Organizing Media: Toward a National Labor Communications Strategy

In "Amplifying the Voices of Workers," Fred Glass offers a long-overdue attempt to bring the discussion of labor's media and communication strategy onto the national stage, and also into the thick of the labor education dialogue. Glass aptly connects thinking about labor media to the lifeblood task of organizing and, thus, provides a necessary missing piece linking decades of grassroots media activism with the central project of organized labor. After reading the article it should be more difficult for labor educators, organizers, and others to consider labor media work an idle curiosity. As Scott Sherman reminds us in a 1997 article in The Nation, "Labor can't organize in an ideological vacuum. It must find a way to alter the consciousness of the general public" (Sherman, 1997: 18). This nearly commonplace assertion is refurbished in Glass's approach and given a compelling practicality that is hard to ignore.

What needs to emerge through further discussion is something of a comprehensive labor media strategy that encompasses all forms of communications, from print to television, video, film, radio, and the Web. Such a strategy should encourage sustained, class-based media initiatives aimed at broad audiences of workers side by side with the wide variety of local and national labor communications vehicles the movement already enjoys. It may also want to place the very necessary work of public relations and dealing with the corporate media in clearer perspective as one tool in the toolbox, not the only tool in the toolbox. Glass has already made a few suggestions for such a strategy and I will add more ideas I've collected over years of being a media activist and labor educator.

Considering the Possibilities

Of course, as noted, lots of labor communications vehicles already exist and even lots of alternative labor media continue in communities throughout the country. An organizing or class-based communications model would touch each of these differently and spin out new possibilities as well. How does such an approach consider the thousands of local union newspapers, journals, and newsletters, for instance?

For one thing, an organizing model would encourage and support these publications, advocate for more, and perhaps suggest increased information sharing and educational and skills upgrade opportunities through the proliferation of union press associations and an increased role for the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA). The American Postal Workers Union has such a national press association, the hallmark of which is a remarkable degree of autonomy and independence within the union. More significantly, the model would encourage a more open, independent, and democratic editorial style that would allow individual union members and workers to see themselves better reflected in the pages of the paper, and discourage the use of trade union papers as mere vehicles for officer re-election. Finally, it might encourage communities of interest in local areas with other alternative journals and papers, weeklies, neighborhood papers, and foreign language and ethnic publications.

Just this kind of approach is being advocated by a group of labor media professionals, community press advocates, labor educators, historians, and union activists organized around two Labor's Voices conferences held in New York City. The ILCA is also poised to consider and promote similar fresh ideas for print communications, as well as other media. Clearly the main purpose of these publications—to strengthen the local union, promote its interests and agenda, and serve and educate its members directly—would not be changed. Perhaps they can do a better job, as some have maintained, but rare is the case that local union publications have the opportunity to "alter the consciousness of the general public" and provide a broad cultural and ideological support system for union membership and identification, what Fred Glass calls pre-organizing. For that task labor needs other forms and, if it had them, the job of doing internal and external organizing and communicating at the local level would be that much easier. It is in this arena that...