Labor Journalism Research Articles

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism

Introduction

In March 2018, Labor published a special issue that explored the history of labor journalism, revealing both variations and continuities from the Gilded Age to the twenty-first century. “Just as historians have always leaned upon journalism for the proverbial first draft of history,” guest editors Max Fraser and Christopher Phelps wrote, “so too labor itself has always drawn sustenance, and always will, from those working the labor beat.”1In the four years since then, there has been a noticeable uptick in the scope and quality of labor reporting in the United States, amounting to something of a renaissance. Partly fueled by an impressive wave of unionization at digital newsrooms and legacy media institutions, what may be called the “new” labor journalism is led by a generation of reporters all too aware of their own working-class status.Having only ever known a media terrain of internships, freelancing, layoffs, and overall job insecurity, these journalists are increasingly organizing among themselves and engaging in collective bargaining with employers, making them more sensitive and attuned to the struggles of other workers across the economy.2The challenges faced by working journalists in the 2020s are not all that different from those faced by working academics. For both, stable careers are harder and harder to come by, the institutions that employ us are continuously willing sacrifice their core missions to serve the dictates of capital, and those of us who do the work are increasingly turning to unions and collective bargaining for protection.There is therefore much that the newer generation of journalists and academics can relate to when it comes to our experiences as workers. Labor reporters and labor historians should especially be interested in learning from one another about how we both do the rewarding but difficult task of telling other workers’ stories while simultaneously tackling our own struggles as workers.Labor invited four prominent and accomplished labor journalists from the growing world of digital media to write brief essays reflecting on their experiences as workers and to offer analysis of the past, present, and future of their craft.Outlining the history of the working-class and radical press, Michelle Chen raises important historical questions and argues that labor journalism is at its best when it allows workers to directly articulate their grievances and aspirations.Luis Feliz Leon discusses his struggles as an unpaid intern and freelancer trying to break into a career in journalism and laments the steady disappearance of experienced, working-class reporters in favor of young opinion writers fresh out of elite universities.Huffington Post labor reporter Dave Jamieson reflects on the sudden burst of unionization at newsrooms and what it may mean for the labor movement's broader prospects, contending that journalists have several strategic organizing advantages over workers in most other industries trying to form unions.Finally, Kim Kelly charts her journey from being a music reporter covering heavy metal to one of the nation's foremost labor journalists, explaining how her working-class upbringing has been crucial to navigating this unexpected yet satisfying career change.Through personal insights and keen analysis, these four essays reveal how some of those behind the “new” labor journalism see themselves and their own labor as part of a larger working-class movement.

The Labor Angle: Reflections on the History of the Working-Class and Radical Press

The Labor Angle: Reflections on the History of the Working-Class and Radical Press

