Book Review: No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class,by Christopher R. Martin

A Critical Appreciation of Christopher Martin’s No Longer Newsworthy

Christopher Martin’s recent No Longer Newsworthy (2019) provides a timely, insightful answer to the question: Why did US journalists, and the country’s broad public, lose the ability to recognize the existence of a working class? Martin answers by charting labor journalism’s decline since 1970, pointing to the many consequences of this decline for workers and even the fabric of our democracy. He joins recent labor scholars who chart how the death of the New Deal coalition and rise of neoliberalism produced a cultural shift in which the very concept of “the working class” disappeared from American political discourse. In its place, Martin shows, the mainstream media became cheerleaders of the 1%, aided and abetted by its new focus on the “upscale consumer” and the glamorous “entrepreneur.” Consequently, the print and broadcast news allowed growing disparities of wealth and income and the dramatic deterioration of economic life for workers to largely escape notice. In this, the media has failed its essential role as a pillar of democracy; that is, its responsibility to “monitor power and offer a voice to the voiceless” (p. 134).

US newspapers once maintained a robust “labor beat,” delivered by expert labor reporters who portrayed the experiences and institutions of New Deal–era workers. These reporters were appreciative of the role of unions in providing needed countervailing power against US employers. Since 1970, the labor beat’s disappearance was driven by the same structural forces that drove the decline of unionized American manufacturing but also transformed the media as a business. The pernicious consequences include a media credulous toward far-right corporate narratives and the media’s complicity in the rise of Trump.

The causal forces undergirding Martin’s analysis is a creative destruction story familiar to historically minded employment relations scholars. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, new structural forces—globalization, automation, mergers, and the consequences of a new shareholder primacy in corporate governance—changed the US political economy and in turn the labor markets. These forces first hollowed out and then transformed the newspaper industry, the modern news media’s original core. Prior to 1960, family-owned newspapers were economically strong and largely free of shareholder pressures. Large, urban, working-class audiences were central to their readership. At the height of organized labor’s New Deal–era power, many newspaper owners amply sponsored expert coverage of workers, unions, and their issues, with notable exceptions such as the famously anti-union Los Angeles Times. Martin includes an important caveat: White newspaper owners explicitly redlined coverage of the Black working class, ignoring African American communities (p. 64).

The now-familiar dynamics of creative destruction began after 1960. Newspapers faced a saturated and eroding market, as suburban flight sapped circulation and advertising revenues. Television news quickly gained importance, which was a development powerful enough to kill off major national weeklies such as the Saturday Evening Post and Life. Consolidation followed. As newspapers folded in significant numbers, two-newspaper cities declined. Large chains, such as Gannett and Knight Ridder, snapped up independent local papers, just when these companies became publicly traded entities. Stockholders now joined advertisers and readers as principals; by the 1980s, stockholders were the only principal that mattered. This shift eroded interest in a labor beat and eased newspapers’ own union-busting of their typesetter unions to pave the way for automation.

These developments ushered in a new business model. MBA-driven strategies encouraged abandonment of dedicated, non-affluent readers. Newspapers now targeted the suburban, college-educated, affluent readers the advertisers increasingly prized. Coverage of rural and urban working-class communities fell by the wayside. With television as an alternative, and with papers no longer covering their communities or issues, working-class readers stopped buying papers, which accelerated circulation decline. Labor reporting was displaced by travel, investment, food, and lifestyle beats that appealed to and “hailed” upscale consumers. Labor reporters either retired without being replaced, were reassigned, or laid off. Without expert labor reporters, the news media now framed labor strikes as inconveniences to consumers, not struggles for equity or justice.

What is shocking about this story is just how consciously the media abandoned working-class readers. In industry trade publications marketed to advertisers, newspapers turned decisively to focus on “quality demographics” rather than mass circulation, driving the shift to privilege “affluent moderns” and “influentials” (pp. 88, 96, 100) over the working class. This development went in tandem with corporate owners’ willingness to bust their own workers’ unions—previously unthinkable but now less problematic.

A new editorial focus on business eclipsed labor reporting. Newspapers in particular now hired large numbers of business reporters, far more than those who previously covered labor. Business pages offered a new theory of labor issues: They are solved individually, not collectively. “Job coaching,” not organizing, became the Rx for workers’ challenges, assuming “that all readers hold or desire such white-collar or pink-collar jobs, that they aspire to climb a careerist corporate ladder, and that the solution for any job dissatisfaction is to figure out how to either ingratiate oneself to the boss or look for another job” (p. 122). Personal finance reporting promoted a language of individual stock holding as the new economic democracy that made unions, collective action, and employment policy unnecessary. Martin points out the irony that, as wealth and income inequality accelerated, celebration of upward mobility through personal investment—and not examination of structural inequalities—became a journalistic focus.

As mainstream journalism found the working class “no longer newsworthy,” an innovative right-wing press—targeting conservative whites, including workers but also business owners and retirees—stepped into the vacuum. From direct mail, to cable news, to Twitter, right-wing media built a cultural ecosystem in one part of the working class—that is, white workers, hailing them directly (though not on class issues). A key through line in Martin’s book is how this development not only made Trump possible but also heavily shaped the flawed mainstream coverage of his victory.

