16
The Political Economy of Labor
The Labor Blind Spot
Scholarship in the political economy of communication has tended to cluster around the exploration of three intertwined topics: media, messages, and audiences. Those who focus on media tend to look at questions of power and control, including media ownership and the social, political, and economic relations that are at play in the construction of messages and of audiences. Studies concentrating on messages tend to look at the content of the messages themselves, ranging from news to propaganda to advertising, and at the discursive and technological forms these messages take. Those concentrating on audiences tend to look at the way individuals or groups receive, make sense of, understand, act on, ignore, or incorporate messages into their daily lives. Although the field has produced rich and varied work, one aspect has received too little attention: labor.
Intellective and physical labor are required to produce messages and the technologies used to disseminate them. Receiving and acting on messages also requires labor. Yet communications scholars, including those working in the political economy tradition, insufficiently address the various forms of laboring. In addition, the organizations that represent media and information workers, and the presentation of labor in the media, also receive relatively little attention. As this chapter documents, some researchers are now working in this area. But it is probably accurate to conclude that if, as Dallas Smythe (1977) famously remarked, communication is the blind spot of western Marxism, then labor remains a blind spot of western communication studies, including the political economy tradition.
Harry Braverman’s (1974) work gave rise to an intellectual drive to address the significance of labor by directly confronting the transformation of the labor process in capitalism. According to him, labor is constituted out of the unity of conception, or the power to envision, imagine, and design work, and execution, or the power to carry it out. In the process of commodification, capital acts to separate conception from execution, skill from the raw ability to carry out a task. It also concentrates conceptual power in a managerial class that is either a part of capital or represents its interests. Finally, capital reconstitutes the labor process to correspond to this new distribution of skills and power at the point of production. In the extreme, this was accomplished through the application of scientific management practices, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. These amounted to the precise measurement of the time and the amount of labor it takes to accomplish tasks most efficiently, that is, to permit the maximum return on investment. In the process, management became the scientific brains of an enterprise and workers, who once possessed the craft skill to control the labor process, were turned into appendages of the machinery. Braverman documented the process of labor transformation in the rise of large-scale industry, but he is particularly recognized for producing one of the first sustained examinations demonstrating the extension of this process into the service and information sectors. Braverman’s work gave rise to an enormous body of empirical examination and theoretical debate, the latter focusing principally on the need to address the contested nature of the process and the active agency of workers and of the labor union movement (Burawoy 1979, Edwards 1979). Much of this work constituted what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1970) would call “normal science,” that is, working through and expanding upon the wide range of problems and implications contained in Braverman’s contribution. This included mapping the contested terrain at the point of production, documenting its history, and demonstrating how the transformation of the labor process was experienced differently by industry, occupation, class, gender, and race. Recent work, including scholarly assessments and business press accounts, has tended to incorporate an interest in how the means of communication, sharpened by steady improvements in technological proficiency, have enhanced the commodification of the general labor process (Baldoz et al. 2001, Huws 2003, Mosco and McKercher 2008).
Despite a strong political economy tradition and a broad interest among economists and policy makers in the cultural industries, communication studies has tended to situate its object within the sphere of consumption, and this has contributed to a focus on the relationship of audiences to texts more than on the media labor process. Political economists of communication have paid considerable attention to institutional control over media production and to the impact of this control on audiences, including the concept of audience labor. Although this is changing, arguably more attention has been directed to the labor of audiences than to the traditionally understood labor process in the media industries. Moreover, media industry labor carries strong craft, professional, and artisan traditions that continue, even as the labor process is transformed (Deuze 2007). The image of the crusading professional journalist or the high-tech entrepreneur overwhelms the less romantic reality of a media and high-tech world most of whose workers toil under conditions that industrial workers of the past would recognize. There is an understandable tendency to emphasize the individual creative dimensions of media production that distinguish this sector from the many occupational sectors that share the characteristics of industrial production. Authors write books, some directors are the auteurs of film, stars make movies and television programs, and so forth. There are substantial grounds for this view, principally based on the relatively high level of conceptual thought that this industry requires. This is the chief reason why print workers and their labor unions have historically occupied a privileged position in the workforce. But the emphasis on individual creativity only obscures a complex process of production, one that, however unevenly, has come to look more like the labor process in the general economy.
Organizational Communication and Labor
Organizational communication and sociology have provided some of the better insights into the bureaucratic structure and production processes in the media industries. The work of Tuchman (1978), Fishman (1980), Gans (1979), and more recently Deuze (2007) among others, has examined the system of bureaucratic controls that manage the complex process of, principally, news production. Their work highlights those simplifying routines such as beat reporting, a detailed division of labor, and regularized features that establish a template for what is potentially an open-ended production process. This body of research demonstrates that a substantial amount of organizational planning and preprocessing are used to gather, package, and distribute news and information on a routine basis. This line of research is important for a political economy that addresses the labor process because it describes in rich empirical detail the sociotechnical processes that help to constitute the work of producing media even as it turns labor into a marketable commodity. Nevertheless, although this work gestures to political and economic influences, these are left untheorized in favor of a framework based on theories of bureaucracy and organization that foreground abstract administrative needs and functions. Notwithstanding nods to power and profit, this approach concentrates on how the structural pressures of bureaucracy, following on a literature originating in the work of sociological and political theorists like Max Weber and Robert Michels, rationalize production in the cultural industries, just as they do throughout an economy managed by complex bureaucracies.
