On the Media; 1996-09-01; Covering the Conventions; Reporting on Labor; Part 1

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. It's Labor Day weekend, a weekend that marks the end of summer. The papers are full of back to school sales. The last barbecue of the season closing up the summer house. Wait a minute. What about the Labor and Labor Day weekend as the concept of labor disappeared from the media's radar screen altogether, in an era of telecommuting from home and shrinking labor unions, you don't see or hear as much about labor unions or the plight of workers as you once did. Has labor coverage change with the times, or are the media missing an important story covering labor? That's up next after this news. So stay tuned. From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Ann Bozell and tomorrow is Labor Day.

One hundred and second one in 1894, Congress declared the first Monday in September a national holiday honoring the laborer. For much of this century, the Labor Day was mostly about labor unions. What was considered labor news coverage was focused on the growth of unions, strikes and organizing campaigns. But is the power of organized labor has waned and union membership declined. The labor story has shifted. Or perhaps the correct word would be that the labor story has left the front page along with the union story. There aren't many labor reporters nowadays around, but people still work. We are still laborers. It is the thing that most of us spend most of our time doing. And yet it's a bit like covering religion. Something else that is vitally important to a lot of Americans that's often overlooked by the media covering work seems to get either ignored or lumped in with business coverage or welfare coverage or even lifestyles coverage. I'm Alex Jones, and on this edition of On the Media, we're going to probe how the media

covered labor that labor with a small l, how the media cover work and workers, and why there isn't more and better coverage than there is. My guests are Ron Blackwell, a longtime union activist who is director of corporate affairs for the AFL CIO. And I think it's a sign of how times have changed that the AFL CIO as a director of corporate affairs. Welcome, Ron. We're glad to have you. Well, please be here, Alex. Also with us is Stephen Franklin, a labor reporter for the Chicago Tribune, one of the few journalists in the nation assigned full time to the labor beat, Steve Franklin. We're very glad to have you. So am I now. So agree with everything you say. He joins us from WBC in Chicago and from his home in Washington, Peter Kilburn, a national correspondent for The New York Times who specializes in labor coverage, is with us as well. Peter Kilbane, we're very glad to have you. Hi, Alex. Ron Blackwell, from your perspective, what are the media doing wrong when it comes to covering the labor story these days?

Well, I think you set it up quite well when you mentioned the difference between covering the labor movement, the unions and covering workers in the workplace and the condition of life of working Americans and their families. And I think as organizing activity and as strike activity waned in the past two decades, you've seen a drop off in the coverage of the press and other kinds of media of of unions. But I'm not I'm not so concerned about that because I think that the labor movement is back and so are American working families. And we're going to be heard from labor. And politics has been a fairly common story to report on this year. And there's no there's quite a bit of attention that union summer, the drafting of young workers, young students and workers into the cause of American workers has caused a lot of press attention as well. It has. But other kinds of stories concern workers themselves are getting short shrift here. And I think that's where the deepest problem with the media coverage comes. I think it's the fundamental social fact of our times is

it's becoming extremely difficult to make a living in America by working. And while there are stories, notably The New York Times long treatment of this subject that appear episodically, what really concerns me about it is there's no solution offered and there are no very hard questions being asked by the press of either politicians or policymakers about why in the richest country in the world and its richest point in history, it is the case that we have the first generation of Americans who work all year round and every day and still can't make it keep their family out of poverty. Well, let me ask you, Steve Franklin, as a labor reporter, what do you consider the labor story to be these days? Well, I wanted to talk to the labor story is exactly what Ron was talking about. Everything that we do when we work during the daytime and we sleep at night thinking about work. And I think Ron made a good point is right there has more coverage of unions during this last year because the union movement is resurgent and coming back from a long sleep.

But the problem with that is that we only cover the events. We still make tremendous setbacks because we don't we haven't changed the process of covering what work is. And there the story about where it goes from people to jobs to to the management executive who leaves off thousands of workers. It's a story about the celebration of work and story about the boredom, the monotony, the monotony of work. It's about where we work and how we earn a living. Well, let's let's take the Chicago Tribune for is an example. Where does your work appear? I mean, where do your stories appear all over the paper, or is there some way of. No, I write for the business section and, um, so my stories appear on the business page, which is good and also bad, because a lot of times we tend to look at work as far as how does it affect business or how to workers deal with it. Is this an issue of strike? How will affect companies? And also, much to my dismay, I get a lot of reaction, people saying, oh, you wrote a story, but I don't read the business page. Business is that's not for workers and that's a problem.