Martin also charts the disappearance of labor from popular culture and political discourse. Post-1970, presidential candidates and presidents abandoned the language of the working class and their once-bipartisan support for collective bargaining. In its place, leaders of both parties adopted the neoliberal language of “working middle-class families,” “consumers,” “Wall Street,” “investors,” and “entrepreneurs.” Mainstream journalists uncritically conveyed this new terminology, behind which workers and the role of and need for legitimate countervailing power disappeared. This move mirrored a new discourse celebrating the Horatio Algers and Rockefellers of our era: the term consumer replaced citizen; working class and middle class were bested by Wall Street. By 2000, entrepreneur was more common than working class, indicative of a new “wealth porn”—celebratory coverage of CEOs, finance wizards, and the super-rich (pp. 147–51).

Martin deepens our understanding of how New Deal liberalism was supplanted by a neoliberal, free-market ideology hostile to unions and government labor standards. Notably, he embraces a political economy familiar to the Labor and Employment Relations Association’s institutional tradition, particularly the necessity and legitimacy of countervailing power, and how crucial it is that this perspective that once undergirded coverage of the working class has been lost. For example, Martin shows how journalists began to uncritically repeat the new conservative economic consensus that privileges untrammeled “free markets”—a construct using theoretical deduction rather than empirical analysis to conclude that unions and government regulation are hindrances. To illustrate, Martin interrogates widespread news coverage of right-wing economic propaganda; specifically, conservative labeling of government regulations, especially those preventing worker abuse, as “job killers.” By the 1990s, this term became a “politically charged bludgeon” used by “Republicans and business groups to attack government’s legitimate regulatory role—protecting consumers, workers, public health, and the environment” (p. 165). The news media, especially the Associated Press whose stories appeared in 3,000 papers daily, channeled this narrative with astonishing credulity. In the language of mass communication scholars, frequent media coverage of a topic is “agenda setting.” Worse, uncritical adoption of a highly political “frame” normalizes spin as fact. When agenda setting and framing go unchallenged, it becomes propaganda, which “selects facts or invents them to serve the real purpose: persuasion and manipulation” (p. 164). Propaganda and journalism are opposites; what journalists do if they do their job correctly is to verify facts and truth. This the media failed to do in the case of “job killers,” challenging the term’s use in fewer than 10% of stories that mentioned it. Thus, journalism “of assertion” replaced “journalism of verification” (pp. 178–79).

Martin concludes his fine book by modeling effective labor reporting. He flips the class script on “job killing” by demonstrating how financial engineering boosting CEO pay and private equity windfalls has itself been a potent—and verifiable—source of “job killing” (pp. 181–92). He highlights two examples. When private equity owners’ damaging actions led to the demise of union jobs in the conglomerate that included the classic Hostess baked goods, most news coverage highlighted consumers losing access to Twinkies, and not the betrayals of workers by private equity owners. Similarly, the curious coverage of Red for Ed teacher strikes left many journalists surprised that workers in red states with master’s degrees were falling behind economically and willing to rebel. And Martin heralds that, in the New Deal era, both the press and the government equipped American workers with countervailing power against employers, concluding that “[t]oday, capital has no equal counterbalancing force in government or journalism. . . . with little power in an economy rife with inequality, where does one go, what does one do?” (p. 200).

His recommendations should not surprise. News enterprises should stop focusing on only an upscale audience; have beats on the diverse groups that make up the working class; and adopt an informed recognition of the existence of a working class, giving voice to their experiences and struggles while highlighting the movements and institutions that hold promise for improving their lives. As Steven Greenhouse and Christopher Martin discuss in this symposium, there are green shoots of such a labor journalism. For Martin, continuity that generates expertise in covering labor—the core capacity journalists wield to speak truth to power—is essential. Such expertise would recognize how far the working class has moved away from the day when it was predominantly white, male, and blue collar, which would serve as a corrective of the failure of the news media to cover diverse communities even during the labor beat’s heyday. (See Townsend and Hillard’s essay in this symposium.) An effective citizenry is informed by journalism, and thus covering the labor beat is one of American democracy’s most consequential needs. Martin’s powerful prescriptive story is very much part of the policy agenda for the broad community of labor scholars and activists.

Michael Hillard

Professor of Economics

University of Southern Maine

mhillard@maine.edu

Newsworthy Work? The Marginal Status of Feminized Labor

Against the backdrop of the profound social, economic, and political upheaval wrought by COVID-19, media accounts abound registering the impact of the pandemic on US workers. While front-page features chronicle the perilous plight of “essential workers,” news reports laud the unionization efforts of hourly wage earners and gig economy participants alike. Even fast-food industry workers—a category of employee long unheeded by media outlets—are garnering visibility amid coverage of localized efforts to furnish them greater job security (de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, December 17, 2020). But lest we forget that this ostensible surge in attention to the working class is a relatively new, or perhaps more aptly, renewed development, Christopher Martin’s No Longer Newsworthy (2019) lucidly reminds us. Both insightful and compelling, the book makes clear that the recent wave of pandemic-related coverage—including the championing of collective bargaining processes—marks an abrupt departure from the status that American labor occupied for much of the past half century.