Editor's Introduction

Tennessee State University historian Andrea Ringer neatly situates the twentieth-century decades of the traveling circus within a larger framework of labor and industrial history. A large enterprise comprising as many as one hundred railcars and three hundred horses as it traversed the countryside, the traveling circus, says Ringer, might best be considered a “traveling company town.” Even as a few owners like Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers had generally consolidated control of the industry by the 1930s, their employees—an interracial and mixed-gender assembly of ordinary laborers and skilled specialists including sideshow workers who fought off their popular label as “freaks”—were organizing around wages and working conditions under various AFL actor and teamster unions. The distinctiveness of the circus workscape, defined by tensions between paternalism and class status and tradeoffs of work and leisure time, ultimately succumbed to a combination of mechanization and modernization, which diminished its exotic appeal. In 1956, the last road show folded its tents and joined the transition to indoor arenas.With a microcosmic look at the 1950 American Enka rayon workers’ strike in Morristown, Tennessee, Jennifer Brooks makes us think again about the real impact of the national Taft-Hartley Act, passed two years earlier. While several sections of Taft-Hartley are standard-issue features of labor history lectures documenting a turn away from the union-enabling message of the Wagner Act of 1935—including a ban on secondary boycotts and the permission for states to ban union shops—a lesser-known aspect of the new law, according to Brooks, proved pivotal in Morristown and many other workplaces across the South. When they recruited replacement workers, employers could themselves now file for National Labor Relations Board elections—elections under which the new workers could vote, while still-striking workers could not! Utterly averse to the intended spirit of New Deal – era labor law, the new wrinkle fit well into a changing era of industrial relations.Jeff Schuhrke assembles a revealing roundtable on the social conditions affecting the latest wave of labor journalism. Michelle Chen looks back on a century of the labor beat, highlighting an arena still short on “working-class voices.” Luis Feliz Leon, who struggled as an unpaid intern, laments the media preference for “pundits”—often fresh out of Ivy League universities—over working journalists. Dave Jamieson celebrates recent unionizing success in circles where it sometimes seems “a little strange not to be organized in this field.” Finally, Kim Kelly takes pride in negotiating the challenges of a freelance market where even Teen Vogue finds itself in need of labor coverage.Arts and Media editor Richard Wells usefully reconstructs the mixed reception of auteur filmmaker Mike Leigh's treatment of the Peterloo Massacre, a pivotal event in working-class history that also figures centrally in E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. As Wells relates with citations ranging from film critic A. O. Scott to historian Peter Linebaugh, Peterloo proved something of a Rorschach test for the art and ethics of working-class representation as well as the politics that connects 1819 to 2019.In his review of Nate Holdren's account of workplace accidents and the law in the Progressive Era, Gabriel Winant laments the fracturing of the field into separate vectors defined by working-class agency, the “cultural turn,” and state-and-institutional analysis. In doing so, he salutes Holdren for helping to “bring back” these too-often-separated projects “into conversation.” Fortunately, our reviewers suggest that synthetic and insightful intellectual forays also characterize other studies, including Erin Hatton's treatment of “coercion” as applied to such disparate groups as prisoners, welfare recipients, graduate students, and college athletes; and also the meaning of “disability” in Tracy Kinder's study of wounded Union army veterans. Among several other works worthy of special note, Kim Phillips-Fein calls attention to a Mike Davis/Jon Wiener blockbuster on radical LA youth in the 1960s, Robin Muncy dissects two big anthologies on the legacy of the New Deal, and Donna Haverty-Stacke touts David Witwer and Catherine Rios's insights about the far-reaching impact of the McClellan Committee's largely phony war on union crime in the late 1950s.Finally, having bid a fond adieu to Jim Daniels in the last issue, we welcome Labor's new poetry editor, Susan Eisenberg. In recalling the moment of workplace transition between a retiring staff member and her successor at a union office, “Renee's Bouquet” indicates how much individual gestures of kindness and connection make a difference in our lives.

The Federated Press and Labor Feminism on the US Home Front during World War II

Abstract: This article analyzes the wartime journalism of three female reporters for the Federated Press, a cooperative news service that provided copy to more than two hundred labor newspapers from 1919 to 1956. The essay demonstrates how WWII labor journalism fostered union women's increased visibility, promoted labor feminism, and groomed leadership for postwar social justice movements. I argue that by acknowledging the importance of working women in the labor movement and insisting on their rightful place in it, these journalists advanced the goals of working-class feminism, seeding a groundswell of middle-class feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

News Fixers at the Digital Interface: Precarious Labor and International Journalism in the 21st Century

Abstract This article conducts a discursive interface analysis of World Fixer, the most visible online platform currently connecting foreign correspondents with local news workers who can help them translate interviews, navigate unfamiliar places, and stay safe in the field. Placing Johanna Drucker’s theory of the digital interface into conversation with the critical frameworks found in global communication studies, anti-colonial theory, and anti-racist communication scholarship, the goal is to illuminate both the opportunities that the World Fixer site provides its users, as well as the inequalities that the website still perpetuates.

