How to Build a Strong Economy: Education or Unions?

On May 15, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that

The American higher-education system has long been seen as a leader in the world, but confidence in its future and its enduring value may be beginning to crack along economic lines, according to two major surveys of the American public and college presidents conducted this spring.

The surveys, conducted by The Pew Research Center and The Chronicle, reveal few surprises to those of us who have been paying attention to the latest crisis of higher education, but several points underscore the different views of the purpose of higher education among education professionals and between those with degrees and those who have not gone to college . For example, of the 1,055 presidents of colleges and universities across a broad spectrum, including four-year, two-year, public, private, and for-profit institutions, respondents are split roughly in half on whether colleges should be about work force preparation or “intellectual growth,” and the responses fall along a predictable axis, with four-year institutions arguing for the latter, and two-year and for-profits advocating the former.

Equally interesting is the difference between college graduates and those who have not (or have not yet) attended college in their responses to the same question on the mission of higher education. According to Pew, those who attended college more often believe that the mission of college is intellectual growth, while those who have not feel it should be work-force preparation. As significant are the responses, across all educational levels, to the question of what a young person needs to succeed in the world: a college education comes in third, behind a “strong work ethic” and the ability to get along with people..

The Chronicle survey addresses President Obama’s statement in last year’s State of the Union address of a national goal that the U.S would lead the world in degree attainment by 2020, so that we can lead the global workplace. The assumption that America will regain its competitive edge simply by awarding more college  degrees seems naïve, , particularly when the same respondents to the Chronicle survey report overall “lower quality” of preparation on the part of incoming students. Indeed, few of the college presidents surveyed think the goal is attainable: only three percent believe it is “likely” that the U.S. will achieve this benchmark, while 50 percent say it’s not likely.

Compounding the problem is that, even if this goal were achieved, a college degree is not a guarantee of gainful employment, though university marketers often suggest it is. Just last week, Catherine Rampell of the New York Times cited a study by Andrew Sum of Northeastern University that shows that only 55.6 percent of 2009 college graduates are working in jobs that require a college degree, while the other 44.4 percent are almost evenly split between working in jobs that require no degree and not working at all.  In the current economy, and as Sherry Linkon and Jack Metzgar have suggested in their analyses of predictions about job growth in the service sector, in the long run, college degrees are clearly not the answer for everyone.

Indeed, in his response to Obama’s aspiration, Brookings Institute fellow Grover J. ‘Russ” Whitehurst noted:

Germany has a stronger economy than France but half the percentage of young adults with a college degree.  Further, France has increased its percentage of young adults with college degrees by 13 percentage points in the last 10 years whereas Germany’s output of college graduates has hardly budged, yet the economic growth rate of Germany has exceeded that of France over this same period.  Obviously increasing educational attainment is not a magic bullet for economic growth.  Education credentials operate within boundaries and possibilities that are set by other characteristics of national economies.  We must attend to these if more education is to translate into more jobs.

And what are those “other characteristics” that might generate a stronger national economy? The answer is ironic, especially as governors in Ohio and Wisconsin are pushing anti-union bills through state legislatures. According to several studies, one of the conditions of strong economies like Germany’s is not increased degree attainment but strong unions and worker protections.

Marc McDonald suggests that when looking at two of the world’s nations with the lowest jobless rates, Germany and Japan, what emerges is a common factor of heavily unionized workforces:

Take a look at two of the most heavily unionized nations in the world: Germany and Japan. Both nations are thriving and have jobless rates far below the U.S. rate. Both nations still have large manufacturing sectors, which are heavily unionized. And both nations are exporting more than ever—even to low-wage nations like China. (Japan, for example, is one of the few nations on earth that has enjoyed a trade surplus with China much of the time in recent years)… Not only are Germany and Japan heavily unionized, both nations have strong pro-worker laws that back up their labor movements. In both nations, for example, it’s virtually impossible to fire full-time workers. Mass layoffs are very rare in both nations.

While many would balk at the suggestion that the U.S. emulate Japan, with its notorious reputation as a stressed out, all-work economy, McDonald notes that, on average, Japanese workers work fewer hours than their American counterparts and enjoy greater benefits. McDonald argues that because workers are protected within these economies, the companies that employ them must think beyond the immediate and develop long-term strategies, rather than short-sighted policies that focus solely on short-term growth and quick shareholder gains.