Martin devotes considerable attention to the role of news frames in steering public understandings of work and the working class. This analytical focus is perhaps not surprising given that his first monograph, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (2004), offered an in-depth treatment of media narratives of the labor movement. In the current book, Martin details the mainstream media’s gradual abandonment of the working class and the subsequent waning of public support for organized labor. The nation’s transition from producer- to consumer-centrism offers productive scaffolding for the patterned recasting of labor strikes—from expressions of collective worker strife into “consumer inconveniences” (p. 111). What, in the 1940s, represented workers’ struggles for socially inclusive growth was, in later decades, supplanted by accounts of frustrated commuters facing traffic delays and cancelled trips.

Martin demonstrates that this shift was also a response to the changing political economies of newspapers, which—like other mass media industries of the late 20th century—deployed market segmentation practices in earnest. The collective upshot of such industrial activities was, as Joseph Turow details, an “unrelenting slicing and dicing of America” (Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World, 1997). Indeed, through a rich analysis of the newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher, Martin shows how news executives sought to lure advertisers with the assurance that their papers would provide access to the “right kind” of readers (p. 70). This was, of course, a euphemism for overwhelmingly white, middle- and upper-class audiences—those believed to hold the lion’s share of consumer spending power. Together, these dynamic media frames and market segment logics reflected the broader onward march of America into what Lizabeth Cohen has persuasively described as A Consumers’ Republic (2004).

The new market focus of the news industry had significant implications for the nature and tone of journalism, too. Martin contends that both a symptom and a consequence of attention to perceived upmarket tastes was a progressive displacement of the labor beat. Instead of covering unionization efforts, journalists from the 1970s onward were tasked with covering finance and providing fodder about the workplace for dedicated “lifestyle” sections. With the notable exception of the “social justice” commitment of longtime Chicago Tribune columnist Carol Kleiman, Martin notes how much of the content in the workplace “lifestyle” sections was glib—if not utterly frivolous. As evidence that the halcyon days of labor reporting had gone, he offers recent headlines from the Chicago Tribune workplace column, which include features on “doughnuts,” “office part[ies],” and the place of “emotions” in the office (p. 122). The presumed audience of such fluff, Martin explains, is “pink- and white-collar workers,” and more pointedly, “striving individuals . . . laboring in cubicles and trying to climb the corporate ladder” (p. 120). In this consumerist media landscape, the realities of working-class labor and struggle seem invisible.

As insightful as Martin’s assessment of labor coverage along the axis of class is, the story looks somewhat different through the lens of gender. Conventional class-struggle journalism no doubt dwindled in the late 20th century, but this argument is complicated by the news media’s relationship to gendered labor and, more precisely, what social theorist Lisa Adkins has described as a cultural feminization of work (“Cultural feminization,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2001). Indeed, lifestyle directives on successfully navigating the service sectors—slight as they might seem through a grittier lens—are still labor coverage of a sort.

Recent years have seen significant workplace stories and events shoehorned into “style,” “lifestyle,” or even “fashion” sections—presumably because of their focus on feminized (read: less important) categories of work. A 2013 feature on “The no-limits job,” for example, explored the grueling—near inhumane—working conditions of entry-level employment in the media and publishing sectors (Wayne, New York Times, March 1, 2013). The feature reported a staggering 68% decline in the net worth of those younger than 35 and quoted a new-media manager who sought to “hire a 22-22-22,” that is, “a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.” Tellingly, the article appeared in the Times’ “Fashion” section, and all of the young workers interviewed were women. The following year, an article detailing the various modes of exploitation that characterize internships was similarly relegated to the “Fashion” section (Williams, New York Times, February 14, 2014). Such reports of mostly women workers failed to register the same level of attention they would have gained had they received more prominent placement in the paper. But, of course, women’s work has long been an afterthought of capitalist economies. Even a well-researched, post-#MeToo article compiling legal advice for “When you experience sexual harassment at work” (Safronova, New York Times, November 10, 2017) was sidelined from broader conversations when, instead of a headline feature, it appeared in the “Style” section.

The marginalization of feminized work runs parallel to what Martin frames as a class-based segmentation of the workplace and the winnowing away of coverage of the unionized and industrial working class. Journalism scholars such as Carolyn Kitch and Kimberly Voss have offered important perspectives on the historical value of “women’s sections”—style, fashion, entertainment, and the like. In a 2013 Columbia Journalism Review feature chronicling the fraught framing of “women’s pages,” Sarah Jaffe explained that “while reserving a separate space for ‘women’s issues’ meant that things like parenting, fashion, and the beginnings of the feminist movement got column inches, the separation also demarcated the women’s page as the site of less newsy content, a ‘pink ghetto’ that still persists” (“From women’s page to style section,” Columbia Journalism Review, 2013). Such a patterned sidelining of gender-coded labor has had the same impact as the other shifts Martin critiques: It has left minor voices at the margins, thwarting the kind of mass political strife that spurs collective action.

Rather than a critique, this gendered insight is an invitation for further research. It expands labor struggles beyond the unionized working class that are similarly rendered invisible; stories of overwork and exploitation similarly hemmed in as of-interest to limited readership. And the point goes further. Independent of such news coverage, labor itself underwent a number of crucial shifts in the period covered in this book. The recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the neoliberal assault on unions and frayed social safety nets, the ascent of postindustrialism, and the diversification of the labor market—together—present notable challenges to what exactly we understand labor and labor struggles to be.

