The Labor Missing in Labor Day Coverage
Business reporting talks a lot about owners and profits. It’s time to put workers back at the center of the story.
It’s Labor Day, and here’s a bitter irony: what’s missing from most business reporting is labor itself.
Business coverage focuses more on owners and investors, expenses, profit margins, consumer habits. Labor issues get relegated to the occasional feature, a flare-up over a strike, or government unemployment data.
That wasn’t always the case. Journalism once played a central role in building the labor movement. Muckrakers exposed dangerous working conditions. Dedicated labor publications gave workers’ voices a platform. And mainstream newsrooms helped build the public support that made early labor victories, and pro-labor candidates, possible.
As Sarah Jaffe and Christopher R. Martin have both argued, the labor beat once thrived because unions touched nearly every household. Today, with private-sector union membership at just 6%, most news organizations treat labor as a sideshow. That’s a mistake.
Martin put it plainly in Nieman Reports:
“If the mainstream news media want to talk to the working class, they need to find them, give them a voice, and include them in their audience (and not treat them as just a subject of anthropological investigation).”
The ground is already shifting. Labor is back on the rise at Starbucks and Amazon. A new wave of digital-native reporters are covering organizing with an urgency mainstream outlets have mostly ignored. The demand is there.
The news organizations that figure this out will stop treating labor like a side note. They’ll see that a “business and labor” beat is really just a “people” beat. Because that’s what the economy is—people. And once you tell that whole story, you’re not just doing better journalism. You’re earning relevance. You’re earning trust. You’re building something that lasts.
💬 What do you think? Should newsrooms revive a dedicated labor beat—or does it make more sense to rethink business coverage altogether? I’d love to hear your take in the comments.
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