Peter Kilbane, The New York Times has you doing a job that is a little bit difficult to define. How would you characterize what The New York Times wants you to do? When I was assigned it, the the the the instruction was when I raised the question labor. What do you mean cover labor? They said, no, you're covering work in America. And that gave me what struck me as a wonderful license to to go around the country and look at workers. I, I agree with much of what Ron says, but I think I've had quite an opportunity to look at a wide variety of workers and in particular, low wage workers, catfish people in Mississippi, migrant workers, all kinds of workers whom the unions have never touched. And unions sometimes become irked that we don't pay much attention to them. But I think our priority really is not on the coverage of an institution, the coverage of a building and the coverage of the men in suits who run these

institutions, but rather the issues and the people in the workplace. And we are trying very hard to focus on that. And if you follow our coverage of welfare, which I've also been assigned to, you see the immense coverage of the issue of workfare moving people from welfare to work and what the problems are there. These are very real pocketbook issues. And I think they play right to the point that Ron raised about the wage gap. Since 1973, average wages have declined and we've been treating that. And I think we've been trying to make the point to people that it's pretty hard to make a living on even twice the minimum wage. My point let me just jump in here for a second. I want to make a point that you just identified yourself because we think this is an important story. This is different in Chicago. The Times did a wonderful series earlier this year on the downsizing of America. It was it was fantastically moving and compelling. My argument with it was that it was at the end of the cycle because the downsizing had already occurred. And so all the trauma that was suffered then in fact, many of the

stories couldn't back up the point that the factual number that this was the end of the cycle. I'd like my newspaper. We followed by let's copy them and let's see what they did. And that's the problem. Sometimes the media were not there when the story is important and even when you know, the thing is that we did a program on that particular subject when it was when it came out. And one of the things that that that was frustrating to the Times was that the numbers, the statistics lag so far behind the phenomenon and the trend that it becomes very difficult to if you are an organization, a news organization that wants to put meat on the bones and not just tell anecdotal sort of impressions, you have a very hard time doing that. I want to disagree that that's not true. In that case, the numbers were there. I know I've written about that for a long period of time. This is Ron Paul. Yes. Ron, I'd like just point out this story. That was an excellent article in which I cited in my introductory remarks at The Times ran. This is not the end of the cycle. We've been losing two million jobs through displacement for years now, since the early 1980s.

In fact, it only became news when I became a white collar phenomenon, which itself is an interesting thing to, in fact, discuss here. So I'd like to suggest to you it's not that it's not timely and it's certainly not over. It's a continuing factor of our economic life that is driving the sense of insecurity in so many people's lives. And I think we need to get into it. Well, I also wanted to raise a point to a point that Peter made. My comment was by way of criticizing his good work, of course, but to focus to shift away from the unions. Well, first of all, I don't think you should shift away from the unions, but you should also cover the lives of working people, because that's the soil from which the labor movement comes. But I would suggest to you, to you need to take a broader view of that than simply the workplace. Working people's lives don't end when they leave work. And what they do at work, however, shapes profoundly what they're able to do and the rest of their lives. But I think what's shaping up in America today by way of a social phenomenon, a real threatening of the American dream, the inability of working working people to keep a family together because everybody in the house is working and many of the people in the house have two jobs or more.

These are the real dilemmas that I think that somehow the press has to get at, if not as news, and somehow find some way to get into it and inquire into its meaning. And finally, the last thing that we ought to be able to do if we weren't in this curious thing where we feel like we have to live in hardship, despite the fact that we live in a seven trillion dollar a year economy with a country that rich ought to. Be able to think about what work ought to be and about the contribution that the productive activity makes to the meaning of one's life, and we ought to be thinking about our economic institutions, the major corporations and the trade unions and others in terms of their ability to serve that cause as well. Well, Ron Blackwell, you've raised you've implied that politics is really the issue you're really talking about here. Is am I correct? No, I don't mean that. I mean, much of what's like you say, 75 percent of the people in this country are either non or production workers or nonsupervisory workers. They're just working people.