From a political economic perspective, the organizational literature contributes rich empirical detail but rests on an idealist foundation that substitutes an administrative essentialism for what it perceives to be the economic essentialism of the market. It places, as Weber suggested, the determining influence of the means of administration over that of the means of production. The challenge that the organizational literature poses to political economy is to develop a position that examines the process of production foregrounding political and economic power, specifically the commodification of labor. This would constitute an important link between institutional and textual analysis that retains the materialist strength of a political economic approach. The point is not to reclaim ground lost to one essentialism by restoring another, but to theorize the commodification of labor in the process of media production. The political economy literature has taken some steps in this direction but considerable work remains to be done (Huws 2003, Wasko 2003, Martin 2004, McKercher and Mosco 2006, 2007, Kumar 2007, Mosco and McKercher 2008).
The Laboring of Culture
It is useful to begin the process of reinserting labor into the political economy of communication by describing Michael Denning’s conception of the laboring of culture (1996, xvi–xvii). Denning’s masterful cultural history of the United States in the middle years of the twentieth century, The Cultural Front (1996), uses the phrase to sum up a number of interrelated themes, all of which put labor at the forefront of the cultural struggles of the era. The period from the Great Depression to the 1950s saw the word “labor” join “work,” “industry,” and “toil” as key words in the vocabulary of cultural workers. As a result, the language itself was “labored.” Those years also saw the increased influence on – and participation of – working-class Americans in the arts and culture. This was largely the result of a rapid expansion of mass education and mass entertainment, as the children of immigrants and working-class families grew up to become artists and employees of the cultural industries and as American workers became the primary audience for those industries. Denning also uses “the laboring of culture” to refer to the new visibility of the labor that went into cultural production. He contends that one of the central narratives of the era was the organization of cultural workers into labor unions, including teachers, newspaper reporters, motion picture actors, and radio stars, as well as the workers whose technical expertise ensured that people could watch the movies, listen to the music, and communicate with each other about how to consume the products of the cultural front. The phrase is also a reminder that culturally and politically, the middle years of the last century were characterized by working people embracing social democracy, not simply New Deal liberalism. Finally, Denning contends that the laboring of culture connotes one of the earliest conceptions of labor: the work that leads to a birth. The laboring of culture, therefore, entailed work and toil, and it had its successes and failures: “To labor is to plod, to be hampered, to pitch and roll in a storm. In all these senses, the cultural front was a laboring, an incomplete and unfinished struggle to rework American culture, with hesitations, pauses, defeats, and failures” (Denning 1996, xvii).
A political economy sensitive to the laboring of communication would bring into the field of communication studies a clearer sense of the work that goes into communication and culture, and of the workers who perform it. Rather than remaining on the fringes of the discipline where it may be treated instrumentally or, more frequently, ignored or dismissed, labor and those who perform it become part of the common vocabulary of communications scholarship. This is especially important given the growth of employment in the communication and related knowledge industries. The laboring of communication also takes up the question of worker organizing, ranging from the creation of social movement unions that attempt to represent the unorganizable to the efforts of conventional unions to organize new groups of cultural workers, recapture lost work (and lost workers), rebalance the relationship between employers and employees, and not only survive but thrive in a globalizing economy. Unions and worker movements are cultural and political organizations as well as economic ones and it is important to ask what that means for their members and for the larger society. The laboring of communication also raises policy questions, ranging from whether and how to regulate mass media and mass messages to how to deal with skilled, creative workers who produce ideas, rather than goods. Finally, the phrase recognizes that the laboring of communication is a difficult and painstaking phenomenon, full of victories and failures. To paraphrase Denning, it is a difficult, imperfect, and unfinished struggle, but an important one for scholars to explore.
Labor Enters the Political Economy of Communication
In the 1980s and 1990s political economy literature took some steps toward labor, particularly by examining the introduction of new communication and information technologies into the workplace (Mosco and Wasko 1983). Research started to address the transformation of work, including patterns of employment and the changing nature of labor in the media and telecommunications industry. Decrying the absence of a labor perspective in journalism history, Hardt (1990) connected what is primarily a political economic perspective with a cultural history of the newsroom that focuses on the introduction of new technologies deployed to carry out work. This extended the pioneering research of political economists working outside communication studies who have examined the labor process in the newsroom (Zimbalist 1979). Following a useful overview that situates current conflicts over electronic news production technologies in the context of over one hundred years of struggle in which “newsrooms, like factory floors, have been a laboratory for technological innovations and a battleground of economic and social interests,” Hardt offers a political economic perspective to explain the neglect of labor: “under prevailing historical conditions that privilege dominant visions of the press, press histories ignored working-class issues and questions of labor practices (reflecting the anti-labor attitudes of publishers)” (Hardt 1990, 355).
Repeatedly, research addressed the application of new technologies to reduce employment in the industry and to restructure the work of editors by implementing electronic page layout and by transforming reporters’ jobs with electronic news gathering (Russial 1989). These provided specific applications of the labor process view that points to the use of communication and information technologies to shift the balance of power in conceptual activity from professional newsworkers, with some control over their means of communication, to managerially controlled technological systems. Similar work began to address the transformation of the labor process in film (Nielsen 1990), broadcasting (Wasko 1983), telecommunications (Mosco and Zureik 1987), and the information industries (Kraft and Dubnoff 1986).