There is no doubt that Martin’s rigorously researched and elegantly written book makes a compelling argument about the shifting political economy of labor struggles in the media. It shows how social institutions—most especially politics, media, and finance—have played a role in the staggering fissures in our economy. In thinking about the role that these fractures have played in diverting collective advocacy, we can also use Martin’s framing to understand at least one other mainstream media abandonment: feminized labor.

Brooke Erin Duffy

Associate Professor of Communication

Cornell University

bduffy@cornell.edu

Newsworthy for Whom?

Christopher Martin’s No Longer Newsworthy (2019) opens with a tantalizing challenge: Why did the mainstream US news media resuscitate use of the term “working class” that excluded much of the actual working class? Martin chronicles the recent disappearance of a labor beat, and with it, coverage of the working class. Trump’s surprise 2016 election revived journalists’ use of the term, but in deeply flawed ways. The media essentialized working class to mean only white, male, and blue collar. After the election, it sought to explain Trump’s surprise election, embarking on journalistic “safaris” to the heartland states that swung the election to Trump. While curious of these voters’ political allegiances and their individual stories, journalists, lacking labor beat expertise, were incurious about telling a larger story about all who might reasonably be considered working class (Jaffe, “Whose class is it anyway?” 2019: 87; Tankersley, The Riches of This Land, 2020).

Martin deconstructs this new class narrative. Essentializing white working-class swing state voters as the key to Trump’s 2016 victory misses many other crucial factors, including voter suppression targeting voters of color, Clinton’s poor campaign strategy and voter misogyny toward her, FBI Director Comey’s actions and Russian interference, and voter exhaustion with Democrats after eight years of the Obama presidency. To illustrate, Martin dissects the flawed coverage of Trump’s signal election-year moment—his commitment to prevent Carrier, a division of United Technologies’ Corporation (UTC), from moving 1,400 Indiana factory jobs to Mexico. After forgetting his early promise to take action, Trump was prompted by Fox News after the election to follow up. The national media repeated Fox’s framing of Carrier as a political story that emphasized white, blue-collar worker/victims whose livelihoods Trump resuscitated. Stories featured grateful white male workers, whose gratitude for Trump explained his victory. In fact, Carrier’s workforce was 60% black and 40% female, and its union, United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1999, was governed by a board of eight black and three white officials. Many members supported, and the local had endorsed, Bernie Sanders. If told as a labor story, journalists would have noted all of this and emphasized Local 1999’s activism in protesting UTC’s plans; critically analyzed UTC’s misuse of its deep pockets, including a golden parachute for a previously fired CEO and $10 billion in recent stock buybacks; and debunked the weakness of Trump’s ad hoc actions—Mike Pence, still Indiana’s governor, showered UTC with $7 million in tax giveaways, ultimately saving only half of the 1,400 jobs—as a substantive policy method for addressing deindustrialization. Martin concludes: “In the Trumpian economic populism, the white, male Carrier workers the news media featured, to the exclusion of others, suggested which Americans have jobs worth saving” (2019: 43). Martin thus opens the door to a critical discussion, whether journalistic best practice, or scholarly work: How should we understand the US working class?

Unlike journalists’ narrow construction, Martin joins scholars who insist that how we understand, study, and cover the US working class be grounded in a critical analysis of social identities and the overlapping systems of oppression that have an impact on workers. Following Michael Zweig, he rejects stratification theories of class that ignore or elide structural systems of power and oppression (Zweig, The Working Class Majority, 2000). To Zweig, the working class includes those who must work for a wage and have little power at work or in society per se; 62% of the labor force meets Zweig’s definition (Zweig 2000: 28–29). This definition is structural, embedded in a larger political economy, that is best understood as “the forces acting upon workers” including globalization, shareholder primacy, employer attacks on worker power, and fissuring that has debased employment, made it hard to retain or join a union, and broadly eroded equity, voice, security, and mobility (Fink, “The great escape: How a field survived hard times,” 2011: 8).

What about working-class social identities? Less than 25% of the working class is blue collar, including occupations such as meatpacking, in which only one-fifth of frontline workers are white (King, “Counting the working class for working-class studies,” 2019; Fremstad, Rho, and Brown, “Meatpacking workers are a diverse group who need better protections,” 2020). A majority are in low-wage and precarious jobs, with median annual earnings of approximately $26,000. Crucially, the working class’s demographic composition—43% workers of color and 46% female—belies the Trumpian white male trope. Thus, “working class” should conjure nursing home, fast food, janitorial, and fulfillment and call center workers who are female and/or a person of color (Draut, “Understanding the working class,” 2018).

The list of what female, LGBTQ, and BIPOC workers face that white men do not is long. The heralded New Deal–era labor market, and its labor and social legislation, largely bypassed women and workers of color. Structural racism brings distinct oppressions: occupational segregation into the dirtiest, toughest, and lowest paid jobs; a 400-year history of persistent barriers to acquiring the quality education and wealth that many white workers have had access to; and racist treatment by employers, managers, and white workers. Women of all races still cope with the double shift, persistent occupational segregation, and sexual harassment on the job. Immigrant workers still perform the tough stoop labor required to pick our food, and they face racism and the many burdens of undocumented status. And disparities in exposure to and deaths from COVID-19 faced by “essential workers” have made the pandemic’s impact a story of the contemporary working class, understood through an intersectional lens that places workers of color and women in the public jobs most exposed to the pandemic. Workplace oppression is further interwoven with the many-sided racist phenomena these workers face when they punch out of work, as the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd so painfully illustrate.

