The Labor Day menu has been much the same for years now: last hits at the beach, hamburgers on the grill, and the annual IS LABOR DEAD? piece in papers across the country.

In this presidential election year, unions might get a little more ink and air time: Will blue-collar union workers recant their recent Republican ways? Does big-labor backing help Bill Clinton by giving him money and field support, or does it hurt him by tagging him as special interest panderer?

But more important stories about unions, and the workers they represent, receive little play nowadays. Unions account for barely one in six American workers, editors argue. And AFL-CIO actions more often seem the doings of the last politburo in the world than those of an aggressive advocate for workers.

Yet the failure to cover unions -- except for the occasional strike or UNION BOSS INDICTED piece -- camouflages a more serious failure to cover worker issues at all. "You get the impression sometimes that these [working class] people just do not count, except when they shoot someone," says Bob Baker, who was the Los Angeles Times's labor reporter until the paper scrapped that venerable beat last year, replacing it with the somewhat amorphous "workplace" label other papers have also adopted.

A prime example of reporting opportunity lost because of this trend is the September 3, 1991, fire at a Hamlet, North Carolina, chicken plant. There, behind doors that the company had illegally locked shut, twenty-five workers died and another fifty-six were injured.

The disaster did get short-term play. All three networks gave the story day-of-fire coverage. Both CBS and NBC filed next-day follows. ABC dropped the story on its Nightly News, but produced an October 23 Nightline broadcast devoted to hazards in the poultry industry. (The analysis segment on Nightline included comments from a federal labor official, a poultry industry executive, and a union staffer -- but, typically, not a single worker was given a chance to speak.)

Papers such as The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times sent reporters to Hamlet to write pieces on post-fire hardship and loss. But enterprise reporting was sparse on, say, the failings of the Reagan-Bush Occupational Safety and Health Administration or those of state regulators (North Carolina inspectors had never visited the Imperial Food Products plant in the eleven years of its existence).

Notable exceptions were provided by USA Today, which last September 5 put together a good package on worker-safety issues, and Time, which ran a nearly 1,500-word piece titled "Death on the Shop Floor." (Death on the Job, a Home Box Office documentary, covered petrochemical, commercial fishing, and other workplace hazards. Completed before the Hamlet disaster, it was nominated for an Academy Award this year.)

Mea culpa: my own newspaper, the Boston Herald, where I am supposed to cover labor among other things, ran only a few wire-service paragraphs about Hamlet. I was covering other stories at the time, but I too failed to use the Hamlet disaster as a hook to delve into workplace hazards that have probably multiplied in my own backyard as recession-hit Massachusetts firms take cost-saving measures that could cut safety corners.

Then again, no editor suggested the idea. And therein may be both the crux of the problem and a way to solving it.

Most of the few labor reporters left today, like most of the new breed of workplace writers, are assigned to their papers' business sections, where space is tight and the investigative approach is not commonly encouraged. If the workplace were treated more as a hard news beat, and if reporters felt that their pieces could more easily make it to page one, coverage might quickly improve. The beat might also attract more aggressive reporters, who could see such stories as a career builder rather than the downwardly mobile assignment labor reporting is often seem to be.

Stories about factory dangers or worker hassles require getting into factories and talking to workers. That means good old-fashioned beat development and reporting, whether it is called labor or workplace or something else.

Meanwhile, the nation's workplaces remain a largely untapped gold mine of stories. For example, long before it became a cachet newsroom issue, the occupational hazard now called repetitive stress injury was commonplace among workers in chicken plants, in supermarkets, and on assembly lines. But only when RSI made its way into white-collar offices, including newsrooms, did it begin to receive extensive coverage.

Despite the views of some labor leaders, the lack of attention to such occupational issues is not part of some press conspiracy to ignore worker, though animosity toward unions is common among newsroom executives. Rather, the lapse is due to a combination of laziness, questionable priorities, and a growing socioeconomic gap between journalists and blue-collar readers and viewers.

Yet it is in the press's self-interest to better cover the workplace. After all, work is the great commonality. Most people define their lives by their jobs. It seems only reasonable that they would buy newspapers and watch broadcasts that speak more often to that commonality, especially in times of recession and broad industrial restructuring.

They would certainly rather learn about the next workplace disaster as readers and viewers than as victims.

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