During this time, a start was also made on political economic work that addressed the international division of labor and labor internationalism. The former resulted from the pressures to rationalize production and the opportunities that technologies, particularly in computers and telecommunication, provided to overcome space and time constraints that once set limits on business. This research began to probe the formation of global labor markets which enabled business to take advantage of differential wages, skills, and other important characteristics on an international scale. Much of the early political economic work in this area concentrated on the spread of the hardware (Southeast Asia) and data entry (the Caribbean) businesses into the developing world where companies were attracted by low wages and authoritarian rule (Sussman 1984). The growth of the international division of labor in communication sparked an interest in labor internationalism. Specifically, this involved making use of the means of communication, including new technologies, to forge close links among working class and labor union interests across borders (Waterman 1990, 2001).
The History of Communication from a Political Economy Perspective
Contemporary communication historians are building on this research. Radio was a central instrument for Denning’s cultural front, and communication scholars writing history today from a political economic perspective are explicitly and implicitly telling the detailed story of the media’s role in the cultural front. Some have continued to enrich the story of radio. For example, Nathan Godfried (1997) examines the history of a Chicago radio station, WCFL, that was established and run by a labor federation representing unions in that city (Chicago Federation of Labor). Providing a voice for labor in a sea of commercial broadcasting was no easy task, particularly since many of the unions, whose members were also big fans of commercial stations, struggled to define a labor alternative. In the face of enormous commercial and business pressures, WCFL was able to retain its unique character through the 1940s, providing both news and entertainment from a labor standpoint. Returning to WCFL, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf (2006) describes the broader role of radio in the effort to build a democratic Left in twentieth-century America. She not only tells the story of several alternatives to commercial radio, but also describes the political battles that pitted labor and its allies against business in some of the central policy debates of the time. These included decisions about granting and renewing broadcast licenses, determining the limits of station ownership, setting rules about acceptable content, and deciding precisely what should be the requirements to air diverse perspectives (see also Fones-Wolf and Fones-Wolf 2007).
Political economy has also addressed the historical labor trajectories of other media, especially print journalism. For example, Tracy (2006) has written about the crucial role of the International Typographical Workers Union in battles to control the labor process and the introduction of new technologies in the printing industry. They culminated in a 1964 strike that shut down the newspaper business in New York City for four months. Drawing on interviews with the leader of the labor action, Tracy documents labor’s once powerful voice in the media industry and assesses its strengths and also its weaknesses, such as hanging on to a narrow craft ideology that ultimately contributed to muting that voice. As political economists who study media concentration have demonstrated, one of the ways business was able to defeat those calling for more democratic communication and press for a singular commercial form of media was through cross-ownership or the purchase of multiple media located in a single community or region. But that also met with strong opposition from coalitions of citizen and labor organizations (Fones-Wolf and Fones-Wolf 2007). The battle for control over Hearst-dominated media in San Francisco provides a stunning example of a company that refused to tolerate the slightest deviation from a conservative viewpoint in either print or broadcast media. One can also find major recent examples that document the history of resistance in the telecommunications and computer industries. Countering the traditional great inventor, technicist, and procorporate readings of AT&T’s story, Venus Green (2001) examines the significant interplay of race, gender, and class in the company’s history. Dan Schiller (2007b) recounts the struggles in the workplace and in policy-making circles that challenged business efforts to control the postal and telephone system. Pellow and Park (2002) take the analysis into Silicon Valley by telling the story of the struggles first of indigenous people, then of agricultural workers, and now those of immigrant women who do the dirty hardware work and of more privileged but often exploited young software workers. My research with Catherine McKercher extends this view by telling the story of the battles between craft and class among communication workers throughout the history of American media (see also Mosco and McKercher 2008). The remainder of this chapter concentrates on what this research has contributed to the political economy of communication labor.
Labor Union Convergence
In an era characterized by declining labor union penetration, increasing corporate concentration, and the rise of global conglomerates that feed into – and are fed by – the spread of new communication and information technology, knowledge workers have begun to explore new ways to increase labor’s power. This is especially the case in the communication sector, which provides the equipment that makes globalization possible, and the production and distribution of the ideas that make it work (Mosco and McKercher 2008). One approach is to pursue labor union mergers, designed strategically to restructure labor unions along much the same lines as the corporations that employ their members. There is considerable research on the value of merger or convergence among labor unions, including in the communication and information industries (Batstone 1984, Katz 1997, Stone 2004). Convergent unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA) or the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) bring together workers in what were once independent industries – newspapers, telecommunications, sound recording, broadcasting – but are now part of cross-media conglomerates. These unions also recognize that it is not just the boundaries between employers that have become blurred; the boundaries between what were once distinct forms of work have also been obscured through the spread of digital technology. Labor convergence, therefore, is seen as an appropriate response to technological and corporate convergence (McKercher 2002, Swift 2003, Bahr 1998). A second approach is to create nontraditional worker organizations, which draw into the labor movement people who cannot or will not join a traditional labor union. Such groups provide a range of services and support for workers, their families, and their communities but do not engage in collective bargaining. In North America, they are particularly prominent in the high-technology area (Kline et al. 2003, Stone 2004, van Jaarsveld 2004).
