Off the Barricades

Gone are the days when the U S labor press typically billed The Class Struggle as an "irrepressible conflict between the toilers and the parasites." Today's labor press has climbed off the barricades, calmed down and grown up. In shifting from diatribe to dialogue, it has locked out such epithets as scab, fink and goon; it treats the bosses almost as respectfully as the workers. Amateur polemicists have been mostly replaced with professional journalists; the trend is from bombastic pamphlets to smoothly written, fact-filled newspapers that reflect a labor movement no longer on the defensive.

U.S unions now put out more than 1,000 publications, ranging from slick magazines to mimeographed monthlies, which reach 20 million readers as fringe benefits bought with union dues. The better papers--the Machinist, the Hat Worker, Electrical Union World, the autoworkers' UAW Solidarity, the ladies' garment workers' Justice, the clothing workers' Advance--carry lengthy analyses of legislation before Congress and think pieces on such top ics as automation and narcotics. They are almost all unabashedly Democratic in their politics, and they tend to embark simultaneously on the same liberal campaigns: to abolish right-to-work laws, for instance, or to ban lie-detector tests from employment procedure. But the labor press no longer paints issues entirely in black and white, says Gordon Cole, editor of the Machinist (circ. 868,000) who once worked for the Wall Street Journal. "Now they present a lot more grey. In fact, people don't believe you, if your articles aren't grey."

Crackdown on Corruption. Union papers now try to appeal to the whole family by running "ladies' sections." They carry regular columns on cooking, dressmaking, hobbies, social security and travel; the papers of affluent unions run notices for charter flights abroad. As for consumer advice, few commercial papers carry shrewder columnists than Sidney Margolius, whose syndicated pieces tell union members how to spend their union wages. "My wife reads the paper from cover to cover," says a Manhattan machinist. "She's more of a regular reader than I am."

Few of the papers carry ads, and the International Labor Press Association keeps a close watch on those that do particularly those that may succumb to an old labor press racket of shaking down businessmen for hefty contributions in the form of phony ads. As one safeguard, the I.L.P.A. demands that ads be confined to goods and services within reach of the papers' readers Over the last decade the I.L.P.A. has expelled 16 papers for improper advertising: a jewelers' union paper, for example, which ran ads for yachts and steamship boilers. It has also effectively ended another racket in which a bogus labor editor solicits ads from businessmen too scared to protest, then pockets the cash.

No Bad News. Some readers complain that labor papers are still too prolabor. "Everything is 100% progress," says one union member. "They never talk about losing a fight." While the papers print their share of bad world news, they run scarcely any bad union news. A union victory in a National Labor Relations Board election rates banner headlines; news of a defeat is buried in the back pages.

Union members, to be sure, no longer get the old spark from their once fiery papers, nor do they read them as fervently as they did in the past. "It was never a problem to dramatize a picket line," explains Justice Editor Leon Stein, "but how do you dramatize a tax cut?" On the other hand, union members now read their papers for much the same reasons that other people read the commercial press: for information and for entertainment. "In the '20s and '30s," recalls a Manhattan ladies' garment worker, "there were just two classes of society. It's a different world today, and Justice is also different. We're all better for the change."

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