Ten Years of the Global Labour Journal: Reflecting on the Rise of the New Global Labour Studies

The article examines the origins of the Global Labour Journal (GLJ) and its goal of broadening labour studies. It shows how, over the past decade, the GLJ has recorded and analysed the forms of action and organisation that fall outside the traditional focus of labour studies. Through a range of careful case studies, the Journal has made an important contribution to the growing field of global labour studies. The two topics that have been the focus of most attention across all types of submissions have been: 1) precarious work and new forms of labour struggles; and 2) international trade unionism or transnational/global labour. The Journal has been successful in giving a platform to content from the Global South, but it is uneven and limited. Another major limitation is the failure to bridge the divide between the big questions raised in the Marx/Polanyi debates during the early phase of the Journal with the more concrete accounts of labour rediscovering its power on the periphery of labour movement. The article concludes by pointing towards possible options facing labour and the choices facing the GLJ.
 KEY WORDS: Global labour; global labour studies; precarious work; future of labour

Labor Journalism Today: Three Interviews

In three separate interviews, special issue coeditor Max Fraser discusses the past, present, and future of labor journalism with three of today's most widely read labor writers: Steven Greenhouse, formerly of the New York Times ; Labor Notes 's Jane Slaughter; and freelance writer Sarah Jaffe. Together, they offer a unique perspective on the evolving political and economic landscape of the labor beat during recent decades, as labor's long decline and the deteriorating fortunes of traditional media news outlets have combined to refashion the way writers cover work, class, and social change in American life.

A Gilded-Age Social Media: John Swinton, Joseph Buchanan, and the Late Nineteenth-Century Labor Press

The years following the Civil War saw the rise of a nationwide network of independent local weekly labor papers that exchanged news, economic analysis, political ideas, and labor market information. Although its roots may be traced back to the 1820s, the rapid growth of this press in the 1880s was propelled by the working-class upheaval of that decade. It was composed of scores of weekly labor-oriented newspapers and formed a social network within America’s new wage-earning class. Among its most influential journalists were John Swinton and Joseph Buchanan, who helped shape the combative labor journalism of the Gilded Age.

News and Views of the Postal Service: Trezzvant W. Anderson and Black Labor Journalism in the New Deal Era

Trezzvant W. Anderson (1906–63) was a railway postal clerk, labor activist, and newspaper correspondent who used crusading journalism to aid the larger struggle to end racial discrimination in the civil service. Anderson's activism led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8587, which ended the civil service employment application photograph requirements. Anderson's advocacy journalism, centered upon union action and workplace justice, illustrates how the black press embraced employment issues and made them central to African American aspirations for racial equality in the New Deal era.

Heywood Broun, Benjamin Stolberg, and the Politics of American Labor Journalism in the 1920s and 1930s

Between the First and Second World Wars, Heywood Broun (1888-1939) and Benjamin Stolberg (1891-1951) were labor journalists when the newspaper industry was consolidating into chains and industrial unionism was gaining in American society. A comparison of their lives and writings in the 1920s and 1930s illuminates the politics behind news coverage of labor. Suspicious of the Communist Party, Stolberg ultimately clashed with Broun, the quintessential Popular Front left-liberal, over the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The two were similar, however, in framing labor positively, unlike much of the rest of the press, while eschewing any journalistic ethos of “impartiality.”

Women in Defense of Workers: Ella Winter, the literary left, and labor journalism in California

ABSTRACTLeft-wing, middle-class journalists such as Ella Winter contributed decisively to the labor rebellion of the 1930s. In contrast to mainstream labor reporting, they practiced a form of anti-fascist, working-class journalism that consistently linked the drive for collective bargaining to a larger movement for social and economic justice. Winter and other writers such as Miriam deFord and Emily Joseph carried forward a tradition of labor defense, socialist feminism, and free speech advocacy that originated in the bohemian left of the early twentieth century. Rather than reducing women’s activism to communist intrigue or the exigencies of the economic crisis, this essay seeks out the deeper roots of women’s working-class journalism in the 1930s. It finds them in the democratic and aesthetic aspirations of the pre-Bolshevik left, even while it addresses the critical impact that the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism had on socialist feminist writers. Functioning as mediators, organizers, and witnesses to the movement, they bridged the gap between the middle and working classes, chronicling the experiences and articulating the aspirations of a multiracial proletariat. For these writers, radical commitment and responsible social commentary seemed entirely compatible. Out of this conviction, Winter and others helped build a cross-class coalition in California. In addition, they carved out lives of social purpose that allowed them to achieve a measure of female independence and professional achievement.

