It’s Time for a New Labor Beat

Better labor coverage will help journalists advocate for themselves, too.

After the 34-day-long government shutdown, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum wrote a post titled “Nancy Pelosi Ended the Government Shutdown, Not the Air Traffic Controllers.”But Drum went beyond the popular liberal take, wondering, in a publication named for a famed labor leader, “Do we really want the folks who run our air travel system to have this kind of power? I’m not so sure that would be a great thing.”

At a moment when unions are once again getting directly, aggressively involved in larger questions about American life — with the United Teachers of Los Angeles bargaining for the rights of students in Los Angeles, and the Association of Flight Attendants’ promise to ground flights in the name of public safety if there had been another government shutdown — Drum and many other reporters and pundits come across as woefully unable to or uninterested in any kind of deep consideration of labor and worker power.

“Labor reporting should be an essential beat everywhere,” said Hamilton Nolan, who helped establish the Gawker Union, which started the wave of organizing among digital newsrooms. “It is not just about unions—it’s about money and inequality and class and corporate power and everything having to do with how people earn a living or die trying.”

With newsrooms continuing to organize, both in the name of workers’ well-being and protecting the future of the fourth estate, a generation of writers who came of age in an era of historically low union representation in the workplace must now reckon with journalism’s long history of both indifferent and aggressively anti-union coverage. Not only will doing so lead to good stories—having a better understanding of labor will also make journalists better able to save ourselves.

If we are supposed to be all about speaking truth to power, then covering the story of workers telling the boss how to run the business should be at the heart of our work too. And as workers suffering under the weight of our own top-heavy industry that seems forever on the brink of collapse, it’s arguably a question of worker solidarity too. These are problems of our time that journalism needs to cover: Who should foot the bill for classroom materials? Who should benefit record-high corporate earnings? Who should be able to live comfortably in major American cities?

Considering the long-standing tradition of both left-wing and labor-focused publications in the United States, such an approach would not be inherently new. “But by and large, newspapers are owned by capitalists, and they’re going to side with employers in labor disputes,” said Erik Loomis, a labor historian at The University of Rhode Island and the author of A History of American in Ten Strikes.

Going all the way back 1874—the beginning of the modern labor movement in the United States—“every single time that workers began to organize in this era, it was the Paris Commune is coming to the United States,” in most press coverage, Loomis said. During the Pullman Strike in 1894, the New York Times called Eugene Debs, “an enemy of the human race.”

The Los Angeles Times was even more blatant in its anti-unionist coverage. Owner Harrison Gray Otis ran the paper the early 20th century with two goals in mind: To boost the booming city (and thereby make more money) and to protect Los Angeles as a fervently anti-union city (and thereby make more money himself). The conflict between Otis and organized labor came to an ugly head when the Times building was bombed by two union iron workers in 1910, killing 21.

It wasn’t until decades later, as organized labor became a larger force both in American industry and, to a lesser degree, in newsrooms, that union issues began to get something resembling a fair shake from major papers.

Labor became a regular beat—if not a dedicated section—at many publications in the 1940s and ‘50s, “and the overall tenor of being extremely anti-union became harder to sustain because of worker power,” Loomis said. But labor reporting waned as unions did too, and came to something of a symbolic end when Steve Greenhouse, who covered the beat for the New York Times, took a buyout in 2014, leaving the paper of record without a labor reporter—just like every other major newspaper.

The demise of mainstream labor reporting can itself be seen as a class issue. “I think the lack of labor beat reporters is a problem that has political-economic roots,” said Sarah Jaffe, one of the most prominent labor reporters in the country, who covered the UTLA strike for The Nation. Labor sections were cut in part because the business section was more attractive to advertisers. “Workers, particularly as their salaries plummeted and they had less disposable income, weren’t as good for luxury ad sales,” Jaffe said.

Despite its own issues with revenue, the new digital media industry,  and the generation of reporters who came up writing on the web, do show signs of covering labor in a new, invigorating way—perhaps because they are dealing with labor issues in their own organizing efforts.

“So when Slate has a big fight about a right-to-work clause in their contract, suddenly you have a whole new group of reporters who know, not just academically but in their actual life experience, what RTW [right-to-work] means,” Jaffe said. “And thus you see the rise of new and informed labor journalists.” They may not have a decade on the labor beat, as Jaffe does—or multiple decades, as many former labor reporters did. But it’s a start.

“I do think that the growth of unions in our industry will inevitably make the labor beat more vibrant, and you can already see it happening over the past couple of years,” said Nolan, who now writes both opinion and reported work on labor for Splinter. While he has refrained from writing about some organizing work that he was directly involved with, he doesn’t see being involved in a union as a detriment or conflict for those who cover unions.

“Labor rights and workplace rights are basic civil rights, and no reporter in any newsroom anywhere should be marginalized or pushed out of a coverage area because they engage in union activity,” he said. “Casting union activity as a type of bias that somehow ruins a journalist’s professionalism is a back door way for employers to crack down on people’s ability to build strong unions. No reporter anywhere should fear exercising their own labor rights as loudly as they need to.”

Loomis believes that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 pushed legacy publications to embrace more radical and pro-worker ideas, such as the op-ed Loomis himself wrote for The New York Times last year making the case for a federal job guarantee. But while he does think that the rise of the digital media organizing is very important, having union newsrooms dedicated to covering labor issues won’t in and of itself be enough. Because, as he ominously asked, “what’s the future of digital media?”

The future may be grim, but the historic union drive at The Los Angeles Times revealed what the alternative might look like for non-union publications: systematic cuts to editorial budgets combined with flagrant pay (and behavior) at the senior-management level. In organizing General Otis’ publication, the L.A. Times Guild may have not only saved themselves, but the paper on the whole.

That exploitative business model is employed in digital media too, where owners are increasingly relying on lean editorial departments and underpaid interns and freelancers in the pursuit of profits. While there’s no telling if layoffs at Buzzfeed would have been any less horrible if the the newsroom organized before staff was slashed by 15 percent last month, it certainly would not have hurt. It may be that embracing labor—and the stories of the workers behind the movement—as both a beat and an organizing principle is the best path toward finding that elusive future.

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