The Stock Market Gets Daily Coverage. The People Who Actually Build the Economy Get Almost None.
May 1st is the international Labor Day. It’s an appropriate time to ask, where are the sections on labor news in leading news outlets? Don’t bother looking. They’re not there.
They all have a business section, often with some business news on the front page or top section. Topics like stock market results, are markets more or less nervous in response to other news, what companies are merging?
But labor news? By which I mean news that the typical worker would find applies to them, or seems to be asking the questions a reporter might pursue looking at things from the perspective of the typical working person. Do the big news sources cover that?
The New York Times has no labor section. If you search for labor news it connects to stories tagged as “Labor Role In Politics”. Recent stories list almost nothing truly worker focused. They are about the controversies the Secretary of Labor has generated, or they are incidental like sports stories with some labor component, or they are from a business perspective.
That’s true across the board, the labor news is in the business section and from a business perspective. Stories about the cost of labor and whether that’s going to affect corporate profits.
The Washington Post has no labor section but does have a jobs section, which is a classified type list of jobs. No specific labor news. CNN has mostly labor news from a business perspective in the business section. A search of MSNow has few real labor stories, maybe one a month. FoxNews has almost no recent stories other than one sports related and one negative story about a union. Ironically one of the few big news sources with labor stories is part of Bloomberg News. Ironic because Bloomberg has always been business focused. But even in this case it’s not up front where the typical news consumer would see it. It’s in a specialized sub-site for law related news and gives stories about court cases related to labor, or news about laws proposed or changing.
So what should be in a labor news section? How about stories on the progress of any campaigns around the country to form unions. They might be small, local groups trying to form a union, but what’s new in their efforts? How will Federal Reserve decisions about fighting inflation affect the typical paycheck? Which state legislators around the country are trying to get legislation through that would be helpful to working people? Have workers at some notable industry or company had a campaign to get work conditions made more safe and what success have they had? Just like looking for stories about business, the range of topics is broad, and new potential stories appear everyday.
Why is this important? Even for people who don’t follow the news it’s almost impossible not to be exposed most days to some brief note about how the stock market did. Is that important to the typical worker with a 401(k) retirement account? No. They’re just riding the average return and waiting to see what they have at the end. The only ones for whom a daily market report matters are those actively involved in trading, or who have the lion’s share of their income and wealth in investments. The subtext of those ubiquitous market reports is that those are the people who matter. That labor news is buried or invisible gives the subtext, those people aren’t important. The typical workers are the ones who do all the work. Who build the economy. The top level gives directions and then it is the typical workers who carry out every one of those steps. It is their competence that makes it succeed, that makes companies grow, that lead to the top having all that wealth. They are the engine of the economy, the vast bulk of consumption that companies depend on to sell to, the single most important part of the whole system, and in any sane economy, the target of success. That is, success should be, how well does the economy deliver for the people doing the work, and for they and theirs, their families and circles, the ones who make up the consumer side? Any other target, like prioritizing the wealthy, is akin to some form of feudalism.
So putting working peoples’ news right up front is essential to keeping our whole system focused where it should be. But that news is almost invisible. It’s a fair guess that almost no typical workers look at the news and think, “Hey, why is news that’s about people like me and all the work we do missing”?
Let that sink in for a moment. How brainwashed are we?
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