All the labor problems fit to print: the New York Times and the cultural production of the U.S ‘labor problem’, 1870–1932

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in the New York Times by analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data.

Transformative Unionism and Innovative Campaigns Challenging Inequality

In this article I provide an overview of the articles in this Special Issue of the Global Labour Journal, drawing lessons from the creative and (un)typical campaigns that the authors describe. To begin, the first part of the article gives an overview of inequality, which is then followed by a discussion of the ‘mutations in capitalism’ over the past forty years. After having set the context, I look at the ways in which labour is responding by drawing on eight interesting and creative campaigns that either directly or indirectly address the causes and consequences of inequality. In the concluding section, I attempt to draw gestural lessons from the cases discussed here. One of the most persistent and jarring realities of the twenty-first century is the growing

Dying for an iPhone: The Labour Struggle of China’s New Working Class

The presented sociological research analyses the ways in which the integration of the electronics manufacturing industry in global supply chains has intensified labour conflicts and class antagonism. The Taiwanese transnational corporation Foxconn Technology Group holds more than 50 percent of market share in global electronics manufacturing. Its 1.4 million employees in China far exceed its combined workforce in 28 other countries that comprise its global empire. I assess the conditions of a new generation of Chinese workers on the basis of the intertwined policies and practices of Foxconn, international brands (notably Apple), and the local government, as well as the diverse forms of collective actions workers deploy to defend their rights and interests. Within the tight delivery deadlines, some Foxconn workers leveraged their power to disrupt production to demand higher pay and better conditions. While all of these labour struggles were short-lived and limited in scope to a single factory, protestors exposed the injustice of “iSlavery,” garnering wide media attention and civil society support. Contradictions of state-labour-capital relations, however, remain sharp. In the authoritarian regime, notwithstanding the resilience of the Chinese state in the face of sustained popular unrest over the last two decades, my ethnographic study highlights the unstable nature of precarious labour in its hundreds of millions.The published audio is a recording of a talk in the University of Westminster's CAMRI Research Seminar on October 1, 2014, see also http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/ and http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminarsAn article related to this talk has been published open access in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Pun-Ngai/3981Biography:Jenny Chan was Chief Coordinator of SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior) between 2006 and 2009. Educated at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong, she went on to pursue her doctorate in sociology and labour studies as a Reid Research Scholar at University of London. She was awarded the Great Britain-China Educational Trust for dissertation writing (PhD diss. 2014). In September 2014 she joined the University of Oxford as Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies, the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. Her recent articles have appeared in Current Sociology, Modern China, The Asia-Pacific Journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Global Labour Journal, New Labor Forum, Labor Notes, New Internationalist and New Technology, Work and Employment.http://www.area-studies.ox.ac.uk/dr-jenny-chan

‘This great America’: H. B. Higgins and Transnational Progressivism

In 1914, before the outbreak of the World War One, H. B. Higgins travelled at the invitation of ‘industrial counsellor’ Robert Valentine to the United States, where he found an intellectual community of a kind that no political cause or group of people offered at home. There he joined a network of public-spirited experts who moved easily between universities, business, labour reform groups and journalism. Higgins' intellectual exchanges with jurists including Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and Learned Hand and labour reformers such as Josephine Goldmark and members of the American Association for Labor Legislation formed the distinctive American context that shaped his iconic ‘Australian’ essay on ‘A New Province for Law and Order’ and a larger transnational Progressivism.