And and they spend most of their time working. And the time they spend there in the conditions under which they spend it color most of their reality. And you have this very strange thing where you have the richest country in history. I keep repeating that and you have such hardship on the part of working people. And I think you need to inquire into why that's taking place and whether it's really necessary. And what I find is that when when the media treats this, it asks the policymakers and the politicians and they simply scratch their heads, point to globalization, technical change, and that's the end of it, frankly. Did you have a comment? Well, you know, I think it's actually a very important point is that we have incredibly important problems. But the problem of the media also, we tend to write cataclysmically we tend to draw dramatic portraits in black and white. And one of my concerns in the last few years is that there are some Americans who are doing very well, but they're terribly insecure about the future and they shouldn't be because they're not in that situation where their jobs are going to be wiped out or the pay is going to decline. But they don't understand what's taking place. And I think what what's happened to the media is we can't translate the story accurately

for some people who are largely at the bottom of the pay scale, at the bottom of the skills level, the bottom of the education background, they're having a very hard time. But a lot of other Americans aren't doing so badly. They're getting by. And that's the problem. People have sort of economic dyslexia. They understand what's happening out there. Alex, Peter, can I jump in? Surely, Alex, I think you started to touch on an important point there. Is this a political story? I think there's a point at which maybe I'm splitting hairs, but there's a point at which we in our coverage of labor have to move beyond it. And I believe I don't mean to be defensive, but I think we do the issues that Ron is raising about the two income family, about the travails two income families face and still can't make it. That issue is out there. Perhaps it's not out there as emphatically as it ought to be. I don't know if it is necessarily a hardcore labor story. It's an economic story and it's a political story. And it is in part a labor story.

The reason I suggest it's a labor story is that the reason why things are so hard is because wages are falling and that's something you get in employment by working. Something in the employment relationship has profoundly changed from the period pre 1973 in the period post 1973. We have a lot to it further if you want to. But what I suggest to you, it leads right to labor. We're going to have we have a lot more to say on this subject. We're going to be back in a few moments. But I want to ask our listeners, how should the media cover labor? What do you think? Is it coverage that it's the coverage that it does what you want? Do you want something different? What would that be if it is something different? Our number is one 800 three four three three three four two one eight hundred three four, three, three, three, four, two. This is on the media from National Public Radio. Army ranks of the labor cum union called.

And see if you remember the struggles of fall when you are standing helpless on the outside of the door and you started feeling like I'm a I'm time. And you started out and I'm Alex Jones, and we're back with a special Labor Day segment of all the media talking about the coverage of labor that was filloux, by the way, singing links on the chain. Peter Kilborn. Yeah, when you look at what The New York Times represents, as far as America is concerned, you think of it is a it is a great newspaper institution. It is also identified very strongly with the establishment and with big business. That's a lot of its coverage of these issues that you described appears in the business section. That's not unlike many other major news organizations that have the luxury of being able to have someone who is a labor oriented reporter or a workplace reporter or

whatever. Do you see an inherent problem here with that? Absolutely not. I, I don't even think of the establishment. I don't think of the work that our average reader out there with the 75000 dollar of your income or something about that, I, I hope he reads it, but I'm not thinking of him. And I don't think his interests have any bearing on how how I approach a story. Alex, let me raise one other question. Bill Seren, who is a former Times labor correspondent and now head of the journalism program at NYU, has a piece in The Washington Post today. He has one sentence of the piece is that says that but labor lacks passion, zero vision and agenda. Now, people like Ron Blackwell are doing terrific work. And new leadership at the AFL-CIO have put many of the labor issues back on a public agenda. But generally speaking, unions themselves, union leadership, have taken very little initiative. They tend to be very insular.

They tend not to be focused on these issues. We have to rely to some extent on on institutions and their agendas to help us see what's out there and to help us see what's what there is to cover. They can be very helpful. But I must say, you find you find insular institutions, very undemocratic in their practices, who elect leaders who never leave their jobs until they're in their 70s, in their 80s. It's a pretty uninspired and uninspiring crowd. Well, let me ask Ron Blackwell. Let me respond. Ron, I think I'm not as I said in the beginning, the program I'm not too worried about that. The labor movement comes out of the lives of working people and the feltlike concerns that they have. And that soil has not been richer in this country, at least since the 1920s. That's true. And I think the stuff that you have seen in politics, the stuff you have seen in Union Summer, the stuff that you could see if you go with us on an organizing drive, which I'd be happy to arrange, would inspire you with with the vitality in the life of the labor movement. Been on our back and you will hear from us.