It is important to note that scholars must be cautious in holding the New Deal era as a “Golden Age,” as it could easily leave us to celebrate a period when, for example, Jim Crow and other discriminatory institutions are alive and well. However, in looking back retrospectively to earlier centuries, and in adopting a critical and intersectional lens to this periodization, we are able to fully acknowledge America’s long-standing legacy of exclusion and oppression—one marked with annexation, genocide, and slavery—while bringing into focus the reality that many marginalized workers were not beneficiaries of the social contract of this era. While Martin, indeed, points to the media’s purposeful exclusion of African American communities in reporting, its failure to hire Black reporters, and its overall whitewashing of the working class, his framing that the news media “abandoned” the working class runs the risk of leaving the reader to nostalgize an era that while seen by many as progressive was at the same time exclusionary and regressive. In fact, with this more critical framing, the term “abandon” (as offered in the book’s title) no longer holds up, as we come to recognize that the mainstream media never served the full working class.

Noted labor journalist Sarah Jaffe describes the flaws and “work” being done by journalists and social observers who participate in what she calls “whitewashing of the working class”; that is, holding up the white, male, blue-collar worker as “the” quintessential worker. She argues that journalists and the public have turned “white working class” into an identity category, bereft of understanding class based on “relationship(s) of power, one’s relationship to the workplace and the means of production” (Jaffe 2019: 95). If working class and white go together, “the corollary is that nonwhite people are not working” (p. 95); that is, the nonwhite are poor “takers’’ who live off of welfare and form an “underclass.” Crucially, this identity theory of the white working class reifies class as a characteristic that “is just something you are, as immutable as the color of your skin” (p. 96). Thus, the media are doing the work of establishing the appropriate barometer of what whiteness and the working class are, or are not, thereby not only contributing to the creation, reconstitution, and reproduction of our “common knowledge” notions of race, racial divisions, and politics but also preserving a construction of white racial privilege that “valoriz[es] . . . whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on racial caste” (Harris, “Whiteness as property,” 1993: 1713). In short, while the media are ostensibly concerned with covering and humanizing this forgotten segment of the American working class that has been left behind, it is also, paradoxically, affirming and defending the privilege that is attached to whiteness (Harris 1993). It is materially, symbolically, and ideologically embodied in the narrow ideal that, in fact, these workers, the voters in the blue, swing states, decided the outcome of the 2016 election, and it is they who truly matter.

This understanding of whiteness as a privileged position of social standing has historically 1) afforded white workers a public and psychological wage, compensating them for their low economic wages; and 2) formed the basis of a cross-class political alliance uniting white workers and capitalists against workers of color (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, 1935; Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, 2004). This cross-class alliance, then, which has largely benefited capitalists, works to sustain “a system of racial privilege and subordination that deflects attention from class, gender, and other grievances” (Olson 2004: 16) and, in turn, affixes a set of power relations that ensure the maintenance of American capitalist and political order.

Moreover, who the media are also matters. Stories must not be just about the problems that workers face; they must also be told by, for, and with workers. What story is told is just as important as how the story is told. In the past, workers of color and participants in labor movements had their own media that were decidedly not mainstream, but they existed. Media and news stories reflect assumptions not only about who is worthy to be covered, who is given humanity, or who is compelling, but also about who can be in the newsroom in the first place, and who has authority and power to frame reporting. The working-class experience is as broad and varied as ever, and thus, the media should make room for the working class in all of its diversity, both in its storytelling and in who makes up the media. With better representation, perhaps we would encounter more pieces wondering what “Black working-class voters” or “Latinx working-class voters” are thinking or doing.

What are the consequences of white-washed narratives of the working class? First, they keep us from acknowledging and adequately understanding the full breadth of the challenges that workers face. Second, they undermine strong and effective labor movements and forms of activism necessary for building broad-based, coalitional power among workers, which is crucial for the radical change required to achieve equality and justice for all workers. Addressing these consequences requires action. As noted, a stark increase in representation among journalists is obviously an important start. As scholars, journalists, or citizens, let us deploy frames in our work that recognize an insight that has been historically missing from most of our journalism and public discourse: Many “working classes” occur within a larger one, all of whom are newsworthy.

Phela I. Townsend

Doctoral Candidate

Rutgers University

phela.townsend@rutgers.edu

Michael Hillard

Professor of Economics

University of Southern Maine

mhillard@maine.edu

The Demise of Labor Journalism is Greatly Exaggerated

Ever since I began covering labor and workplace issues for the New York Times in 1995, I have heard complaints that labor journalism is on its death bed, that there isn’t nearly enough coverage of unions and workers. Well, to paraphrase a famous author, the demise of labor journalism is greatly exaggerated.

There’s no denying that the news media of today run fewer labor stories than they used to. I remember seeing a New York Times from the late 1940s that had six labor stories on the front page. Nowadays, fans of labor journalism are lucky if one labor-related story appears on the front page every week or two. To my mind, that doesn’t mean newspapers deliberately pay less attention to labor issues today than they did in decades past. In 1947, there were 270 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers—those stoppages involved a total of 1.6 million workers. Seven decades later, in 2017, there were just seven large work stoppages, involving a total of 25,000 workers. So of course there should have been more labor coverage in 1947 than in 2017.