The Silhouette and the Secret Self: Theorizing Biography in Our Times

The Silhouette and the Secret Self:Theorizing Biography in Our Times Leonard Cassuto (bio) Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. By John D'Emilio. New York: Free Press, 2003. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 564 pages. $20.00 (paper). Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism. By Elizabeth Faue. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. 249 pages. $19.95 (paper). The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. By Jerome Loving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 480 pages. $34.95 (cloth). Frank Norris: A Life. By Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse P. Crisler. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 492 pages. $38.00 (cloth). For a long time I never much enjoyed reading biographies. I'd start them with the highest of hopes and the best of intentions, but then I would bog down in the beginning chapters and put the books aside. My biographies would then drift from end table to end table until they washed up like bulky jetsam in my study. There they would languish, until after awhile I'd shelve them with mingled guilt and regret. Then I realized that I didn't have to plow through a biography straight from beginning to end. Now, because I like to locate myself in the life story right away, I usually start biographies in the middle and read the story out of chronological order. That way I begin with the part of the subject's life that presumably caused the biographer to be interested in the first place. Why don't biographers just start in the middle themselves? It turns out that this question points to methodological issues common to virtually all American studies scholars, including the problem of text and context, how they're related, and the problem of which is which. In the case of biography, the answer starts with the lingering influence of Leon Edel and the way that his model has been followed—often unthinkingly—by biographers paddling in his massive [End Page 1249] wake. Edel was not simply the author of the definitive, multivolume account of the life of Henry James. He was also the foremost theorist of biography of the last half-century. Beginning with the classic Literary Biography (1957) and extending through a series of books and articles on the subject stretching over decades, Edel outlined the biographer's craft and set forth its goal: to locate "the figure under the carpet." This conceit, whose phrasing winks at James, refers to the view of a person's outline (the visible self) in the form of bumps and lumps in the carpet. For Edel, the biographer's job is to infer what lies out of sight below, the "secret myth" that's causing that particular and individual pattern of bumps and lumps that's presented to the world. Simply put, the biographer searches for internal motivation.1 That search amounts to an excavation of the private self. Not surprisingly—given the way that he defines the task—and in keeping with the intellectual currents of his time, Edel's "most significant" digging tools are psychoanalytic.2 The biographer in Edel's mold (and there have been many who have climbed from it) accepts certain important assumptions, especially that inner motivation offers the best narrative through-line to span a life. That doesn't mean that all biographers style themselves as posthumous therapists in search of the elusive unconscious, nor that biographers didn't look for personal motivation before Freud came along, but rather that the biographer's work in the age of Freud has been governed by the general assumption, conveyed by psychoanalysis, that the truth lies beyond the rational, proceeding from the subject's distant past. This assumption generates a particular sort of biographical apparatus. The Freudian worldview assumes that the adult subject has been decisively shaped by childhood events. Freudian case studies—which Richard Ellmann calls "biographies without heroes"—center on the search for those early-life events that did the shaping.3 Certain conventions long ago became ritualized, obligatory parts of the biographical narrative in our time, and they've become frozen in place. These days we expect...

Book Review: Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism

Book Review: Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism

Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism

Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism

Hypertensive Heart Failure Presenting in Labour: A Case Report

Peripartum heart disease is worldwide in distribution but appears most commonly in multiparous black women with a low socio-economic background1. Hypertensive disorders associated with pregnancy can be classified into three groups: Chronic, transient and pre?eclamptic hypertension2. Whereas chronic and transient hypertension do not affect the outcome of pregnancy appreciably, pre-eclampsia presents a potential danger to the mother and fetus. Cardiac failure among pregnant northern Nigerian Women has been reported to occur more frequently in the postnatal period3. Hypertensive cardiac failure has been seen in pregnant women in our practice, but none was seen in association with labour. In a series, only 1.13% of the women with heart disease developed heart failure during labour 4. We report a fatal case of hypertensive heart failure in labour from our centre. Key Words: Hypertensive Heart Failure, Labour Journal of College of Medicine Vol.9(1) 2004: 34-35