Working In These Times
Where Have All the Labor Writers Gone?
Consider the fate of the labor reporter. A long vanishing breed, there are only a few of them left in the country.
Businesses and their mouthpieces disparage them for daring to question their facts, their motives and for humanizing the stories that Corporate America wishes would remain distant and bloodless so nobody would pay attention to them.
Union supporters often question their support for organized labor. And they frequently accuse labor reporters of hyping their coverage in order to draw attention to their articles while failing to convey the deeper, more significant issues that confront unions.
Then there is the small collection of union crooks, and bullies who despise labor reporters because they dare to look under their unions’ hoods and to expose wrong-doing.
And yet the surviving labor reporters go on. They persist even though many of them have been scattered to the far corners of news operations by editors convinced that their stories no longer matter, and despite the crushing presence of business news that treats workers and unions as if they were invisible and unconnected to what goes on.
New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse is one of these survivors. He was recently snarled in a dispute with some union officials that says something about the job’s many thankless hassles.
In November, he wrote an article detailing complaints of current and former members of Unite Here, the hotel and restaurant workers' union, with what they described as a longstanding practice known as pink-sheeting.
Citing interviews with “more than a dozen organizers,” Greenhouse detailed workers’ allegations that they were pressured to detail personal issues that they said were later used against them as a way to control or manipulate them.
John W. Wilhelm, Unite Here’s president, who was quoted as saying that he condemned such tactics, also described its presence within in the union as “rare.” But he also told Greenhouse that he was “cracking down on what pink sheeting existed.”
Not long after the article appeared, the Union of Unite Here Staff (UUHS) issued a public letter, heaping a mountain of complaints onto Greenhouse’s shoulders. The group accused the story of being founded on “trumped claims” from disgruntled former staffers, and of failing to link the complaints to the larger dispute that not long ago drove the former hotel workers and garment workers unions to abruptly break up their union marriage.
What’s Greenhouse's take on these gripes?
Citing Wilhelm’s own admission that such abuses have existed and accounts from others familiar with them, he doesn’t think the complaints are made up.
Nor does he think he failed to point out the battling between the unions.
Indeed, the story did talk about the break-up and cited as well Wilhelm’s supporters who said that the complaints were coming from his union’s foes.
Could he have fleshed out more in detail the roots of pink-sheeting within organized labor? Possibly, I think. Could he have moved higher in the story the details about the unions’ toxic break-up? Possibly.
But questioning his “journalistic integrity,” doesn’t fit well.
Not when you consider reporting over the years about union victories ignored by most of the mainstream media, otherwise untold stories about companies’ abusive practices that unions stood up against, and stories about unions and their leaders that reached more than some husbands and young children.
It’s a pain delivering bad news about unions when they are so down on their luck, but that’s one of the burdens of being a fair and honest labor reporter.
It’s also a responsibility.
I know, because I spent quite a long time doing the job, and can tell you all about the rewards and headaches, among them angry words hurled at you by union officials who say you are not on their side.
But truly you are not on their side.
You are there to tell the truth, to tell the human story, and to make sure nobody forgets that workers and unions count. And that’s a fact nobody should deny.
Stephen Franklin was the Chicago Tribune's labor and workplace reporter until August 2008.
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Comments
Truly an excellent piece explaining the dilemmas of being a conscientious and sharp labor reporter like Steve Greenhouse.
As the editor for 14 years of the Racine Labor, which survived 60 years as probably the most radical “official” labor weekly in the nation, I certainly saw my share of bad reporting on the labor movement, some of which is chronicled in articles in Extra! and Norman Solomon and Martin Lee’s Unreliable Sources.
But most of labor had no clue on how to respond to ill-informed or biased coverage, because labor hierarchies never provided any training on dealing with the media.
For example, which Schlitz Brewing announced that it was closing its Milwaukee brewery in the midst of a strike, none of the local’s leaders could be found to comment for about a week. It was only when the IAM’s legendary President William Winpisinger came to Milwaukee on another matter than labor responded at all—and the IAM had only a small membership in the plant.
To the extent that labor leaders like local union presidents are taught anything about the media, it is to avoid commenting if at all possible. Then, if compelled to comment, the response was likely to be, “We don’t negotiate through the newspapers. We negotiate at the bargaining table.”
In other words, labor was admitting to a strategy of ceding the media battlefield to corporations. It was also confessing to a strategy of labor imagining itself big and powerful enough to take on Corporate America without using the media to spread labor’s message (to the extent it had one) and cultivate allies.
Only a few exceptional labor leaders in past years—like the late Winpisinger and the recently-passed Rudy Kuzel of the UAW (whom I profiled for workinginthesetimes.com)—developed any facility in projecting labor’s message to the media.
Finally, with new AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and the USW’s Leo Girard, labor now has some strong and articulate voices at the national level. They clearly understand the importance of developing a clear message and using national media (esp. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show) to project it.
Unfortunately, Trumka and Girard are arriving at a time when the ranks of labor reporters at daily papers have been thoroughly depleted, as Stephen Franklin reminds us in his fine contribution.
Roger Bybee
Details about the UNITE-HERE story aside, I completely sympathize with both Steves and all the half-dozen good labor reporters who are hanging on across the country - -I’ve worked as a communications professional for unions for the past 3 years, and it is LAUGHABLY difficult to get working people’s voices heard in the American corporate media. Trying to talk to an average newspaper, TV or radio, news outlet, you get put in the weird position of having to talk to the “Business” beat reporters, who have absolutely no context or understanding of a) what unions are and what they do, b) what workers are and what they do, and c) how to explain and cover it for the general public.
The complete absence of recognition of people’s identity as workers in our national conversation is a scary indicator of the entrenchment of corporate-hegemony in our society.
There are some rank and file workers who write about labor.
I know - I’m one of them.
I’m Gregory A. Butler, an African American union carpenter in New York City. I’ve been in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters for 17 years (6 years in the now disbanded local 17 in Harlem and the Bronx, and the last 11 years in local 608 on the west side of Manhattan) and I’ve been a shop steward for the last 11 years.
I’ve also run the GANGBOX: Construction Workers News Service since 1999 (these days, our online home is at http://gangboxnews.blogspot.com )
And, I’m the author of two books “DISUNITED BROTHERHOODS ...race, racketeering and the fall of the New York construction unions” [iUniverse Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2006] and “LOST TOWERS ...inside the World Trade Center cleanup [iUniverse Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2006].
I’m also working on my third book “UNION FAIL ...the death spiral of the New York labor movement” - forthcoming in 2010.
Hey, the best way to deal with the bad coverage we get in the media is to become our own labor journalists - that’s what I did!