It is understandably difficult to take seriously the suggestions that political economists should focus on labor resistance, especially in North America, because these are not the best of times for organized labor. In 2007, 12.1 percent of wage and salary workers in the US were represented by labor unions. The good news, from the unions’ perspective, was that this was up 0.1 percent from the year before. The increase was the first in the US in a quarter-century, and it occurred despite continuing declines in manufacturing jobs (Greenhouse 2008). But however you look at it, an increase of 0.1 percent is a very slight change. And it followed several years of steady decline, from 12.9 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004, 12.5 percent in 2005, and 12.0 percent in 2006. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the rate was 20.1 percent (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008, 2007). The situation is somewhat better in Canada, where 29.7 percent of workers were union members in 2007. But in Canada, too, this is significantly lower than the 1981 rate of 38 percent. Canadian labor union membership dropped steadily between 1989 and 1998, but has stabilized at about 30 percent since then (Statistics Canada 2007, 2005). In both countries, there is a significant gap between union membership rates in the private sector, which formed the backbone of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and its Canadian counterparts for much of the twentieth century, and the public sector. In 2007, the private-sector union membership rate stood at 7.5 percent in the US and at 17 percent in Canada. The public-sector rate, by contrast, was 35.9 percent in the U.S. and 71.7 percent in Canada (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008, Statistics Canada 2007).
Admittedly, we need to place these numbers in their historical context because union density rates were at these low levels in the 1920s only to bounce up to highs in the 1930s that were maintained into the early 1950s. As late as 1932, an eminent American labor economist, speaking to a meeting of the American Economics Association, reflected on the American Federation of Labor’s loss of 40 percent of its members and pronounced that technological change made it nearly impossible for the union movement to regain its earlier strength (Clawson 2003). Furthermore, although union density is declining, the absolute number of union members is growing, with an overall expansion of the workforce in both the United States and Canada. While it is the case that the United States and Canada have more unionized workers than ever before, density rates continue to decline and there is general agreement among scholars and labor unionists themselves that workers in the knowledge economy face serious problems. Two strategies stand out for doing something to rectify the problem: labor union convergence and social movement-based labor organizations. Established labor unions in the United States and Canada have adopted a merger strategy to better mobilize and concentrate resources. This has especially been the case in the knowledge and communication sectors. In order to understand this strategy, as it applies to the knowledge and media sector, it is useful to consider the concept of convergence.
Convergence is an important concept to describe central developments taking place across the media, telecommunications, and information sectors of the communications industry. Generally speaking, it refers to the integration of technologies, arenas, and institutions in these industries and more specifically to the integration of the devices that these industries use and to the information they process, distribute, and exchange over and through these devices (McKercher 2002, Mosco and McKercher 2008). By integrating computers and telecommunications, the Internet is now an iconic example of technological convergence. This form of convergence is linked to, and partly responsible for, the convergence of once separate industries into a common arena providing electronic information and communication services. Differences in the social relations of technology, including corporate and regulatory arrangements negotiated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that divided up the media into fields of mutually exclusive dominance, once erected thick walls between print media, electronic media, telecommunications, and information services and between labor processes and labor union structures in those industries. Now, owing largely to the power of private communication companies, the weakening enthusiasm of governments for supporting public service communication, and the decline in social movements committed to public service communication, the walls are breaking down, eliminating many of the distinctive features that divided these separate industries and creating one large electronic information and communication services arena.
Convergence has enabled the interconnection of technologies to create new systems of hardware and new levels of service, such as wireless networking in Wi-Fi and Wi-Max systems. Hardware convergence has been greatly advanced with the development of a common digital language that does not distinguish among audio, video, or data transmission, reducing all communication to one language that provides a manifold increase in the quantity and quality of electronic communication. Digitization has the technological advantage of providing enormous gains in transmission speed and flexibility over earlier forms of electronic communication, which were largely reliant on analogue techniques (Longstaff 2002). But digitization takes place in the context of, and greatly expands, the process of commodification, or the transformation of what amounts to a resource into a marketable product or service. On the one hand, the expansion of the commodity form provides the context for who leads the process of digitization and for how it is applied. On the other hand, digitization is used to expand the commodification of information and entertainment, specifically to enlarge markets for communication products, deepen the commodification of labor involved in the production, distribution, and exchange of communication, and expand markets in the audiences that receive and make use of electronic communication (Mosco 2009).
Companies are taking advantage of technological convergence by creating corporate or institutional convergence. This is embodied in the scope of merger and acquisition activity that is most prominent within the knowledge and media industry, though not limited to this sector (McChesney 2007, Schiller 2007a). Convergence is bringing together communication firms that want to take advantage of opportunities to integrate products and services, to cross-promote and cross-market in previously separate spheres like entertainment and news, and to cross-produce content for a range of media. Corporate convergence does not, in and of itself, guarantee success. In the short run, it sometimes does not produce the synergies that companies anticipate, such as integrating the cultures of the print newsroom and the broadcasting station. It also sometimes results in content that cannot attract audiences. These facts help to explain the difficulties experienced by convergent media firms like AT&T, Bell Canada Enterprises, and AOL Time Warner. Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal, in 2006 Time Warner executives were no longer talk about “synergies” but about “adjacencies” (Karnitschnig 2006). Moreover, digitization itself is not a flawless process and technical problems do slow its development. Another stumbling block in the process of technological and institutional convergence is the state of government regulation. Technological and institutional convergence has raised fundamental problems for regulatory policies that were established for discrete industries based on discrete technologies. But these may be short-term problems, which can result in cyclical declines over the course of a secular trend, rather than evidence that convergence has failed. Large units enable businesses to better control their environments, limiting competitive pressures even as they benefit by developing internal market competition among divisions.