Some knowledgeable readers will rush to point out that in 2018 there was an unusual surge of strikes, most notably the #RedforEd walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona. That year 487,000 workers were involved in major work stoppages, the highest number in 35 years. The media devoted plenty of coverage to those extraordinary statewide strikes; they became the lead story on the nightly news and newspaper front pages.

Putting 2018 aside, labor issues, that is, union issues, just aren’t as big today as they were in the late forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. The concomitant decline in coverage should thus be expected—the nation has gone from having nearly 35% of its workforce belonging in unions to just 10.8% today (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm). We’ve gone from an era when unions were heavyweight institutions in the public conversation, when John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and Jimmy Hoffa were household names, to an era when unions are rarely part of the public conversation. What percentage of Americans can name even one labor leader?

While unions are smaller, weaker, and less visible than in the postwar decades, the US workforce is larger than ever before, and for that reason, there should still be plenty of media coverage of workers, if not of labor unions. The number of workers in the United States has increased from 44 million in 1950 to 150 million today (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm), and that means there should be more coverage of workers, not less, than before—stories about sexual harassment, racial discrimination, egregious safety violations, or cheating immigrant workers out of the minimum wage. (I often remind people that the New Yorker’s and New York Times’ Harvey Weinstein exposés, as well as most #MeToo stories, were workplace stories—about workers being harassed and abused by their bosses or potential employers.)

Put another way, a major reason that unions receive less coverage is that they don’t make as much news or noise as in decades past; unions are simply not as big, powerful, or inspiring as they once were. But when labor unmistakably makes news, for instance, the #RedforEd strikes or a baseball players’ strike or a subway strike, the media are generally quick to cover the events. Editors and reporters are eager to cover big stories, and when workers engage in large-scale collective actions (which is more likely when union density is high), there will of course be more labor coverage than when union density declines and there is less collective action.

The first time I covered a winter meeting of the AFL-CIO’s executive council was in 1996; it was held at the lavish Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was the year after John Sweeney became AFL-CIO president, promising to reverse labor’s decline. If memory serves, at least 20 reporters were there, from the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Reuters, and from three or four television networks or stations. There were also reporters from the Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, and Newsday. (There were also several journalists from socialist newspapers.) The last time I covered an AFL-CIO winter meeting was 18 years later in Houston. It was 2014 (the year I retired from the Times), and there were just two reporters from major newspapers there—me and a reporter from the Houston Chronicle. There were also one wire service reporter and three reporters from socialist newspapers.

As unions have grown smaller and weaker, their activities are not on editors’ and reporters’ minds nearly as much as before, and they are generally not seen as nearly as important as when Walter Reuther led massive strikes against GM. In 2006, a month or two into an 82-day Goodyear strike that involved 14,000 workers, I proposed doing a story on the strike. One Times editor rejected the idea, telling me it’s just a private dispute between the company and its workers and why would that interest readers. It’s hard for me to imagine an editor saying that back in 1947—in an era when union battles were considered public concerns, an era when unions won gains and those gains often redounded to workers at other companies.

Allow me a few more thoughts on why labor coverage has declined. One reason, I submit, is that most Americans (including journalists) have stopped thinking of themselves so much as workers as was the case in the thirties, forties, and fifties, when being a worker and improving one’s lot as a worker were very much on people’s minds. The many strikes in those decades helped ensure that many people thought of themselves and their neighbors as workers. Today, I believe, many Americans think of themselves less as workers than as consumers or Red Sox fans or Facebook users or country and western lovers or Trump supporters.

Second, there has been a huge downsizing of the media, and that has resulted in less coverage of virtually everything, including labor and workers. As part of this downsizing, many newspapers reduced coverage of subjects that publishers and editors thought was less central and interesting to readers (and advertisers). This shift often meant plenty of continued coverage of politics, sports, Taylor Swift, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but less coverage of worker issues.

Third, and I agree with Chris Martin here (No Longer Newsworthy, 2019), the corporatization of the media, and the accompanying focus on more upscale issues, also helps explain the decline in labor and workplace coverage. In an era when the news media face brutal economic pressures, there has been an increased focus on running “sexy” stories, on stories that will get lots of clicks, and also on stories that attract upscale readers (to please advertisers). So there will accordingly be more stories about Beyoncé and vacations in Italy than about the misclassification of Uber drivers and truck drivers. Still, some labor issues are seen as sexy and having urgency—for example, the Fight for $15 in its early days and the walkout by 20,000 Google workers.

Part of the problem is that many unions and worker organizations simply haven’t done enough to make news. Many unions have grown conservative, and today’s labor leaders are not nearly as inspiring as Walter Reuther. When a union is deadlocked in negotiations about whether it will receive a 6.5% or a 7.5% pay raise over three years, no one should expect reporters to rush to cover that story. Editors want stories that will interest readers and viewers. A strike in which schoolteachers are demanding smaller class sizes and more nurses and librarians—a strike that involves community issues—will likely receive more coverage than a strike over a 6.5% or 7.5% raise and management’s demand that workers contribute more toward their health coverage. In other words, bargaining for the common good is likely to get more media coverage than bargaining for an extra 1%.

