The “Business” pages of a newspaper concern our interactions with our economic system, primarily as owners and as consumers. As owners (and investors), we are informed about how the stock market’s faring, which sectors are strongest, which businesses are succeeding and failing, and so on. As consumers, we are informed about inflation, finding the best deals on consumer products, the latest consumption fads, and more.
But there’s another way nearly all of us interact with our economic system that is largely absent from business news: as workers.
There are a lot of explanations for the absence of workers’ voices. First, workers don’t have public relations firms to fill reporters’ in-boxes (reporters who rely too heavily on press releases because they no longer have time to do otherwise). Also, workers’ perspectives feel “ideological” to news organizations while owners’ perspectives feel “neutral.” (Even the word “worker” carries Marxist connotations. “Working people” is an alternative.)
Add to that the bottom-line reason most media outlets exist, which is to deliver your ears and eyeballs to advertisers. Focusing on your identity as an owner or consumer better promotes spending, which serves the interests of businesses trying to sell you things. As always, the criteria for what is printed or aired in the media isn’t what’s most needed, but what’s most advantageous for advertisers.
(Also missing from the Business pages are the perspectives of unemployed or underemployed people, a guaranteed constant in our economic system. “Unemployment figures” are provided to help owners understand effects on their investments, but the people represented by these numbers are invisible.)
Thankfully, there are a few shining lights. Workday Minnesota is a partnership of the University of Minnesota’s Labor Education Service, unions, and workers. According to its website, it ”seeks to be a news and information source that combines journalistic ethics and practices with a focus on the lives and concerns of working people.”
“Our admitted bias,” it continues, ”is that we present the world of events and issues through the prism of social and economic justice and the dignity of work.” An admitted bias! Good for them! Mainstream news insists it’s bias-free while favoring the perspectives of business owners and managers.
Minnesota at Work, another project of the Labor Education Service, is a weekly cable TV program by and about working people, aired weekly on Metro Cable Network Channel 6.
Next door in Madison, Wisconsin, Workers Independent News is what they call “a voice in the media for workers.” WIN produces and distributes a nationally syndicated 3-minute headline news broadcast that reaches over 1 million people daily. They even call it “business news for the rest of us.”
How can we broaden business news and amplify the voices of working people? Here are a few ideas:
- Notice the local mainstream media’s bias in favor of owners and managers and bring it to their attention. Write a letter or send an email suggesting an alternative perspective on a story or question their decision to run an story that speaks to owners’ interests (e.g. Best Buy’s earning projections) rather than a story that speaks to workers’ interests. If you’re ambitious, monitor coverage over time, summarize your findings, and ask a media organization to commit to changes in their coverage.
- Download, reproduce, and link to Workday Minnesota’s news (for con-commercial purposes only).
- Submit news and photos on subjects of interest to working people to Workday Minnesota (send them to editor@workdayminnesota.org and include your name, phone number and e-mail address). Workday Minnesota is a media partner of the Twin Cities Daily Planet, so your story may be posted there too.
- Help keep “labor news” from contributing to its own marginalization with leads like this one, from a December 29 story on Workday Minnesota’s website: Teamsters Local 120 has won a neutrality agreement with Minneapolis Refuse, Inc. in a campaign to organize waste-hauling employees.” When union machinations and not people take center stage, labor reporting fails to communicate to a broad audience.
- What are your ideas? Suggest more in the comment box below!