Convergence is not just a technological, political, and organizational process. It is also a myth or a story about how computer communication is revolutionizing technology, politics, and society. As such it is part of a sublime vision that, in its strongest form, envisions the technology creating the conditions for the end of history, the end of geography, and the end of politics (Mosco 2004). Convergence is therefore more than just a term to describe an ostensible change in technology and organization. It is part of a utopian discourse that aims to lead us from the coarse materiality of, in Nicholas Negroponte’s terms, “the world of atoms” (1996, 69) so that we can learn to be digital. This affirmative vision is used to rationalize deepening social inequalities, tightening surveillance practices, especially in the workplace, and the growing control of a handful of companies over the production and distribution of communication and information. To say that convergence is a myth is not to imply that it is false. Rather, myths take a basic empirical reality and enlarge it by attributing transformative social and cultural consequences that are not currently justified by empirical evidence. Convergence, as both a political and cultural process, creates considerable pessimism among those who support public service communication; diversity in the form and content of knowledge, information, and entertainment; and universal and equitable access to media (Artz and Kamalipour 2003). But the growth of labor union convergence is creating some grounds for optimism.
In the United States, a range of media unions – the International Typographical Workers Union (ITU), the Newspaper Guild, and the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET) – have joined the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The model of a convergent union (or, as the CWA likes to call itself, “a trade union for the information age”), the CWA represents workers employed in telecommunications, broadcasting, cable TV, newspaper and wire service journalism, publishing, electronics, and general manufacturing, as well as airline customer service, government service, health care, education, and other fields. Among the major employers of CWA members are AT&T, Verizon, the NBC and ABC television networks, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and major newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. In Canada, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP) has pursued a similar pattern. It has merged with many of the Canadian units from the ITU, Canadian units from the Newspaper Guild, and Canadian NABET. Its members work in pulp and paper mills, telephone companies, newspapers, radio, and television. They are also employed as graphic artists, hotel workers, computer programmers, truck drivers, and nurses. Furthermore, the Telecommunications Workers Union (TWU), which historically represented telephone workers in British Columbia, was able to extend its jurisdiction over telecommunications workers in other parts of the country because Canada’s labor regulatory body determined that technological and industry convergence was best represented by one converged union.
To a degree, the unions see these actions as defensive, or as ways of protecting their members. But, significantly, they also see labor convergence as an attempt to take advantage of synergies brought about by growing convergence in the nature of their work (Bahr 1998). Since these unions represent workers who are increasingly involved in producing for a converging electronic information services arena, they see improved opportunities for organizing and bargaining. In essence, converging technologies and converging companies have led workers to come together across the knowledge industry (Mosco and McKercher 2008).
This strategy has not always been successful. For example, one of the keys to mobilizing against the increasingly integrated video and film industries, encompassing mainly television and Hollywood, is to merge unions representing both sectors, just as companies like Disney and Fox have used their merged power to control their respective workers. For example, without a unified workforce, these companies can dictate the terms of contracts on how revenues from multiple uses of the same television program or film are to be divided. Specifically, labor union convergence in this sector would mean bringing together AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and SAG, the Screen Actors Guild. But attempts to accomplish this have failed, most recently in 1999 and 2003, in very close votes (Mosco and McKercher 2008). In Canada, attempts to build closer ties among its major telecommunications unions have also not been particularly successful. Setting up the National Association of Communication Unions created formal federation links between the CEP and the Telecommunications Workers Union. But perhaps because the latter has a history of radicalism (it once took over the telephone exchanges of Vancouver during a strike action in 1981) and because the TWU has eschewed the convergent union idea, the two unions have not worked closely together (Mosco and McKercher 2008).
Convergence also creates cross-border challenges, as workers at the CBC experienced when, to facilitate bargaining, CBC management convinced the Canadian government to order its unions to merge. Prior to this time, CBC journalists had been members of the CWA (which won the right of representation when it merged with the Newspaper Guild) and its technicians were part of the CEP. This meant that some employees of Canada’s national broadcaster were members of an American union while others were members of a Canadian union. In the ensuing vote, members decided to join the larger CWA, making all the employees at Canada’s national public broadcaster part of an American union. Nevertheless, this form of cross-border convergence has proven to be very useful, contributing significantly to the surprising success of CBC workers against a management which locked them out in August 2005. This case demonstrated the ability of different types of knowledge workers, in this case journalists and technicians, to work together and maintain solidarity with the help of a strong union, even though that union is based in another country. Unions like the CWA have demonstrated that convergence can sometimes “bite back” at the very companies that support it (Mosco and McKercher 2008).
In 2005, the union convergence issue heated up in the United States when, in the wake of the big Republican victory in the 2004 general election and continued decline in union density rates, one of the major unions in the AFL-CIO threatened to pull out unless the federation permitted significant new mergers and other organizational changes. Specifically, the fastest growing major union in the United States, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), demanded that the federation consolidate several of its member unions and shift funding from its own research and political activity to grass roots organizing. Holding out the threat of withdrawal, the SEIU was backed by the powerful Teamsters Union. The AFL-CIO proposed a compromise but was not successful and several unions left the federation to form their own “Change to Win” coalition comprising 5.4 million members committed to stepped-up union organizing. Partly in response to this major defection, the AFL-CIO set up an industry co-ordinating committee made up of 10 unions covering the arts, entertainment, media, and telecommunications industries. The committee’s goal is to build labor power in the industries that have been rocked by corporate concentration and technological change. Convergence, therefore, may also take place in response to the failure of an organization to maintain its membership.
It is uncertain just how far the urge to merge or the convergence movement will take labor unions in the communication, knowledge, and cultural industries. Will it bring back the idea of One Big Union, once popular a century ago with the Knights of Labor and Industrial Workers of the World? Can it expand democracy and citizen engagement by empowering a segment of society that has declined over the past three decades? Is it a genuine new start for labor or a last gasp? It is too early to answer these questions. But it is useful to consider different perspectives on the significance of this development.