I often tell those who complain about a lack of labor coverage that they don’t realize how much very good labor coverage there is. Indeed, over the past year (I’m writing in January 2021), we’ve seen a surge in excellent labor reporting. A big reason for this is the shockingly shabby way that many employers have treated their workers during the pandemic. Many reporters have stepped up to do impressive stories on the terrible conditions that “essential workers” have too often faced. I remember a New Orleans radio station’s story that quoted a Walmart cashier who was alarmed about mask-less customers. She said she felt more “sacrificial” than “essential” (https://www.wwno.org/post/walmart-workers-say-they-face-choice-their-safety-or-their-paycheck). We’ve seen excellent journalism about meatpacking plants that became petri dishes for spreading COVID-19, the inexcusable shortage of PPE for health care workers, the mortal dangers faced by bus drivers, dangerous conditions at some Amazon warehouses, a lack of masks and hand sanitizer for some McDonald’s workers, retail workers being threatened and even assaulted for asking shoppers to wear masks, the many women who have dropped out of the workforce because of a lack of child care during the pandemic, and the dangers that teachers in the Sunbelt have faced after being ordered back to classrooms while their communities were raging hotspots. Even though there aren’t as many workplace reporters as before, it’s great that when important worker issues jump to the fore—like the plight of essential workers—many non-labor beat journalists rush to cover them.

During the massive downsizing of newspaper staffs, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune all stopped having full-time workplace reporters. For a time, I was the last full-time labor beat reporter at a daily newspaper in the United States. Friends joked that I was a dinosaur facing extinction.

But I’m happy to report that in recent years, there has been a resurgence in the number of labor beat reporters and in workplace reporting. Part of that came during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and its depressing aftermath, when many editors and reporters saw the need to cover the millions of jobless workers and the suffering and challenges that they and their families faced. That recession made many news organizations rediscover the importance of workers and worker issues. At the time, many reporters who normally didn’t cover labor issues, such as economics reporters, began covering worker issues in depth. Another reason for the resurgence in workplace reporting has been the growth of news websites, like HuffPost, Vox, Vice, the Root, Refinery29, and Salon, which have a left-of-center readership that is often interested in worker issues. Many of them are younger readers who had a hard time during and after the Great Recession, many were Bernie Sanders supporters interested in social justice and income inequality, many of them care deeply about conditions for workers of color and women workers. I also believe that Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 helped lead to a lasting increase in worker coverage by pushing two important, but under-reported issues into the public conversation: income inequality and the prevalence of low-wage work.

While it’s true that many newspapers no longer have labor reporters, there are many journalists who closely follow worker issues: Alexia Fernández Campbell (Center for Public Integrity), Michelle Chen (the Nation), Rachel Cohen (the Intercept), Josh Eidelson (Bloomberg/BusinessWeek), Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz (Chicago Tribune), Mike Elk (Payday Report), Michael Grabell (ProPublica), Lauren Kaori Gurley (Vice/Motherboard), Sarah Jaffe (Dissent), Dave Jamieson (HuffPost), Katie Johnston (Boston Globe), Kim Kelly (Teen Vogue), Jane McAlevey (the Nation), Claire Cain Miller (New York Times), Hamilton Nolan (In These Times), Juliana Feliciano Reyes (Philadelphia Inquirer), Margot Roosevelt (Los Angeles Times), Eli Rosenberg (Washington Post), Michael Sainato (Guardian), Noam Scheiber (New York Times), L. M. Sixel (Houston Chronicle), Nitasha Tiku (Washington Post). Plus Kim Moody, Jane Slaughter, and their colleagues at Labor Notes. I’ve no doubt forgotten several others—please forgive me for that. There are some retail beat reporters who have done a terrific job covering retail workers and the pandemic over the past year, among them Abha Bhattarai (Washington Post), Michael Corkery (New York Times), and Nathaniel Meyersohn (CNN.com).

I remember when Professor Harley Shaiken (UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education) told me, at a time when union density had fallen several years in a row, that if unions didn’t exist, someone would have to invent them. The same can be said about labor journalism: If it didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it—or reinvent it. And that’s what we’ve been seeing in recent years.

Steven Greenhouse

Retired labor reporter with the New York Times and author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

steven.greenhouse@gmail.com

Revived by the Pandemic: A Historic Moment in Reporting on Labor and the Working Class

As I argue in No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream News Media Abandoned the Working Class, for more than four decades, the mainstream news media had largely ignored covering labor unions and the working class in favor of more focus on news about upscale consumers and their lifestyles. The lack of coverage has been compounded more recently by the dismal state of the newspaper industry, in which more than a quarter of the nation’s newspapers, half of its journalists, and half of its newspaper readers have disappeared during the past 15 years. Newspapers perform a majority of the basic reporting in the United States, so the loss is profound.

In recent years, there has been a minor resurgence in labor/workplace news coverage in some mainstream newspapers and several digital outlets. But, in 2020, it was a virus that made labor/workplace reporting more viral and vital. By mid-March 2020 in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in massive shutdowns, idling more workers than at any time since the Great Depression. At the same time, certain jobs—including medical workers, custodians, transit workers, corrections officers, meatpackers, nursing home staff, teachers, and farmworkers—were deemed “essential,” and those laborers (mostly women and people of color) were often pressed into service in unsafe conditions.

When No Longer Newsworthy was published in 2019, none of us could anticipate that COVID-19 would sweep the planet in less than a year. Journalist An Xiao Mina, for NiemanLab in December 2020, called the pandemic a flashing warning light, a canary in the coal mine:

It is a biological entity with sociological roots and geopolitical effects. And as it harms Black, Indigenous, and people of color and global south communities more than others, as it strikes the elderly and the infirm and the underpaid and refugees and migrants . . . we are reaping the visible consequences of decades of neglect.

