the contract up and will the wage increase be sufficient. So in some cases I think you could argue that labor coverage today, and I'm not just talking about us, but in general, is more sophisticated and is more infused throughout the newspaper than it used to be.

SUSAN WOOD: So when a telemarketing operator looks in her local newspaper for coverage of efforts to unionize her workplace, should she look for it on the metro page, the business page or the technology page? Until unions figure out how to reclaim the media spotlight, she's probably going to find it on the lifestyle page. For On the Media, this is Susan Wood in New York.