On the one hand, labor union convergence increases the centralization of power and of bureaucracy, thereby making it less likely that union leadership can maintain close contact with the rank-and-file membership. Indeed, the evidence from outside North America is not encouraging. For example, in the 1990s the Australian labor movement succeeded in halving the number of its unions, but this did not stop the erosion of union density. Does labor union convergence mean sacrificing union democracy for various forms of cartel unionism?
On the other hand, convergence does give unions greater clout in collective bargaining, thereby diminishing the power that has been concentrated in big companies over the past three decades. To support this view one can point to the CWA’s success in organizing wireless telecommunication workers and in defending technical and on-air staff at the CBC. Moreover, mergers allow unions to be more involved in social and political activities. For example, Swift (2003) cites Canada’s CEP as a case in point of a converged communication union that has been more deeply involved in major policy issues since it expanded across the converged information industries, including the struggle to limit media concentration in Canada, as well as in the fight against lifting restrictions on foreign ownership of Canadian media. The CEP has been in the forefront of lobbying to maintain public telecommunications in the province of Saskatchewan and public electrical power in Ontario. Moreover, one of the advantages of a converged union is its ability to rise above the narrow interests of some of its members. So, for instance, even though the CEP represents energy workers, it is fully behind the Kyoto Accords to limit the expansion of greenhouse gases. Furthermore, it was able to stand up for its paper workers against a powerful wood products company because convergence permitted the CEP to draw from the strike funds of its energy and communication industry members. It also has the resources to create a Quebec Solidarity Fund that permitted it to invest in declining Quebec paper mills and keep them from closing. Furthermore, the CEP has been extensively involved in the antiglobalization movement and in supporting unionization in Mexico and throughout Latin America with the help of the CEP Humanity Fund. Additionally, research conducted by Kiss and Mosco (2005) on what unions are doing about surveillance in the workplace has demonstrated that knowledge worker unions, especially convergent unions like the CEP, provide the best protection for workers in their collective agreements. Finally, convergence allows unions to work co-operatively as never before, as in the AFL-CIO’s industry co-ordinating committee which brings together labor organizations in the arts, entertainment, media, and telecommunications industries to build labor power in industries that have been shaken by corporate concentration and technological change.
Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear whether converged unions are genuinely bringing together different kinds of workers in the knowledge, information, and communication sectors, such as newsworkers and telephone operators, or merely becoming federations of what are, in effect, dissimilar employees.
Social Movement Worker Organizations
A second response to the crisis in organized labor is the formation of worker associations or worker movements that provide benefits to workers without formally negotiating collective agreements. These have been especially prominent in the high-tech sector where union organizing has been especially difficult. Worker associations are particularly prominent among part-time permanent workers who are difficult to organize by traditional unions because they typically work for an employment agency, not the high-tech company itself. Such is the case in California’s Silicon Valley where fully 40 percent of workers are employed in nonstandard ways and in Microsoft’s territory in the Pacific Northwest, which gave rise to the term “permatemp” or permanent temporary worker, so named because they work full time but on hourly contracts that contain practically no benefits or overtime pay. Among the goals of these associations are portable benefits for a highly mobile workforce, lifelong training, job placement, providing assistance to individual workers, dissemination of information to workers, and offering health care plans to workers who are not eligible for employer-paid benefits.
Two types of such associations feature significantly in the knowledge sector, those that represent technology-intensive workers and those that primarily produce content, including cultural workers. Perhaps the leading example and model of the former is WashTech, an offshoot of the CWA in the Seattle high-tech industry formed, by disgruntled Microsoft permatemps who were successful in a legal action against the company for salary and benefits denied them because they were placed in the temporary worker category (Rodino-Colocino 2007). One of the biggest difficulties workers face in the high-tech industry is that many of them do not formally work for the high-tech company itself but for companies like Manpower which provide high-tech firms with workers. Nevertheless, what helped forge WashTech was Microsoft’s use of its political power to create the permatemps category, thereby denying a large group of otherwise full-time employees the salary and benefits that would go to recognized full-time workers. The lawsuit and the assistance of the CWA helped to galvanize a sufficient number of Microsoft workers to form WashTech.
WashTech includes programmers, editors, web designers, systems analysts, proofers, testers, and engineers, who aim to win higher pay, health benefits, vacation, access to retirement plans, discounted stock options, and workplace training. In addition to taking successful legal action against Microsoft, WashTech members have used their technical skills to unearth a secret Microsoft database on employee performance and distribute it to members. WashTech also found contract documents dating back to 2001 cementing deals to outsource high-end software architecture to Indian firms that the company hoped to keep secret. WashTech has been successful at Microsoft, helped by its association with research advocacy groups such as the Center for a Changing Workforce and its online site Techsunite.org, which provides information and online organizing for high-tech workers. But it has at best enjoyed mixed success in expanding to other knowledge sector workers. It failed to organize disgruntled workers at the online bookseller Amazon.com, but did succeed in organizing workers at Cingular wireless. Today, WashTech is especially involved in fighting the outsourcing of tech jobs to places like India and China and has been successful in convincing some state legislators to stop outsourcing government tech work.
Alliance@IBM was also formed by the CWA and, like WashTech, fought to win benefits that were initially denied to workers in the loosely defined temporary category from its employer, in this case, IBM. The company has been notorious for the concerns about toxic chemicals in the workplace and Alliance has been particularly active in fighting occupational safety and health cases before the courts. It has also been successful in winning some formal representation for workers at both Manpower and IBM.