The “visible consequences of decades of neglect” were right there in front of us. In the year before the pandemic, 11.8% of Americans were in poverty, 20.1% lived below 150% of the poverty line, and 28.9% lived below 200% of the poverty line; that is, they earned $26,128 a year or less.

Having a job—long the primary economic promise of politicians—was not an automatic ticket to the American Dream. In fact, 5.1% of all US workers ages 18 to 64 in 2019 were in poverty, according to the US Census Bureau. These are the working poor: people working, yet still in poverty. Similarly, we know that about 40% of Americans would have trouble affording an unexpected expense of $400, according to a 2019 report by the US Federal Reserve.

This condition was aided by one form of neglect: The minimum wage in the United States remains $7.25 an hour (the same since 2009). Someone working 52 weeks a year, with no vacation, would earn $15,080, which is technically above the poverty line in a single-family household but is not a viable wage for living anywhere in the United States. Another form of neglect: Going into the pandemic, about 29 million Americans had no health insurance.

The word to describe so many of our fellow workers with such shaky socioeconomic footing is “precariat,” a term popularized by British labor economist Guy Standing in his 2011 book, The Precariat. The precariat had been growing for years before the pandemic, but by mid-April 2020, the economic avalanche hit, and more than 22 million unemployment claims rolled in. The pandemic and associated economic crisis began to foreground class divisions, as “essential” workers continued necessary and dangerous in-person economic activities while others stayed home, either unemployed or continuing work with minimum disruption via computer-based telecommuting. An April 6, 2020, story in the Washington Post captured the distinction and introduced working-class service laborers to its upscale readers for what seemed to be the first time:

The essential workers harvest our food and stock our grocery shelves. They fulfill orders at warehouses and deliver goods all over the country. They drive our buses, gas our cars and keep our streets clean. They watch our children and care for us when we fall ill. They also happen to be among the lowest-paid workers in the country.

Despite the awkward steps in acknowledging the existence of the socioeconomic class, the coronavirus pandemic offers a new meta-narrative for rethinking the US (and global) economy, one that can enable journalists, citizens, and politicians to reject the assumptions of the received master narrative of a neoliberal “free market” that has structured the relationship of workers to capital and government since the 1970s.

This is not a topic general assignment journalists set out to write about (nor is it a story that any editor would assign, outside of perhaps a few national news organizations). But a million canaries have sent their messages about the sad state of the working class in the current economic system. And, even where labor beats are still slim or nonexistent, news organizations in 2020 began to cover labor and the working class inadvertently by telling the stories of what is happening in their communities.

One such case was in my own county in northeast Iowa, in the city of Waterloo. In April 2020, workers at Tyson’s largest pork processing operation, who had no paid sick days written into their UFCW union contract, began a sickout, refusing to work in an environment they called dangerous. Many of the workers were issued no personal protective equipment, and they worked on a meat disassembly line with bandanas or other jerry-built masks on their faces. On April 22, after worker sickouts, community criticism, and more than 180 worker COVID-19 cases at the Waterloo operation and one worker death, Tyson closed the plant. That week, Iowa won the ignominious honor of having the fastest virus spread of any state in the United States. By the end of 2020, a new episode of the story: Seven managers of the Waterloo plant were fired after it was discovered they had created an office pool to bet on how many workers at their facility would contract COVID-19. (In his defense, one fired manager argued, “It was simply something fun, kind of a morale boost for having put forth an incredible effort,” the Associated Press reported.)

Like most news organizations across the country, the Waterloo Courier doesn’t have a regular workplace beat reporter. But a Courier reporter listened to what people were saying in the community and broke the story of the sickout at Tyson in Waterloo. Iowa’s Associated Press (AP) correspondent wrote moving stories about people who worked at Tyson plants and died from COVID-19. Iowa Starting Line, an online publication, interviewed young Latinos and Latinas deeply worried about their parents who worked in meatpacking plants. Local TV stations and Iowa Public Radio featured stories of workers and meatpacking, too, as did CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and “The Daily” podcast by the New York Times. At the end of 2020, ProPublica wrote a powerful investigation, summarizing another story of neglect: “To understand how things got to this point—how American cities came to be held hostage to global meat corporations—there may be no better place to go than Waterloo, where the outbreak at Tyson’s pork plant took a stunning toll on both workers and the community.” The Nexis database returned more than 1,800 news stories in 2020 emerging just from the Tyson plant coronavirus epidemic in Waterloo. Now, consider all of the stories of the pandemic and the working class across the country, and there is a veritable avalanche of reporting on labor and the working class.

The question now is, will journalism lead, using the meta-narrative of the pandemic to continue to investigate and tell stories of labor and the working class, with revelations leading to reforms? Or, will it revert to routine, and wait for workers to deliver the story—an approach the working class can leverage only with protests, and in the long run tilts in favor of organizations with powerful public relations arms. As An Xiao Mina warned journalists in December 2020, “If by this time in 2021, we’re celebrating a return to normal, we will have failed at our jobs.”

Christopher R. Martin

Professor of Digital Journalism

University of Northern Iowa

christopher.martin@uni.edu