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Reporting on Strikes
Atrios blogs about the transit workers strike in Philadelphia:
A big problem is that in these situations there often isn't much solid information about just what are the real issues for the union. News stories focus on wages, and while everyone thinks 50 grand (with some seniority) is a lot for a bus driver, not many of those people are applying for those awesome bus driver jobs. This article provides a bit more of the union's perspective.
Aside from wages and health care, concerns about pension underfunding and other issues exist.
If I'm reading this right, Atrios is suggesting that the media is at fault here: unions (and mangement) have lots of serious issues at stake when strikes are imminent, but reporters just lazily throw out a few lines about wage demands and move on. The result is that the rest of us remain fuzzy about what's really going on.
But I think something else is going on here. I noticed this a few years ago during the supermarket strike here in Southern California, and I noticed it again a couple of weeks ago reading about the postal workers strike in Great Britain: neither labor nor management is willing to publicly explain exactly what the current contract provides, exactly what the current dispute is over, and exactly what offers each side has laid on the table. It's frustrating as hell. It might also be excellent bargaining strategy (though I wonder about that), but in any case I don't think the vagueness in press reports is usually the fault of the press. Their reports are vague either because both sides are hurling accusations at each other but aren't willing to provide concrete evidence for them, or because neither side will say anything much at all. Much like a political campaign.
I'm happy to be wrong about this if anyone with more experience can school me on how this stuff really plays out. But it seems to be a pretty common problem, and it's a little hard to believe that every single reporter who's ever covered a strike is just a bored hack too lazy to spend ten minutes getting the facts straight.
I don't know about other unions
but our negotiation team is precluded from saying anything about contract negotiations. I got the impression that this was because of the law. They have to be vague with their membership as well...it is very frustrating.
hmmmmm
word my Ninja.. word
Kevin, I hope you found the
Kevin, I hope you found the commentary of Roy Mayall in the LRB, and later on Pat Stamp's letter. They are actual staff and they lay it out clear enough.
newspapers are biased
I've never seen a newspaper with a labor columnist the way paper have business columnists. Labor is always treated as a threat to business. Business is never seen as a threat to people's livelihood.
Years ago...
Years ago the LA Times had a labor columnist. Victim of cutbacks.
wrong
While I agree with the first commentators sentiment, Kevin is wrong. It is true that often negotiation is not aired out in public. However, the problems on labor reporting go way, way beyond the cloistered unions and management. As someone currently engaged in a similar issue at this point, I can say affirmatively that the press does not know how to cover labor.
Two observations:
There is generally no labor reporter or labor beat and often times people with no earthly clue are covering the issue. Newspapers are full of generalists and assorted amorphous political reporters. From my experience, they no little to nothing about labor relations and have little interest. Even given good information and properly briefed, they render a story in the most simple terms. Unfortunately labor law, contractual issues and attendant concerns are technical and reporters prefer to boil things down to "wages, benefits, etc."
2)Additionally, the poor track record of scribes has the natural effect of sowing distrust. Why, especially on contractual issues, would any sentient being allow a poor reporter likely to mishandle their words access.
Sorry to say, but Kevin, labor gets terrible coverage in the media. You may not understand why (this is mother jones, correct?), but the prevailing animus to labor is fairly obvious. Please point me to good, honest news on labor outside of liberal outlets. Inquiring minds...
Irony marks missing
You're kidding, right?
Second this. I work for a
Second this. I work for a labor union, and with VERY few excepts, every reporter that calls about negotiations want to know just one thing: when are you striking? They care not at all about the actual complexities of negotiations. I don't know if it's laziness or what, but most have ZERO knowledge about labor relations. I spend half my time trying to explain basic concepts. It's certainly my job to make contract negotiations easier to understand for the general public, but reporters don't even try to meet me halfway. They care about one storyline: the conflict between business and company. If that's not there, then they really don't give a damn about what's happening.
Lots of people would like to
Lots of people would like to work for transit agencies, just like they'd love to work for all levels of government. I would think that there is generally a glut of candidates, and application processes for government positions aren't exactly the fastest or most straightforward process either.
I'd give anything to stop being an underemployed transsexual struggling to get by on a shitty job and be an admin assistant with the Santa Clara County VTA.
I would imagine it has to do
I would imagine it has to do with what's in the contracts. After all, if I were a union boss, I'd fight pretty hard to put a provision in there that says Ralphs can't publicize compensation packages. Once word got out that cahsiers were making upwards of $28 an hour plus benefits and pensions, almost all sympathy was lost out here during the grocery strike.
With Atrios on this
I'm squarely on the side that the media is to blame. A few years ago, during the last longshoreman lockout (not "strike" as was sometimes reported), the NYT "Labor" columnist reprinted the management's assertion that longshoreman averaged $100k a year in salary. This was widely reported throughout the media, but, as near as I could tell, no reporter took the literally five minutes it required to check the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site. Those numbers put the median at $42,610 per year.
Now I just automatically mistrust all reporting on Labor issues.
A few years ago, Lou Dobbs
A few years ago, Lou Dobbs (speaking of non liberal media outlets) did a very favorable report on Communication Workers who were striking to keep their jobs from being outsourced. As I recall, that was very sympathetically received. So there are ways labor can be portrayed positively in the media, even (especially?) when it comes from a non-traditional source.
My maddening experience
As an editor at a newspaper who shepherded coverage of a paralyzing transit strike in my city — Ottawa, Canada — about a year ago, I think Kevin's assessment is bang on.
Not to say there aren't lazy reporters who won't do a good job and underfunded news organizations that can't, but in a 53-day strike we found it nearly impossible to properly explain the central issue.
