the bal harbour bluesa "labor hack" thinks about work

Bright blue skies and a delicious high in the low 80s. The swimming pool in Bal Harbour, Florida, is packed, the bar service is slow, and we are chatting about the plight of the working stiffs.

I squeeze under an umbrella to escape the sun, and also to listen more closely to a union official, a fellow in his mid-thirties, stretched out on a beach chair, who drops his voice as he grouses about out-of-touch union bosses and worries about increasingly frustrated $5-an-hour workers.

Here it is again, this feeling of being disconnected.

I am always hit with it when I cover the AFL-CIO's executives, the leaders of its thirty-one major unions, as they gather in Bal Harbour for their annual winter meeting. But the feeling goes deeper than the irony of mulling working Americans' future from the sunny poolside of a luxury hotel.

It is really about being a labor hack, a vestigial organ in most U.S. newsrooms. At an AFL-CIO national convention two years ago in San Francisco, I dreamt I was the last person to cover unions. Next morning I scampered through the hotel's halls looking for colleagues, and couldn't find any of the few on hand.

The root of my confusion is a disconnect between the lack of workplace coverage in U.S. journalism and my conviction that not only do most Americans care greatly about work, about how it defines and governs their lives, but they are obsessed with it. They worry about whether their jobs are secure, whether they have health care benefits, whether they'll get pensions when they retire, whether their wage hikes will ever perk up again and let them catch up with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, and whether they'll ever balance long hours on the job with their families' needs.

So, why the media myopia about labor and workplace issues?

Because there are fewer labor writers? By the AFL-CIO's count, there are nineteen full-time labor writers across the nation, and most, according to the labor federation, work for the business pages of newspapers, as I do. Some twenty-five years ago, the AFL-CIO counted nearly two hundred labor writers.

 I suspect the ranks of labor writers have dwindled because they, like the unions, failed to keep up. They covered strikes and contracts and not, say, the working mothers' dilemma. Also, the numbers are misleading; there are many reporters who touch on workplace issues these days, without the labor label; they cover economics, write career advice columns, and so forth. Some of them have taken up the slack, writing about such issues as the spread of low-wage jobs, the continuing pockets of serious workplace casualties, the persistence of sexual harassment on the job.

 Yet when all this is added up, something is still missing. The focus is often too scattered and too soft. There have been too many stories without fingers pointed, facts put into order, context included, or follow-ups taken, too many instances where the media have simply failed to analyze what's happening to workers and the economy.

Part of the problem seems to be a lack of a transition between the old and the new labor coverage. Too many old-style labor writers get trapped in institutional coverage, covering what unions say, and not what they do or don't do, how they affect employees. Too many of the newer journalists who write about the workplace don't seem to understand that, diminished or not, labor unions give working people -- union or nonunion -- their only collective voice. And since 84 percent of the total number of employees in the U.S. do not belong to a union, their stories are not as easily accessible, and too many of them go untold.

 What to do about all this, in Bal Harbour, anyway? A week in Florida with the heads of the 13.3 million-member AFL-CIO is usually a risky exposure to frozen meeting rooms and tight-lipped union executives. The result: lifeless prose with little meaning to millions of workers.

But this time I am stirred, a bit re-connected. Unlike previous gatherings, this one had some sizzle, some connection to what is happening to American workers:

After weeks of plotting, a group of union leaders try to get seventy-three-year-old AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland not to run for re-election this fall. Appearing angry and wounded, the aging lion fights off the drive and the issue is left unresolved, at least until the AFL-CIO's convention in October in New York. One union leader suggests that some of his colleagues are so much at odds with Kirkland because they need a fighter, because they fear that the GOP will gut everything they value.

Indeed, the union leaders face a group of glum politicians who warn of great setbacks for labor in Washington. Republican representative William F. Goodling, chairman of the House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, tells the leaders that, in fact, the nation's labor laws are up for review.

 Meanwhile, a group of workers from Decatur, Illinois, who are walking picket lines because of long-term disputes, make an unsolicited appearance, pleading for help from the union leaders. The leaders hustle by them in the hotel's hallways, looking uncomfortable, offering a visual metaphor for the strained connection between labor's top and bottom.

At one of the last cocktail parties, after the crowd has thinned, I come across a friendly union president who has begun to open up to reporters. Peter Szekely, Reuters's labor writer, is beside me.

How come you guys cover labor, the union president asks us, drink in hand, smiling. Is it some form of punishment?

I wonder, maybe it is. But I'd choose it again.

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