It is unusual to think of engineers and the labor movement in the same sentence, but the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) has made it necessary for the management at Boeing to do so because in 2000 the Society led the largest white-collar strike in US history against the giant manufacturer. Indeed, what makes the SPEEA particularly interesting to those who believe that knowledge work offers the potential for new forms of organizing is that much of their success was achieved by the use of email and the web. For example, the union managed to collect home email addresses while building a communications network for their strike against Boeing in 2000. In perhaps the most effective use of its database, SPEEA was able to generate a picket line of 500 people in six hours by email alone, to disrupt an unannounced meeting of the Boeing board of directors in a local hotel. There are other noteworthy high-tech worker associations organizing efforts as well. Systems Administrators Guilds have been set up in the US (and in the UK and Australia) to organize computer workers and intervene in policy debates.
Worker associations are also increasingly prominent among content producers. The Freelancers Union, a national nonprofit organization, grew out of the group Working Today, which was founded in 1995 to provide benefits to people working in the New York City electronics district known as Silicon Alley. Membership is free of charge and open to all freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, temps, part-timers, and the self-employed, but members pay fees for the services they choose. Today, the group is able to offer group health insurance for members and their families in 30 states. By 2006, 13,000 of its members had purchased health care insurance and the union had grown to 37,000 members with annual revenues of $38 million and $4 million in funds for advocacy (Economist 2006). By the end of 2007, the union passed the 40,000 member mark and received national attention when freelancers walked off the job at the music video channel MTV after its parent, the media giant Viacom, approved a cut in benefits. Assisted by the Freelancers Union, picketing workers won a restoration of benefits and called attention to the plight of so-called permalancers who, like the permatemps at Microsoft, perform near full-time work for part-time wages and minimal benefits (Stelter 2007). The Graphic Artists Guild – representing people who work in illustration, graphic design, photography, cartooning, web design, multimedia, and other forms of design – combines elements of a professional association with labor unionism. It offers workshops that improve members’ skills, but it also runs a legal defense fund and acts as an advocate for artists, particularly on the issues surrounding copyright. The National Writers Union, which participated in the early meetings that founded WashTech, gives members advice on freelance contracts and on asserting or protecting copyright. It also runs a job hotline and a campaign to get employers to hire a union writer.
In Canada, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union has organized a freelance writers’ local, working in co-operation with a professional association, the Professional Writers Association of Canada. In December 2006, the fledging unit announced that it would urge freelancers to “just say no” to a new freelance contract being handed out to writers at Sun Media, a subsidiary of the Quebecor newspaper chain. It has also tried to fight for higher freelance rates, protection of intellectual property, and better benefits for freelancers. By early 2007, it had roughly 350 members and had launched a recruiting drive in Toronto, Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, ON, Edmonton, Calgary, and Montreal. Plans for 2008 included a job board, described in the union’s newsletter as a “hiring hall” for freelancers, and a survey of writers to find out who really pays what for freelance work (Canadian Freelance Union 2007).
Finally, building on the freelance writers’ movement and demonstrating that practically every form of new media, from the telegraph to the Internet, has given rise to labor agitation, in August 2007 an annual convention of bloggers hosted a panel on “A Union for Bloggers: It’s Time to Organize.” The panel featured speakers who are members of a national coalition aiming to develop a labor organization for bloggers. Organizers hope a labor group will not only showcase the growing professionalism of web-based writers, but also the importance of their roles in candidates’ campaigns. Blogging has become increasingly popular in the US, where roughly 8 percent of Internet users have created their own blogs or online journals. A union or worker association might help bloggers receive health insurance, carry out collective bargaining, and set professional standards. “It would raise the professionalism,” said Leslie Robinson, a writer at Colorado Confidential.com. “Maybe we could get more jobs, bona fide jobs” (Heher 2007). It is difficult to say whether these social movement worker organizations will be able to sustain their ability to help communication workers in the long run. This will depend on the ability of technology and content workers to join together in a convergence across a major barrier in the communication industry. It will also depend on their ability to build bridges across international divides.
Even those labor organizations that have successfully achieved a measure of national or even, as in the case of the CWA, binational convergence, are limited in what they can accomplish because they lack a strong international scope. For example, when the worker association WashTech, which has received strong CWA support, successfully defended information technology workers, Microsoft fought back by outsourcing the work to India and elsewhere (Brophy 2006). Examples like this make it imperative to broaden the study of labor convergence to include the international arena. In doing so, it responds to calls in the scholarly literature to rethink international labor federations in light of a changing global political economy (Jakobsen 2002). But it is important to do so with research that is grounded in the complexities of a changing international division of labor that is not easily reducible to simple conclusions. Consider the issue of outsourcing labor. Labor union organizations invariably consider it negatively, while most businesses conclude that it is an unalloyed gain for economic growth. Basing policy, including the strategies of international labor organizations, on these simple responses is dangerous because outsourcing is not without its contradictions. A large share of outsourcing in the knowledge and communication sectors is contained within the developed world where, for example, Canada has become Hollywood North and Ireland continues to benefit from its skilled workforce and wage premium. Moreover, although India is a major source of low-wage knowledge labor, its major companies such as ICICI, Tata, Infosys, and Wipro are taking a leading role in the outsourcing industry. Their movement into key markets in the developed world suggests that place still matters and that culture continues to count. Finally, resistance is growing from labor organizations and that is one reason why the expansion of convergent unions and worker associations in the knowledge and communication sectors is particularly important. (Mosco and McKercher 2008; see also Elmer and Gasher 2005). Political economy research that assesses the strategies and prospects of international labor organizations needs to be grounded in a recognition that the dynamics of the international division of labor, particularly in the knowledge and communication sectors, is complex and not easily reduced to singularities, however attractive as political slogans or mythic symbols.
