From: Labor Studies Journal Winter 2003 Amplifying the Voices of Workers: An Organizing Model for Labor Communications Fred Glass Abstract Today it is technologically and financially feasible for labor to develop its own forms of advanced media production and distribution. However, a major obstacle to effective labor communications is its reliance on corporate communications models. To serve labor's prime directives to organize and represent workers, unions need a different approach to communications; one based in assumptions explicitly opposed to corporate communications methods developed to serve corporate goals. New media technologies can and should be wedded to labor education goals to create an organizing model for labor communications. The Old Ways and the New Labor communicators used to be the people who produced newsletters, brochures, flyers, and other printed materials for union members. Some (not many) were called on to carry the union message across the treacherous waters of the corporate media to broader publics. Over the past decade, in a new media environment rich with possibilities for unions, they have evolved to become people who also make videotapes, send out blast faxes, deal regularly with mass media inquiries, and design and implement web-based communications. With all this communicating, you might think we are spreading the word better and faster than we ever have. Unfortunately, despite important efforts by the AFL-CIO to turn around labor's decades-long decline, membership recruitment and retention numbers tell us we are still sliding. We are also losing basic battles to inform the public about union LABOR STUDIES JOURNAL, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter 2003): 1-16. Published for the United Association for Labor Education by the West Virginia University Press, P.O. Box 6295, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506. © 2002, West Virginia University Press. 1values. According to recent polling data, as union density has fallen, so too has the public's knowledge of, simply, what unions do (Mitchell, 2001). Part of our problem is the evolving communications environment. While it provides useful tools, the highly technological culture of com-munications practitioners is dominated by a corporate mindset inappropriate to labor's prime directives to organize and represent workers. We need a different approach to communications, one based in assumptions explicitly opposed to corporate communications methods. We need communications that attempt to engage workers in a collective effort at self enfranchisement. Common Sense is Wrong Union density, despite a stepped-up organizing orientation and budget on the part of the labor federation, remains lower than it's been in three quarters of a century. It continued to fall last year. That is mostly due to obstacles like outdated labor laws, indifferent politicians, hostile corporate leaders operating in a cowboy global economy, and generations of workers outside the fold unfamiliar with the benefits of unionism. It is also because the desire for transformation-the starting point for real change-still eludes many unions. Given these difficulties, it is essential for union leaders and commu-nicators to understand that an organizing model of unionism requires an organizing model of labor communications. This runs in the face of "common sense" communications theory drawn from corporate practices. Our challenge is to come up with balanced communications strategies that cull what we can from the bag of innovations originating in corporate-oriented media, while not losing sight of crucial differences between "them" and "us" and how that plays out in labor communications theory and practice. Their Handbook The question to ask in whatever game we are playing is, toward what ends? Corporate communications theory is built on two cornerstones: selling commodities and, less explicitly, selling capitalism. That neither of these goals matches labor's goals should be self-evident. But, apparently it is not. If you listen carefully at union communications seminars, you can usually hear a set of assumptions right out of the corporate PR and advertising handbook: People do not like a lot of words. Serious content is less important than slick form (although what form is, beyond 2trendy design elements, remains unexplored). People don't think for them-selves, so we have to do it for them; and critical thinking comes with a special sign on the door: for executives only. Moreover, people are so bombarded all the time by advertising, mass media, direct mail, e-mail, voice mail, faxes (in short, data overload), that the only way we can get anyone's attention is by using even fewer words, more garish design, and shrinking our message down to slogans approved by the highest authorities save God: focus groups and polls. The logic of these positions leads to a Social Darwinist communica-tions theory: survival of the fittest message means reduction to the most nearly illiterate. We could play by the accepted wisdom of corporate media ideologists, because "theirs is the only game in town." Or we can come up with new rules, because our team needs something different-from communications, and from society-than their team does. We already do play in their game, of course. And, some of that work has become very good in recent years, probably because that is what one aspect of corporate communications theory is set up to accomplish: clearly stating a message and getting it into the mass commercial media. Best examples: tying theme-based paid electronic media advertising to political campaigns, as practiced in the last few election cycles; and John Sweeney's ready availability to the press, compared with the previous leadership's hermit-like non-relationship with the media (Mort, 1998: 47). We also already play in our own game, consisting of the labor press and, increasingly, various emerging forms of electronic media. But, our own game is characterized by a great unevenness and some rather wishful applications of common sense. Let us take a look at some of the work and its assumptions to assess how it functions. On Matching Audience with Methods America©work, the flagship AFL-CIO publication, features pages of bite-sized info nuggets, many colors, contemporary design (described by one union communications staffer to me as "capable of inducing a headache in the reader") and rather more cheerleading than analysis. Despite the effort to retool a look in