In 2014, H.G. Watson, a freelance journalist and Ryerson journalism instructor, wrote for rabble.ca that “The labour beat – the reporters who write about workers, unions and all that it encompasses – has all but disappeared from newsrooms across North America. And with it, stories about workers’ struggles that are now slipping through the cracks.” By 2016, J-Source’s Errol Salamon had reversed course, pronouncing the beat “back from the dead.” So, which is it?
Watson, when asked if she still agrees with her characterization of labour journalism from 2014, now says that, in some ways, the field has rebounded.
“Yes and no. I think, if anything, we’ve seen a rise in the amount of reporting on labour even if we don’t necessarily call it labour – it’s not how, traditionally, labour has been viewed.”
In contrast to labour reporting in its heyday of the mid1900s, which saw reporters covering union conferences and intra-union politics, labour reporting today is more likely to cover the struggles of non-unionized workers. “The way labour itself works has changed,” Watson explains. “We have much more precarious labour, we’ve seen the rise of contracts, of the changes in manufacturing, the shifts in what kind of labour people predominantly do – so I think that has, as well, shifted what labour reporting actually is.”
David Bush, an editor at RankandFile.ca, says the corporate consolidation of media ownership and the shuttering of local outlets has “pushed the labour beat aside to the point where we have a mainstream press situation in Ontario where there is one person who regularly covers workplace issues – that’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh from the Toronto Star.”
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