But, Peter, I wanted to and I don't mean this in any way critically, but you just said that your average readers. Seventy five thousand dollars. And this joins a point which Stephen made earlier about not everybody is doing badly, but seventy five thousand dollars is about the median income of the top 20 percent of Americans. That's the only group of Americans whose real income is rising and has been rising over the past 15 years. That 80 percent, the other 80 percent of the American family income is either stagnant or has been falling. And this poses a really serious challenge for media, it seems to me, because people who are, I would suggest to people who work for New York Times or even in higher income brackets than the people who read The New York Times. And somehow they have to they have to become aware of the real life concerns of the other people. We're dividing into two countries. And and the people who are reporting on the lives of working people aren't sharing their kind of difficulties. There was a time not too long ago when the reporter on the beat was a working stiff themselves, didn't have a college degree.

That's no longer the case because I think you would have to grant they are now in the group that's doing OK. Steve Reich, that's accounts for why the questions aren't as hard hitting as they might otherwise be. I'm Steve Reich said Peter said something that struck me and I think is to the contrary. I said earlier, and I don't think you're trying to make that point and see my arguments. The reason that Labor writing disappeared from most newspapers, that the labor writers, when the unions began to vanish and their importance slipped away, they had nothing else to write about. And they forgot everything about the issues of affirmative action, about age discrimination, sex discrimination, about how workers don't understand. For one case, that's where we failed because we lack the imagination of the press to say, OK, the world of work has changed. And simply writing about the Teamsters and and the government workers is not enough. We have to expand it until that is broad and until there's a base of that, then I think that labor writing will still be in the back of the pages. Or occasionally there'll be stories about families that commute or telecommuting that I look at. A lot of it is our fault. And we didn't make the jump and we didn't convince our editors and and we didn't convince our readers that we're as important as politics.

Want to get our listeners in on this conversation, Sue in Boston, you're on the air. I, I just wanted to burst your bubble, guys. I think that you're out of touch with the way that workers in this country actually feel without this damn thing. I know that for someone who worked for The New York Times, just having your taxes and your car in your garage may seem like a really miserable life, but actually most people are really happy with that. And I think that, you know, he's praising the labor movement and its great vitality and stuff. I mean, come on, there are countries in the world where there really is a labor movement where people are getting shot down because they're standing up for their rights and they're getting paid almost nothing in this country. You know, we have some self-congratulatory students and some people in the media who bemoan this great suffering. But people I got to these guys and they're happy. Well, you know, the thing is, you've raised a point that we're going to to flesh out. I don't think we're going to have time at the moment, but I want to go go after it

because it's quite important. And that is the international dimension of this sort of global world that we're in. And the fact that that that labor, as it affects Americans, even if they are complacent, is something that they have to that their lives touch every day. I think that the Kathie Lee Gifford sort of media event, if you want to call it that, was a perfect example of how that is sort of being, you know, maneuvered onto the front pages these days. Ron Blackwell, what do you think? Well, to join this international point, I think there's a good case in point. One of the reasons why wages have been declining is the fact that American workers, many of the ones who Sue is describing, are placed in direct competition with some of the most oppressed and impoverished workers in the world. And we have trade agreements like the NAFTA, which in the media was represented simply as almost the definition of economic rationality. And we were fought bitterly. The labor movement was fought bitterly by the by the business establishment who didn't want to include protection for poor workers rights that would allow workers to claim some of the benefits of increased

productivity. The press characterized labor as protectionist. We were fighting we would have supported NAFTA if we had had NAFTA. That would protect worker rights and we could not get that story into the media. And I think this international side, and that's the reason why, incidentally, there was a Kathie Lee Gifford story, because the only way that we could bust into mainstream media was to find a sensational episode where a heroic young workers in Honduras were essentially near slaves, following on a story that came out of California in which they were slaves. I want to assure you, there's a pretty tough situation here in the United States. And then finally, we had some workers who walked into our justice center in New York being owed months of back wages. They weren't being paid wages at all. And we tried to help them collect them, but we had to find out who hired them and what were they making? They were making Kathie Lee Gifford clothes. And so both at home and abroad, there is a new sweatshop in the world and American workers are being asked to either compete in it or lose their jobs.

So, Sue, did you have a car? Can I just jump in for a second here? I tell you, we'll get you we'll get to you, Steve, when we get back. And Sue, stay on the line. We want to talk to you some more. Hold on just a second. We're going to be back in a moment. We're talking about the coverage of labor. We want to hear from you. Our number, one 800, three, four, three, three, three, four, two. This is on the media from National Public Radio. No.

