Whatever happened to the industrial round?
Why a lack of dedicated IR reporters is bad for our democracy
With the launch of a new award for Australian industrial reporting, we revisit a story from the Walkley Magazine archives.
When Alan Joyce grounded Qantas’ entire fleet in a petulant act of business militancy on 29 October 2011, industrial relations was back on the front pages and leading the evening news bulletins.
It was arguably the biggest IR story since the 1998 Waterfront dispute, but Australia’s media was woefully undermanned.
Yes, Court One on level six of Fair Work Australia in Melbourne was packed to the rafters with media for those two nights (and early mornings) of hearings, including the cream of Australia’s IR reporters — all three of them.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration but you could count the number of specialist IR reporters regularly filing in Australia today on two hands.
Three of the best in the business — The Age’s Ben Schneiders, Ewin Hannan of The Australian, and the veteran Financial Review scribe, Mark Skulley — sat it out during two nights of marathon hearings. But outside of Melbourne — still the heartland of Australian IR, mainly by virtue of being the home of the ACTU — the round is virtually non-existent.
The shrinkage of IR reporting over the past decade is a disturbing metaphor for the decline of quality journalism in this country.
A decade ago, when the writer of this article plied the trade for the Herald Sun, every metropolitan daily had a full-time industrial roundsperson. Some, like The Age, had two. AAP had industrial rounds in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. And the ABC had a specialist. Then there were the IR scribes at magazines like BRW and The Bulletin.
A few decades before that, a full blown press gallery operated out of the Victorian Trades Hall building (and the John Curtin Hotel across the road, where Bob Hawke often held court during his ACTU days). Competition for scoops was intense, and the reporters were among the best and most skilled in their organisations.
And industrial reporting has traditionally been one of the most coveted rounds on a newspaper, a fulfilling career in itself for those who chose to make it their speciality, but also for many a pathway to political reporting.
Veteran talkback host Neil Mitchell, the ABC’s Walkley Award winning economics reporter Stephen Long, The Australian’s Washington Correspondent Brad Norington, and The Age political columnist Shaun Carney all cut their teeth on the industrial round, to name just four.
And why not? The industrial round provides all the elements of the great yarns every journalist seeks: conflict, intrigue, political shenanigans, powerful human stories, and colourful personalities.
The industrial reporter is an eyewitness to many of the biggest stories of our times. He visits a world populated by larger-than-life characters: uncompromising yet idealistic union leaders and cynical, hard-nosed employer bosses. It’s the scene of conflict in the streets and in the courts, picket lines, lock outs, mass blockades and last minute court injunctions. Double-crossing, highwire negotiations, bluff and counter-bluff, wild threats, outrageous quotes and recriminations. Political power plays, secret deals, collusion with governments. And heart-wrenching stories of personal deprivation, struggle, camaraderie, sacrifice and solidarity.
And add to that the most fundamental of human struggles: that of dignity, respect, and some measure of personal advancement and self-esteem through work.
A dying round
But for years now, industrial relations has been a dying round and its diminishing band of reporters the last practitioners of what was once one the most important reporting jobs in any media organisation.
And this should worry all of us — both those of us working in industrial relations, and those working in journalism.
Because the decline of industrial reporting is symptomatic of the decline of quality journalism, and a loss for all of us. It is typical of the short-sighted, cost-cutting imperatives of modern media organisations, a victim of the growth of churnalism, the pressures of the 24 hour news cycle and internet on a fast turnaround at the expense of analysis, and the lack of investment in journalism.
In the US , we have seen IR consigned to the business pages — we are heading that way here. Melbourne academic Andrea Carson says that between 1960 and 1990, there was a constant of about 100 dedicated industrial reporters plying their trade in the UK. But by 1990 that had fallen to 50. Similarly, in the US, the numbers have fallen from about 1000 specialist workplace reporters during the postwar era to just 10 today. The trend is the same here in Australia.
And yet this decline has taken place during a period that has been one of the most fertile for industrial relations news as any in our nation’s history. The last decade or so has seen the waterfront dispute, the rise and fall of John Howard’s blind pursuit of his lifelong obsession with labour market deregulation, and the unprecedented Your Rights at Work campaign orchestrated by the ACTU and the union movement in 2007. It was a period in which unions withstood an attack on their very existence directed from the Prime Minister’s office, and still managed to engineer outcomes such as the successful pursuit of James Hardie for its unconscionable treatment of the victims of its asbestos products.
Part of the explanation lies in the decline of quality journalism, but also partly in the decentralisation of industrial relations. The old, centralised system meant that people like Bob Hawke or Bill Kelty played a much bigger role in daily life than is possible today, when enterprise bargaining is the norm. No doubt, if we are honest, the fall in union membership over the past few decades has had an influence, as has the shift of most industrial instruments and of state powers to the federal sphere.
There is also the attitude that I have had conveyed to me by reporters that the editor of one major metropolitan daily will refuse to run a story if it has the word union in its intro par.
The demise of the industrial reporting of yesteryear suits big business.
The demise of industrial reporting is a loss not only because so many good stories are going begging. But it is a loss for democracy. Workplace relations is one of the most contested areas of public policy, but for it to be reported fairly and accurately requires experience and knowledge of the field, the players, their agendas, and their histories. The errors made in the reporting of the Qantas dispute by mainstream reporters were due to the lack of full-time IR reporting, with no institutional memory or knowledge of the intricacies of workplace relations, which is leading to ignorance of the system and of the work of unions.