Employer and union alike agreed it wasn't about the money. It WAS mostly about how drivers' runs were scheduled. But after that, things got blurry. Scheduling was partly in the contract, partly a set of company policies, which interacted in complex and arcane ways. We got our hands on the proposed changes when the city was able to force a union vote on its final offer (the workers rejected it), but we couldn't get definitive versions of the two documents as they stood at the beginning, so that wasn't much use. Union members out on the lines no longer had easy access to them and the city wouldn't provide them.
Both sides insisted they wouldn't negotiate through the media, which in practice meant that they'd drop soundbites and allegations, but didn't want to be seen providing anything as helpful as a real document that might have proved something.
The two parties disagreed vehemently over what the effects of the city's proposed changes would be. To make matters even worse, seniority plays a major role in how drivers are scheduled, and we were pretty sure the effect of the changes would have been radically different on senior drivers versus junior ones. And on top of that, different drivers want different things — it turned out some of the most senior drivers actually WANTED to work 16-hour shifts for 100 days in a row, because that translated into having pretty much the whole rest of the year off, whereas some of the other senior drivers wanted to cherry-pick the handful of shifts that got them 7.5 hours' pay for 6 hours of actual work. Some of the junior drivers hated the split and off-hour shifts they were able to pick up at the bottom of the ladder, some of them had taken the job precisely because those weird hours worked for them.
The employer insisted its demands would make life better for drivers, and the union insisted they'd make life much worse. They were probably both right, depending which specific drivers you were talking about.
The city politicians swore one another to secrecy and locked themselves up for days at a time with their transit-company managers, to make absolutely sure the information they had was one-sided. If you tried to talk to the union guys about it, you'd get swarmed by half a dozen people with different angry versions.
It was the only story in town for two months, over Christmas, and the hard information we could pry out of the parties, even with some of our crack reporters (including one who'd just been through a newsroom contract negotiation as a member of the bargaining committee, so he knew intimately how the pure labour-relations stuff worked) was almost nil. Every day was a struggle to do even a passable job informing the city what was going on.
McDruid - mean and median
McDruid - mean and median are two different measurements. There is a chance that both of you were right.
The media scarcely cover
The media scarcely cover organized labor issues, and editorial and pundit opinion is usually anti-union. All major papers have a "business" section which gives the employer point of view but how many have a "labor" section? Liberal pundits, including Kevin Drum, seem to be unaware of the objectives of organized labor, and very rarely show any interest in or sympathy for them. This is a class-war issue from start to end.
The media, including the
The media, including the Internet, scarcely cover organized labor issues, and editorial and pundit opinion is usually anti-union. All major papers have a "business" section which gives the employer point of view but how many have a "labor" section? Liberal pundits, including Kevin Drum, seem to be unaware of the objectives of organized labor, and very rarely show any interest in or sympathy for them. This is a class-war issue from start to end. Most non-union-members who think they are "middle-class" seem to prefer to side against unions - these people would be called "bourgeois" by Marxists.
SEPTA
I do generally agree that reporting on union/labor issues is kinda shitty, but in this case I think there's an additional factor at play: people in and around Philly really hate SEPTA.
It's expensive, it's poorly run, it's decrepit, and it's kinda inconvenient for a lot of uses. And then when the city divsion workers go on strike, and all the people who depend on it most have to deal with the fallout, people's sympathy with the union is seriously weakened by the general frustration with SEPTA.
But also, when you find out that the TWU decided to go on strike at 3AM after the World Series by going out to your bus or trolley stop and waiting for 1/2 hour till someone walking down the street tells you about the strike, you get to thinking. You think about the times the driver with the nearly empty bus blew past your stop without picking anyone up; or the guy who double parked the bus in front of a convenience store and disappeared inside for 10 minutes; or the fact that you can't buy bus tokens anywhere near where you are; or whatever other example of the stellar customer service and employee professionality that SEPTA workers provide, and you say to yourself, "Eh. Fuck those guys."
Existing labor contracts
Even without knowing what proposed contracts are, it would still be very helpful to publicize what employees are currently being paid, and various other provisions of an existing contract. I'm not familiar with the private sector, but with contracts where the government is the employer, I can say that these are never, never publicized - for example, not put onto government websites, even though creating a pdf is almost trivial these days.
As one of the comments above noted, often the amount of the pay (I remember a strike involving Golden Gate Bridge toll takers, who made something like $25 per hour, ten years ago - no public sympathy when that came out) is a bit scandalous. But with the government as employer, *both* sides have reasons not to publicize existing contracts - the unions because the pay and benefits are often very good (look at the percentage of employees who quit, each year) and the government because that pay and benefits comes from taxpayer money.
Anytime you can't find very much
hard information about almost anything, in these days of instant blogs, websites, .pdfs, magazines and journals, it is because someone wants hard information to be unavailable. Information, when combined with resources, is power. Someone is afraid of losing power.
I would lean towards media's fault
This is a bit tangetial to the blog, but close enough:
When the Twin Cities (Mpls and St Paul) had transit strikes in 1995 and 2004, the media was very focused on how it would impact commuting times. Commuting times for downtown workers, people who generally had another option. Belatedly they covered the impact of the strike on who have no other transportation choices. To me this strikes as a bit of classism.
During the 2004 election, they did take about maintaining their "cadillac" health care coverage which was covered locally. Sadly, my fellow citizens took that opportunity to tell them not to strike because they had health insurance than most people. They never asked, why the heck is my employer providing substandard coverage. Of course we are seeing a similiar issue in the current health care debate.
My impression from both strikes is that the media coverage was not very favorable to unions and that the focus of the issue of impact was definitely class directed (not sure which came first chicken or egg).