Labor's Public Image

"As for me, I'm sticking with the union." So goes an old labor fight song. But those were different times. These days, more and more workers in all sorts of circumstances are finding it hard to remember why anyone would have ever felt so passionately about a union affiliation.

It's not news that the membership and power of organized labor is dwindling. But perhaps worse for the long run is the decline of the labor movement's public image as a vehicle for advancing the interests and aspirations of ordinary Americans.

Labor's power is dwindling because a changing economy, along with Reaganaut appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, have left the cards stacked against workers. But that context doesn't get through to the large majority of Americans who aren't union members. The mass media generally only cover grassroots labor issues when there is a strike. And these days, strikes are rarely a winning proposition. So, in addition to all its other image problems, the labor movement is increasingly tagged with the ultimate American insult -- "loser."

Unless you stay up for David Letterman's Late Night television show, you might not know much about the four-month NABET (National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians) strike against NBC. It's not something Tom Brokaw, who daily crossed the NABET picket line, chose to talk about much. Nor did the CBS and ABC news programs, perhaps under the chivalrous guise of not delighting in a rival's misfortune.

But it was an important story, not just for the thousands of workers affected (they were striking for job security), but for democracy. The slash-and-burn stance against NABET (despite the network's number-one ratings and profit status) represented the first major intrusion into NBC's day-to-day affairs by its new owner, General Electric.

Among other things, GE is the nation's second largest defense contractor and up to its eyeballs in the nuclear energy business. It has an overwhelming vested interest in the most important political issue before the public. The potential conflict of interest for NBC's news division is terrifying.

The acquisition should have been prohibited by law. Now that it has happened, it should be the object of eternal vigilance by NBC workers and the public to keep GE's hand out of the network's operations.

Despite all this, Tom and Bryant and Jane and Johnny and David and Paul all crossed the line, came to work, and mostly kept their mouths shut. Letterman, to his credit, did take sides early on with a skit which explained teamwork between labor and management at the NBC "family" by depicting technicians hard at work putting shows on the air and GE executives getting drunk at lunch and spending the rest of the day on the golf course. Also, guests on the Letterman show frequently appeared wearing NABET strike T-shirts.

But when underground cartoonist Harvey Pekar decided to play "mad prophet of the airwaves" and alert a couch-dwelling public to the dangers of the nuclear giant controlling the news, Letterman did his best to hush him up. "This ain't Meet the Press," a Late Night staffer reportedly warned Pekar. In the end NABET lost the strike, and GE fired 700 workers.

THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE Players Association has a considerably less obvious claim on our solidarity. As was noted ad nauseam in coverage of the players' strike, it is hard to work up too much sympathy for workers whose average wage is $200,000 a year. If there is going to be that much money made (and it's a big "if"), the players should get more of it and the owners less. But it's not exactly a gut issue.

However, the NFL players' strike loomed large in the America of symbols and myths, which is where the larger social struggles are won and lost these days. The NFL players are our symbolic warriors, but in today's service economy they also become a symbolic proletariat wrenching their daily bread from the mud and blood of physical struggle for the vicarious satisfaction of male spectators, who mostly do mental (and thus unmanly) work in airless rooms and draw their checks from a computer. (Football has the highest-income audience of the major sports.) The fact that the players are disproportionately black and/or working class also makes them emblems of upward mobility for other fans whose lack of real-life opportunities make such symbolic heroes all the more important.

Within that context, it was important for America to see its gladiator-proles acting to determine their own destiny (the strike was about free agency, not money) and articulating their grievances, most often through their leader Gene Upshaw, a former player who is black. And at least some of the teams demonstrated the value of placing solidarity and the common good above short-term individual gain.

However, the dominant image that emerged from the football strike was that of a herd of six-and-a-half-foot behemoths laid low and humiliated by a small band of little, old white men with billions of dollars and boundless ambitions -- namely the owners. The games went on without the union. Television cooperated by pretending that the scab games were real NFL football. Fans, in too many cases, played along as well. And eventually the players came back shamefaced and empty-handed. Therein lies a grim parable for post-industrial America.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.