When LabourStart began back in 1998, news was one of its three main features (the others were a directory of union websites and links to online campaigns run by unions). One of the three columns on the website consisted of the day’s labour news — all five or six items. I remember well a discussion I had with a colleague that year who told me that in the future, we should probably stick with that format — five or six news stories a day was more than enough.
Fast forward to 2005: We’ve just had to completely re-vamp LabourStart’s front page because the number of news stories appearing in English on the average day had become so large as to require endless scrolling. If you were looking for news from the USA or the UK, you’d have to scroll through pages and pages of news from all the other countries, listed in alphabetical order.
In the month of June 2005, our 340 volunteer correspondents published no fewer than 7,300 links to labour news stories — an average of 243 news stories per day, every day. Let’s put that another way: on average, every six minutes we link to another labour news story.

Not all those stories were in English. We’re running news in around 20 languages these days. But the bulk of those were stories in English.
Some of those stories are purely local, of course. A report on a picket line at a Chicago hotel. A woman fined for driving into a picket line in Canada. A seminar of interest to trade unionists in Sydney.
But many were of global significance — big news stories by any standard. These included hundreds of thousands of workers taking to the streets in one of the largest protest movements Australia has ever seen. General strikes in South Africa and Greece. In the USA, a possible split in the AFL-CIO. And in Israel, the militant leader of the country’s unions running as a candidate for prime minister.
With labour news breaking every six minutes, you’d think that daily newspapers, radio stations and television would be absolutely overflowing with union news. But of course that is not the case. You can read through many major daily newspapers in the USA and elsewhere and never find a single news story that relates in any way to a union. You can watch hours of 24-hour news channels such as Fox or CNN (not that you’d want to!) and never hear the word “union” mentioned.
It’s a funny situation when LabourStart is flooded with thousands of union news stories every month, but in the mass media there’s a drought. Of the 7,300 labour news stories we ran in June 2005, I’ll bet that at most a handful appeared in any of the mainstream media you’ve read.
But it’s not only the mainstream media which are the problem. Which union publication can cover any of those 7,300 stories in real time? There are no labour daily papers in the USA (and very few anywhere else), and most unions would consider themselves lucky to publish a monthly magazine. Newspapers like Industrial Worker which do make an effort to publish general labour news find that at best there’ll be room for a dozen or two labour news stories — and these will appear days or weeks after the event.
All of this leads me to three observations about labour news and the labour movement:
1. The only way to get labour news out to union members in real time is through the web. Print publications and even other electronic media (radio and television) cannot keep up with the pace.
2. Labor news is global news. National borders mean less and less in a globalized economy.
3. The mainstream media isn’t going to do the job for us. Unions need their own media.
The next time you sit down to watch the news on television, or skim through the morning newspaper, pay attention to how much (or how little) labour news you’re seeing or reading. And then remember that every six minutes, another labour news story breaks somewhere in the world.