Would we tolerate a lack of dedicated reporters in any other major policy area. Economics? The environment? Foreign affairs?
Instead, what we are ending up with is incredibly ignorant, sensationalist and inaccurate reporting that perpetuates stereotypes and fails to probe the real issues. PR operatives have been able to dictate the agenda of IR reporting — and yes, I’ll put my hand up to that as well.
How have media organisations allowed IR — which just four years ago was one of the defining issues, if not the defining issue, of the election which brought Labor back into power — slip off the radar?
It would be easy to shrug a lot of this off and move on — but it matters, because lazy, uninformed reporting can feed public opinion that leads to poor policy outcomes; and worse, it allows lies and misinformation to be propagated.
Just as bad, it results in stale, clichéd reporting that follows a pre-determined formula — and woe behold any story that fails to fit that formula — that skates over the differences and subtleties of every workplace dispute.
The formula goes as follows: greedy workers wielding their power to bring a company to a halt, threaten the economy and upset people’s lives. Poor, hard-done employer, sees profits at threat is a victim of “industrial militancy”.
When quite often the reality is this: workers ignored by employer when they seek to bargain, undergo several ballots and weeks later reluctantly take industrial action, see their pay docked and the employer retaliating with a lock out. Dispute eventually resolved, with an agreement for annual pay rises in line with inflation (ie. real wage maintenance).
There’s also a failure to check wild statements against the facts — probably the result of an under-resourced newsroom.
Increasingly, stories are reported through the prism of the employer. Which from this perspective, risks alienating the majority of a media audience or readership, who are in the same servile employee situation as the people being written about.
This is not intended to be a long moan about how the poor old, hard-done by unions never get a fair go in the capitalist press. Indeed, in their dismay at the decline of the industrial round, both unions and employers are on a joint ticket. It is a loss for all concerned.
Unions are themselves to blame, often by refusing to engage and being mistrustful of the media. While there is no doubt there is an overwhelming media bias against unions, it is counter productive for unions to simply put up the shutters.
Or by failing to realise that the moment they open their mouth to a reporter they are no longer addressing just their members but a broad cross-section of the community, probably half of whom don’t even believe they should be allowed to exist.
Unions are becoming better communicators — ironically at the same time as coverage of IR is diminishing. In fact, many unions are finding the traditional media to be irrelevant and using increasingly sophisticated social media techniques to get their points across. And that should also worry mainstream newspaper outlets.
The ‘lost tribe’
The demise of industrial reporting is symptomatic of the decline of quality journalism in this country as newsroom resources are cut and editorial agendas are shaped to suit the interests of their investors.
And I feel sorry for young reporters today who will never get to sink their teeth into this round. Because IR reporting is fantastic training for journalists. It allows you to develop skills of building contacts, sorting out different interpretations of events, and achieving balance — all skills that will serve you well later in your career.
Every day in my current job, I confront the ignorance of journalists who have no background in industrial reporting. To them, it’s just another story. Tomorrow it might be a lost dog or a celebrity sighting.
Without any background or relationships with unions, junior reporters approach each story with a pre-formed idea dictated by their newsdesk, seek the most sensational angle, and then move onto the next yarn, whether it be a car crash or a celebrity stakeout. There is no depth of reporting, no real understanding of the issues, no attempt to form relationships or contacts, or to delve beneath the superficial surface for the real story. When workers campaign for job security, it is simply reported as a conflict story — unions versus business. There is rarely any investigation by journalists into what is the true state of precarious work in Australia.
Earlier this year, the former BBC labour correspondent Nicholas Jones edited a book called The Lost Tribe of Fleet Street. Jones points to the unseen damage the decline of industrial reporting does to our democratic processes.
“London’s growth as a world financial centre put paid to the authoritative reporting of old. Tough employment laws, a succession of disastrous defeats and a halving of union membership had already marginalised the reportage of the labour and industrial correspondents, but they were finally displaced by financial journalists and city analysts whose pronouncements frequently go unchecked and unchallenged. Industrial reporters have become the lost tribe of Fleet Street,” Jones wrote in an article on the Touchstone blog.
“The demise of the industrial reporting of yesteryear suits big business: the greater the failure of journalists to report informatively on the reasons for industrial unrest and to explain the ever-tightening restraints on the ability of unions to protect their members and stay within the law, the easier it becomes for managers to flout tried and tested procedures for settling disagreements in the work place.”
So here’s the challenge to an ambitious young journalist. Go to your editor or producer and claim the industrial round as your own. Put in the effort and you will be rewarded with stories that are fascinating, get people talking, and make others notice who you are.
An edited version of this article was published in issue 71 of The Walkley Magazine in May-June 2012.
Mark Phillips is Communications Director at the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, and at the time this article was published held that role at the Australian Council of Trade Unions. He is also a former industrial reporter for the Herald Sun and Australian Associated Press.
Mike Rigoll is a freelance artist; check out more of his work on Behance and follow his illustrations on Facebook.
Apply for the new award for Industrial Reporting by May 19: http://www.walkleys.com/awards/industrial/
