Labor Media (United States)

Historical Development of Labor Media

From the early trade union militancy of the Knights of Labor following the Civil War through the end of the Great Depression and the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizing drives of the 1930s, there have been many media outlets with a labor perspective. Newspapers, journals, and newsletters were valuable communication tools in working-class activity during these times. In the early part of the 20th century, there were at least a dozen daily labor papers and hundreds of weekly publications.

One of the largest was the socialist newsweekly The Appeal to Reason published in Girard, Kansas. [Page 296]The Appeal, whose circulation ranged from 500,000 to 1,000,000 readers, was affiliated with Eugene Debs, one of the most powerful and popular labor leaders of his time. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) published many newspapers to assist in their organizing drives and strike activities. Their publications, such as The Industrial Worker and Solidarity, were integral to IWW demands for Workers' speech rights. The IWW editors were frequently arrested and their papers shut down, only to spring up again with new editors in another locale.

During the 1930s organizing drives, hundreds of labor publications flourished, in large cities and small towns, catering to many different trades and in dozens of different languages. Their titles reflect the wide regional diversity of labor media: the Seattle Union Record, Butte Daily Bulletin, Oklahoma Daily Leader, and New York Call. The labor press had its own press bureau, Federated Press, modeled after the Associated Press. Federated Press had full-time labor reporters in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and stringers in many other states and internationally as well.

Labor's voice was not limited to print, however. Many labor radio programs could be heard on the radio dial, from small, low-power community radio programs to the powerful WCFL of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Labor media on such a mass scale disappeared or were marginalized substantially in the 1950s, as a result of a combination of McCarthy-style repression, a growing consumerist culture, and organized labor leadership's “great compromise” that relegated unions' role to service and contract enforcement and away from active political participation. Even with the demise of labor's independent media voice, labor issues were still represented in mainstream media, as almost every major paper in the United States still had a labor writer focused on union issues. By the 1980s, although mainstream newspapers had business sections devoted to business viewpoints, there were no labor writers left at any major U.S. media outlet.

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