Dear Mr. Editor, if you choose, please send me a copy of the labor news. I've got a son in the infantry, and he'd be mighty glad to see that somebody somewhere now and then thinks about the lives of the mining men in Perry County. Was Pete Seeger singing another classic labor song, Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter, which was based on an actual letter to the editor that was published and turned into a song. I think that what we were saying before the break was that these stories have a hard time cracking the front page. Now, Ron Blackwell, you were talking about how Kathie Lee Gifford was the only way to get this story about people in Honduras into the minds of Americans. Is that is that going to be emblematic of what's going to be happening in the future?

That's the only way we had to get it into the minds of Americans. And it was one of the one of the stories that really went deep, more deeply that conjoined with the Delmonte situation where you had near slaves in California, they came, if you recall, one right after the other, and they raised the question of super exploitation of super oppressed workers and connected it to something that wasn't simply something foreign element. It was something that was attached to a name, in fact, the name of a celebrity which gave it a certain electricity in our media. So I think that carried it well into well beyond where it would have gone if we had simply produced Wendy Diaz, who a noble young woman who was the worker that came from Honduras to tell us our story. So what do you think? Well, I think that it's pretty fascinating to chauvinist or racist or whatever word you want to use to paint this broad brush that will include migrant workers who seriously have some big issues with getting some real food into their mouths. And you put them in the same story maybe that you would put in a foreign worker

who is maybe working some extra overtime but is making sixty thousand dollars a year, has a car, maybe his wife doesn't have to work. You know, until people in the media start to realize that there are some really fundamental differences among workers, they're going to continue to be baffled by the fact that workers like Buchanan workers do not like the liberal and they do not like the left. Who's telling them that they are like these Mexicans? They like Buchanan, they like David Duke. They like people who are telling them we're going to organize, you know, a lot of time with these people. And there are workers that support Buchanan. There's no question about it. But I don't find it. That's it seems to me a pretty gross over generalization, too. I think workers have what they do care about is being able to make a living for their families. Steve Franklin, I want to get my point of information here, because I think it's important to note not just a few migrant workers, one out of every five American workers who works full time year round today cannot make enough to keep their family out of poverty.

These are people working full time year round. That number has increased by 50 percent since 1979. OK, they're not the people who are working at Ford. Steve, let's hear what you have to say. I think both of them are absolutely right. And I think it's important that one of the problems that we constantly bring up as we depress people, we overwhelm them with the wrong picture. And there and I've always been astounded at the annual polls of workers, many workplaces. Look at the Gallup poll like the jobs are happy with the job. That's the part of our nature of who we are as Americans. We tend not to complain about work. We like our work so soon is exactly right. Most Americans lack the jobs. What is different, however, is that many Americans feel insecure about their jobs and that varies upon where you are, your situation. And then we also have to say once again is that we have to tell some people that if you're in one situation, if you have a certain education, you have a situation, you're OK. If you don't, then you're here in a far more threatened world. We don't do that enough to. Thank you for your call. Appreciate it. Don in Columbus, Ohio, you're on the air. Yes. Thank you for taking my call. Sure. I'm gonna start listening to NPR a little bit

more. Absolutely. My comments are I'm a business owner, a family business. My dad started this business quite some time ago to company. Get rid of the radio. OK. OK, thanks. And the other point I wanted to make is that I believe the labor union labor movement, the organized labor movement, pretty much passed its agenda through the 50s, in the 60s. And a lot of what they wanted are now laws and business owners and not only business owners, but workers must abide by the law. So that's one comment I had to make. I also believe that in general that the the difference between labor and supervisors is much blurred. I know I work much harder than most of the workers that work for me. And I know don't man as much of them as I do of myself. You know, Don, you raise an interesting point. And I want Peter Kilborn to address.

And that is. We are told repeatedly that small businesses is the main engine of the kind of economic activity in this country and yet small business and I'm talking about people who run small businesses who may be the boss in their dry cleaner, but are hardly, you know, on par with the chairman of General Motors. How much attention do they get in this sort of labor equation? Well, very, very few of them are organized. And I think the reason is that no, I don't mean just in terms of organized labor, in terms of the media attention to their problems and what they what they have to say about this, about the situation, because their perspective may be vastly different from the one we've been talking about so far today. Well, Alex, I was going to say first cop out, but I think that's something somewhat more of a business story to the perspective of small business owners. Conditions of workers working for small businesses are all over the lot. But I see all kinds of cases where the kind of the kind of hostile relationship that you find between the factory floor and senior management of a major company, I don't run into that very often in small companies.

It's very hard for small company to sustain that kind of relationship. I don't I don't see that as significant a story. I think the real the real issues for labor and the real issues of exploitation, to the extent that there is some and there is some issues where you have this great dichotomy between far removed managers.