When Sarah Jaffe began her career as a journalist in 2009, nobody wanted to publish the kinds of stories she was interested in reporting, which were mostly stories about labor and workers.
“It was hard going, even in the places that publish a lot of my stuff now,” said Jaffe, who has written for In These Times, Dissent, The Nation and others.
“At first, if you couldn’t hook stuff to a national news story, people were not really interested.”
As union membership shrank in America over the last several decades, so too did the number of journalists reporting on the lives of working people. In 2015, many media commentators cited the buyout of longtime New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse as a sign of the labor reporter’s end.
Five years on, it appears that such obituaries were greatly exaggerated: People who can write with authority on unions and workers have become a journalistic commodity, especially in the progressive press, and Jaffe — who once struggled to pitch stories — is set to publish her second book in January. On Twitter, along with the obligatory publicity and professional info, her bio proudly proclaims: “labor journo before it was cool.”
Work became a story again, and storytellers started to see themselves as workers
While unions and labor coverage declined, discontent among American workers was fast approaching a breaking point in 2011. Anger at the economic status quo boiled over that year in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, whose “1% vs. the 99%” sloganeering became the core of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Those same years saw the rise of the SEIU’s Fight for $15 and a Union campaign, and the intervening half-decade has seen an outbreak of strikes by teachers, auto workers, graduate students and others.
“I think part of the reason [labor reporting] has gotten more prevalent is that workers have made it impossible to ignore organizing,” Jaffe said.
Just as importantly, the journalists tasked with covering these uprisings began to take the issues being raised by their subjects and applying them to their own workplaces. A wave of organizing began to hit newsrooms, from legacy publications like the Los Angeles Times and The New Republic to digital natives like Vox, Slate and Buzzfeed. Many labor journalists who talked with Blue Tent see the union drives as inspiring more — and better — coverage of unions.
“It's just a fact that the more familiarity you have with unions and how they work and operate, the better your reporting will be,” said Chris Brooks, a union organizer and journalist who frequently writes for Labor Notes.
In 2017, Rachel Cohen helped to organize the small staff of The American Prospect, one of the few publications that kept its eye on the labor beat even as unionism declined. Cohen’s work largely focuses on education, where teacher’s unions often drive stories, especially in recent strike waves. Writing in February, Cohen acknowledged that union membership has influenced the media’s labor coverage, but has not biased it.
“I have never felt my own union involvement has impeded my ability to report on other unions — and I have written some highly critical stories on teachers unions over the course of my career,” Cohen wrote.
“In general, I just don’t think it’s difficult to maintain the position that unions have been and remain a force for good in society,” Cohen explained in an email exchange with Blue Tent, “while also believing that individual unions and union leaders have erred, can err, and need accountability just like any other political institution. Strong labor journalism I think yields stronger unions.”
Worker uprisings and the changing nature of employment continue to drive coverage
Unionism is not the only area of coverage for today’s class of aspiring labor reporters. With companies like Uber and Task Rabbit driving a new “gig” economy, the nature of what technically makes a job a job or an employee an employee has never been more static.
“Fewer people have traditional full-time jobs these days than in the past, and our labor law has not caught up to the changes in technology and the changes in work and the changes in global capitalism,” said Hamilton Nolan, a labor reporter with In These Times.
“One of the biggest things that’s made organized labor as a whole much weaker,” Nolan said, “is that they’re sort of fighting with this set of rules that was designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Journalists covering these thorny questions may once again be able to relate, as digital media has become increasingly reliant on loosely defined contract workers (“Most full-time labor reporters today are freelancers,” said Nolan). These journalists often produce content for low pay with no benefits and few employment protections.
New labor reporters are still developing their knowledge
While much of the recent surge in labor reporting has come from progressive journalists and publications sympathetic to unions and workers, labor journalists who spoke to Blue Tent also stressed the need to report critical stories about the unions themselves. Take the recent scandals at the United Auto Workers, where high-ranking leaders allegedly took bribes from auto companies to tank contract negotiations.
“Rank-and-file auto workers and their families deserve better, and I think journalists shouldn’t pull any punches in providing a detailed accounting of what happened and why,” Brooks said.
But failing to fully report on inter-union issues may only be a symptom of the steep learning curve for new labor reporters.
“I went to the last AFL-CIO convention, and if you walk into the press room, it is not full of reporters from major media outlets, it’s a small number of reporters from relatively small news outlets,” Nolan said.
Brooks added to Nolan’s concerns, citing a lack of familiarity within many major outlets.
“I can't tell you how many times I’ve seen mainstream corporate news companies erroneously refer to the AFL as a union or call an employer lockout a union strike and get other basic labor facts wrong,” Brooks said.
Jaffe doesn’t just see competence as an issue, adding that the press should look to people with actual experience in labor issues and blue-collar work to do their reporting.
“Stop assuming that the only place you should hire people is from the Ivy League universities and actually think about the people that you’re trying to reach,” Jaffe said. Jaffe believes the decline in labor reporting should also be seen as linked to the decline of local newspapers.
“The newspapers that used to actually think of the working class as their readers as well as their subject matter are mostly gone,” Jaffe said.
All of the reporters interviewed by Blue Tent agree that further worker actions will continue into the next several years. This could especially be the case if political responses to economic demands remain largely silent, if not downright hostile, says Jaffe.
“Those of us who have been writing about the workplace and focusing on ordinary people’s lives have been focusing in the right place,” said Jaffe, “because that’s where change is going to have to be made, because there’s very little indication that politicians in America are going to do much about anything.”
But the American press may not be prepared for such a boon in labor stories.
“There already is nowhere near enough labor journalists to cover all of the grassroots activity we've seen since the pandemic began,” said Brooks.
Another way of looking at it: The well of stories for labor reporters, Ivy League or otherwise, will continue to runneth over.
