Twenty years after the UK’s labour and industrial reporters said farewell to their once influential roles, a new study highlights a comparable collapse across Europe of in-depth news reporting about employment affairs.
Stories in European mainstream media appear only rarely, often restricted to niche outlets, and specialist labour desks are “in effect, extinct” says Arena for Journalism in Europe.
The world of work was “no longer considered a desirable beat for journalists”.
In a mirror image of the demise of labour reporting in the UK, the authors of the study – Arena’s director Brigitte Alfter and journalist Jose Miguel Calatayud – say the decline is due to factors such as job insecurity, the shrinking presence of trade unions, and weaker class consciousness among journalists alongside other workers.
What coverage remained was scattered across economy, business, society and other sections of the media which only fragmented the overall picture.
In tracing the decline of the labour beat from the post-war period the authors found that although employment issues were driven temporarily to the top of the agenda during the Covid-19 pandemic of the early 2020s, dedicated labour desks had nearly all gone from European newsrooms.
When occasional reports broke through about slave like work conditions, wages too low for a decent living standard, jobs in legal grey-zones and systematic use and abuse of illegal immigrants in the black labour market, they did not do justice to the monumental nature of these stories.
“There is now a widespread view that labour isn’t a sexy beat among journalists, and in addition increasing financial inequality means greater resources for – and the growing influence of – corporate public relations.”
Arena for Journalism in Europe, which is based in Amsterdam, conducted interviews with colleagues around Europe and found that labour tended to get filed under social issues, and while still considered hard news, it was often subsumed by the prestige beats of politics and international conflict.
The influence of Thatcherism and Reagonomics are touched upon briefly, but the study would have benefited from some detailed comparisons with the impact of the tumultuous changes which reshaped UK industrial relations during the 1980s.
Demolition of the UK’s nationalised industries and the widespread privatisation of state-owned enterprises during Margaret Thatcher’s Premiership was accompanied by the imposition of some of the most restrictive employment laws in Europe.
Trade union membership halved in a decade and swingeing legal restraints on strike action resulted in far fewer industrial disputes.
Organised labour was in wholesale retreat and newsrooms adjusted with alacrity to what Conservative ministers claimed was the arrival of a strike free era.
There was little love lost between the staff of Fleet Street dominated newspapers and the trade union movement.
Broadcasters went along with a changing news agenda as a surge in the promotion of tempting share offers in the privatised industries heralded far greater media interest in the fortunes of the City of London.
Labour desks were decimated as a burgeoning band of business reporters and personal finance correspondents commandeered the editorial space and airtime that had once been the much-prized domain of labour and industrial correspondents.
Rapid changes in the labour market and a growth in workers in the gig economy has generated some signs of a renewed interest in the labour beat, especially among journalists writing for websites and publications on the left of British politics.
After years of campaigning and the emergence of several new independent trade unions there has been a breakthrough in the legal status of workers such as Uber drivers and couriers who have gained a degree of protection under minimum wage regulations.
A further impetus to a potential revival in news coverage is the phased implementation of the government’s Employment Rights Act which gives trade union representatives enhanced access to workplaces.
Big tech companies which have successfully resisted demands for trade union recognition are having to adjust to a new reality.
Union officials and shop stewards have been reminding such employers they must be allowed access to “meet, recruit and organise” non-unionised workforces.