Toward a Global Labor Movement: Will Communication Workers of the World Unite?
Specifically, sensitive to these complexities, the political economy of communication needs to examine the state of international labor organizations in the communication and information sectors and the relationships among them, and assess the extent to which they enable workers to meet the challenges of informational capitalism. This research needs to be situated in a political economy perspective that concentrates on power relationships at the institutional level and at the point of production, and addresses the extent and effectiveness of labor convergence at the international level.
Specifically, Catherine McKercher and I are currently in the process of producing a global map of labor convergence by describing four primary types of international labor organization. These comprise international federations that remain rooted in one of the major forms of communication and information, global federations of unions that span the communication and information industries, government or public federations that represent the interests of workers, and worker associations that may be rooted in one nation but which are testing new forms of organizing and partnering with unions and federations outside the nation. We are interested in identifying the major organizations in each category, describing their successes and failures, and the relationships among them. In essence, it is intended to produce an assessment of the state of global labor convergence and the prospects for building international solidarity among workers and their organizations. This provides the groundwork for detailed case studies that examine organizations facing a range of convergence related challenges, including the challenge of making use of converging technologies to meet the needs of workers and their labor organizations.
Our first case deals with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), an example of convergence that continues to focus on one sector of the media industry. The IFJ is the world’s largest journalism organization, representing 500,000 journalism professionals who comprise its 161 member unions from 117 countries. One of the arguments made in defense of union convergence is the ability to take on broad policy issues that smaller unions cannot afford to address. We are investigating the extent to which the IFJ succeeds on four of the issues to which it gives prominence: media concentration, women’s rights in the media, authors’ rights to control their work, and institutional attacks on press freedom. The IFJ also claims to bring together journalists from both rich and poor nations. This practice is particularly important because companies like Reuters have begun to outsource journalism work from wealthy nations like the UK to low-wage nations like India. Has convergence enabled the IFJ to address this practice? Finally, as technological and corporate convergence challenges traditional definitions of journalism and as some of its member unions, like the CEP in Canada, enlist workers across both the content and technical segments of the knowledge industries, can the IFJ continue to succeed by focusing on one media sector?
Our second case considers the Union Network International (UNI), a global federation that spans all sectors of the converging electronic services arena. Unlike the IFJ, UNI fully embraces convergence. Calling itself “a new international for a new millennium,” it was founded in 2000 and by 2008 brought together 15.5 million workers from 900 unions in 140 countries. It primarily spans the newly converged electronic information and communication sectors including workers in the postal, media, entertainment, telecommunications, and culture sectors. A driving force behind its creation was the growth of companies that span these sectors by taking advantage of converging electronic technologies. Although it is new, UNI has been in the forefront of global labor issues like outsourcing and prominent in applying pressure to global companies and international organizations like the World Trade Organization. It has pioneered the use of global framework agreements with multinational corporations to protect basic labor standards worldwide and has produced the first global charter of rights for call center workers (Mosco and McKercher 2008). How effective is the strategy of creating a labor network of networks that is not confined to one sector? How successful has it been in bridging major divides in the knowledge sector, such as those separating technical from content producers, and news workers from entertainment and other cultural workers? Finally, we are examining how UNI has fared in one of its major goals, building connections between first and third world workers on the vital issue of outsourcing knowledge work.
Next, we consider the International Labour Organization (ILO) to consider how labor convergence works in a UN agency. The ILO differs from both the IFJ and UNI in that it is an arm of the United Nations and was chartered in 1919 to promote justice and human rights for workers. Formally, it produces conventions and recommendations that establish minimum standards for labor rights including freedom of association, the right to organize, collective bargaining, abolition of forced labor, and equality of opportunity and treatment. It also provides technical assistance to workers and labor organizations. This case enables us to consider the state of an international public institution charged with protecting workers and their unions. How does convergence affect the ILO’s operation? Specifically, how has it dealt with the shift from industrial work, the main form of labor throughout most of its history, to the increasingly important category of knowledge and communication work, as well as with the differing regional balances of those two forms of labor? We are also assessing the extent to which the ILO has or has not been a force in building networks between first and third world information workers, between those occupying different positions on outsourcing and the changing international division of knowledge work.
Our final case takes up two labor federations in India, the New Trade Union Initiative, which brings together 300 labor unions representing over 500,000 Indian workers, and the Union for IT Enabled Services (UNITES), which organizes workers across the information and communication technology sectors including completing successful contract drives with a major outsourcing firm as well as an international call center located in Hyderabad. We are concentrating on these organizations because they represent new efforts to transcend traditional political party-oriented labor unionism in India, because they each respond in different ways to convergence in the knowledge and communications sectors (NTUI is broad-based, while UNITES focuses on information technology), and because each has relationships with the organizations in the first three case studies, particularly in attempts to build global labor networks to meet the challenge of outsourced communication and knowledge labor. Our project is examining this new burst of labor union activity in India, and is assessing how it is facing the challenges of convergence. Specifically, how effectively are these new organizations mobilizing knowledge and communication workers in India and how successful are they in building ties to labor federations based in the developed world?
In sum, political economists of communication have correctly reminded communication scholars that they should not simply focus on the “the next new thing”: new technology, new programming concept, new audience. Now we need to assert the importance of a question that developments in labor insist we ask: will communication workers of the world unite?
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