The labor movement, and labor media, have a chance – if they’ll take it – to fill a void in trusted communications left by the decline in “old media,” the failings of “new media” and timidity of the Democratic Party, says John Nichols of the Nation magazine.
Nichols, a Newspaper Guild member, took sharp jabs at present media while arguing that labor should embrace what he calls “next media” – citizen-created, bottom-up information driven through everything from YouTube to Twitter to Facebook.
It’s that citizen mobilization, with union leaders joining later, that produced the tens of thousands of protesters – culminating in a crowd of 160,000 – around the Wisconsin capitol in Madison during this year’s fight over GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation to destroy collective bargaining for 200,000 state and local government workers. Walker’s law is the spearhead for a nationwide Right Wing war on workers.
Nichols, who lives and works in Madison, issued that challenge in his A.J. Liebling Lecture on Sept. 22 to the International Labor Communications Association, meeting in Seattle. Delegates are discussing the future role of labor media.
Nichols said corporate-run old media shuts workers out of the dialogue and that the key failing of new media is that it is often unmoderated and unedited, producing statements and accusations that are often untrue. Next media, he said, should use the best of new and old media while being a mobilizing tool.
Unions and their media still struggle with those concepts. Dave Freiboth, Secretary-Treasurer of the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council in Seattle, speaking before Nichols, admitted: “We have struggled to develop a message that resounds with folks who aren’t as plugged in as we are.”
On the other hand, the message about Walker’s attack on workers in Wisconsin quickly resounded there and elsewhere worldwide, Nichols said. “If Egypt can take Mubarak down, we can take Walker down,” one sign, in Arabic, stated during the Wisconsin demonstrations. Egyptian unions pledged solidarity with Wisconsin during the struggle – and even e-mailed orders to the Badger State to pay for pizza for them.
That message also quickly turned into one of class struggle, and voters got it very quickly, too, Nichols said. Given the Right Wing war on workers nationwide, unionists should do the same. “As peoples’ rights are threatened, they don’t want soft talk,” he added.
The Democrats are also cowards about embracing the struggle, with a few exceptions, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Nichols said. He included President Obama among the recalcitrant, by noting that Obama has not visited Wisconsin since the struggle over Walker’s law, even though Wisconsin is a “purple” state narrowly split between the two major parties.
And union leaders, he said, appeared to be too eager and turn too quickly from the cause-centered mass mobilization of the Madison protests to channeling that anger to electoral politics. Nichols did not question the decision, just its timing.
Unions, instead must concentrate on mobilizing the masses to force politicians to listen to and work for workers. Quoting an FDR statement to union leaders, after agreeing with their legislative agenda, Nichols said the president added: “Go out and make me do it.”