Strikes are big news right now. Movie and television writers are sticking to their pickets, the Screen Actors Guild voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, and a strike may be on the horizon for more than 350,000 UPS workers, the largest potential work stoppage in US history. So why is so much media coverage of strikes still so bad?
In this virtual panel, labor journalists Maximillian Alvarez, Braden Campbell, Sarah Jaffe, and Kim Kelly shed light on common failures of uninformed and anti-worker labor reporting. What’s the difference between a walkout and a strike? Why is hearing directly from workers so important? And how do the precarious labor conditions of the media industry impact the quality of coverage?
As both professional storytellers and unionized workers themselves, these seasoned journalists understand the power of public narrative to support or undermine working people’s movements—and the ways pervasive anti-union sentiment can distort coverage of labor issues. The panel was co-hosted by the National Writers Union, The NewsGuild, and the Writers Guild of America, East. An edited transcript will be made available soon.
Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist covering labor and social movements and the author of Work Won’t Love You Back and Necessary Trouble. She is currently working on her third book and is a member of the Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union.
Kim Kelly is a Philadelphia-based independent journalist and the author of FIGHT LIKE HELL: The Untold History of American Labor. She is a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue and her writing has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She’s also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV. She was a founding member of the VICE Union and is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalists Union as well as a member and elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). She’s currently at work on her second book.
Braden Campbell is an editor-at-large on the labor team at Law360, covering labor law and policy and all things NLRB. He is a steward in the Law360 Union and a member of the bargaining committee in negotiations for the union’s second contract.
Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief of The Real News Network in Baltimore and the host of Working People, “a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today.” He’s also the author of The Work of Living, a book of interviews with workers conducted after year one of COVID, and he hosts “The Art of Class War” segment on Breaking Points.