Communicating in Corporate America's America

In the labor movement today, we welcome skilled, specialized professionals into our ranks. We freely and openly recognize the need for accountants, archivists, computer network administrators, and other highly trained professionals. We would like the professionals we hire to be zealously committed to the labor movement, but we apply no litmus test. We don't worry, for instance, whether network administrators will bring values into our unions that could sabotage our labor mission.

But public relations professionals are an entirely different story. They can undermine our labor mission. Indeed, argues Fred Glass in "Amplifying the Voices of Workers," communications professionals infused with corporate values are undermining the labor movement, saturating our unions with modes of thinking that undercut the labor values we hold dear. The labor movement can no longer afford, contends Glass, to unquestioningly swallow corporate assumptions about effective communications. If we continue to allow corporate values to trump labor values, he warns, we are doomed to irrelevancy or worse.

Fred Glass, a veteran and distinguished labor communicator and educator, knows of what he speaks. Few labor activists can match Fred's direct experience with the obstacles and opportunities labor communicators face. I also sense, from the tone of his essay, that Glass has encountered, first-hand, the empty arrogance of corporate communicators. I can envision him sitting—and steaming—at some high-level union strategy meeting as a well-coifed ad agency executive blathers on expertly about "gross rating points" and "cross tabs."

Still, Glass does recognize that corporate communicators have developed and perfected techniques and approaches that can be put to good use by those of us committed to building a more vibrant, democratic, and class-focused labor movement. "Our challenge," Glass writes, "is to come up with balanced communications strategies that cull what we can from the bag of innovations originating in corporate-owned media, while not losing sight of crucial differences between 'them' and 'us' and how that plays out in labor communications theory and practice."

Glass, in his essay, goes on to do that culling. But it is here, starting with the culling process, that this reader parts company with Glass. He essentially sees danger where I see promise. He sees promise where I see dead end.

Let us consider my two main concerns with the Glass essay, his discussion of what he calls "the 'nugget-sized' fallacy" and his clarion call for sinking significant labor treasure into a strategy of building "Labor Media Resource Centers."

Suspicious Simplicity

What is wrong with corporate communicating? Glass begins his answer by blasting away at the sound-bite style, the notion that messages must be encapsulated to be effectively communicated. Corporate communicators, he charges, assume that "people don't like a lot of words," insist that "serious content is less important than slick form," and conclude that "people don't think for themselves, so we have to do it for them."

Glass disdainfully dismisses the rationale for this perspective, the argument that people are bombarded by so many messages that the "only way we can get anyone's attention is by using even fewer words, more garish design, and shrinking our message down to slogans."

Short, to Glass, is simply suspect. Sound bites clear-cut the way for corporate cultural domination. Class-conscious labor communicators, he advises, should stand on constant guard against the "nugget" mindset.

I am not so sure. I have spent the last 30 years, in and around the labor movement, trying to master the art of expressing thoughts concisely. And I have worked to share what I have learned with union members and activists. I never felt, in any of these efforts, that I was cribbing some unsavory page from the corporate communicator handbook. I considered the KISS approach — "keep it short and simple" — an age-old truth of effective communications, not an insidious corporate technique.

I still feel that way and I do not think I am alone. Slogans are not a corporate invention. Champions of...