McDonald may be on to something in his suggestion that as corporations –  and increasingly universities — clamor for the “flexibility” that non-union and non-tenure workplaces promise, they may be embracing a short-sighted strategy. Writing in Harpers last year, Thomas Geoghegan, urges Americans to “Consider the Germans,” and in so doing he counters the claim that what American employers need is greater flexibility and fewer fetters that come with worker representation. In considering the ways that Germany continues to thrive in high-market manufacturing he notes:

All my life as a labor lawyer I have read the same thing in The Economist, about the United States and its wonderful labor-market flexibility. What they mean is: Unlike the Germans, U.S. working people are completely powerless. But it’s precisely because of our labor-market flexibility that we can’t compete. Our workers have been flexed right out of their high-wage, high-skill jobs and into low-wage, low-skill jobs. That’s bad for the workers, of course, and it’s also bad for the economy. The German model—with worker control built into the very structure of the firm—keeps bosses and workers in groups, rubbing elbows with each other, and sometimes just elbowing. It creates a group interaction that over time builds and protects what economists like to call human capital, especially in engineering and quality control. It’s precisely this kind of valuable capital that our atomizing “flexible” labor markets are so good at breaking up and dispersing.

Both McDonald and Geoghegan share the belief that while America obsesses (with good reason) over China, that the model to emulate is that of Germany, with its strong secondary education system and clear worker rights’ laws.

What’s the connection between the value of a college degree and the economic impact of unions?  Just this: if our goal as a nation is economic growth, then we might do better to focus on the rights and status of workers rather than on getting more people to go to college.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

Reframing the Public-Sector Worker Debate

In a March 10 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker set the record straight on why he is fighting public unions, and in so doing he evoked a frame that could easily have appeared in any of the many “recession” stories that have proliferated in media over the past few years:

For example, my brother works as a banquet manager at a hotel and occasionally works as a bartender. My sister-in-law works at a department store. They have two beautiful kids. They are a typical middle-class Wisconsin family. At the start of this debate, David reminded me that he pays nearly $800 per month for his family’s health-insurance premium and a modest 401(k) contribution. He said most workers in Wisconsin would love a deal like the one we are proposing.

The example is compelling, and like the countless other similar accounts, it invites readers to ask “Why should ‘they’ have what I don’t have?”

Walker’s “frame” parallels much of the coverage of workers’ issues that, in an earlier post, I criticized for failing to address the complexities and the realities behind the eye-catching and heart-tugging “working class” frames like his.  For example, rather than simply accepting as unassailable inevitability the plight of Walker’s brother, why aren’t we asking why his health-care premiums are so high, or why the important work that he and his wife do to support their family is so undervalued at a time when corporate profits and worker productivity are at all-time highs?

Imagine the impact of a story that, after describing the plight of Walker’s sibling, actually examined the profit margin of the hotel and department store that employ the couple to let readers discern whether or not the couple is being asked to “sacrifice” because their employers are exploiting the recession to squeeze more out of employees.

This lack of information is equally troubling in the portrayal of public school teachers, which often consists of a comparison between the “perks” of the teacher, with those of the private sector. Missing from these stories is the harsh reality that based on the cost of earning and maintaining their credentials, public school teachers are one of the lowest paid groups, according to a CBS Money Watch study.

Moreover, many media too often repeat the easy opposition between taxpayers and public workers, as in a recent Christian Science Monitor piece that sports the headline, “Who Will Win the Battle Between Teachers and Taxpayers?” Too few note that public workers are taxpayers as well, and in many cities, such as Youngstown, these workers pay much of tax burden that keeps city services functioning.

In a smart analysis for tax.com, “Really Bad Reporting in Wisconsin: Who Contributes to Public Workers Pensions?” Pulitzer Prize Winning reporter David Cay Johnston explains that public pensions are actually deferred compensation, and he faults “pack” journalists for accepting as gospel the Scott Walker version, without seeking to understand how pension systems actually work.

Johnston’s thoughtful piece reveals the dangers of reporting that, in the rush to get the story out, fails to fully tell the entire story, to dig for the facts. Subscribing to an easy objectivity that equates “balance” with the transcription of spin from both sides of an issue, reporting on the assault on unions has failed to truly inform. I’m reminded here of the late great Molly Ivins, who famously observed that

The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press…The smug complacency of much of the press—I have heard many an editor say, “Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right”—stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from someone on both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, “Cat,” and the other side saying “Dog,” while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes. Getting up off your duff and going to find out for yourself is still the most useful thing a reporter can do.

Ivins’s point was that, in an age of instant news gratification, reporters often are lulled into becoming merely stenographers, recording two sides of every argument, even when the facts clearly prove one side wrong. Too often reporters shy away from this duty because they have been conditioned to avoid what might appear as advocacy journalism at all costs, but in shying away from the duty of fully reporting and even disputing shaky facts cloaked in political hyperbole, we abdicate the all important “watchdog” function of the press.

And the perils of neutering the watchdog press, are today more dubious than ever. Last week, Sherry Linkon and John Russo argued that a coalition is needed to combat the multi-pronged assault on unions and public employees:

We need to build a movement that crosses boundaries – between public- and private-sector unions, the traditional working class of industrial, blue-collar workers and the new working class of retail and service workers, between the working class and the middle class, cities and suburbs, and among diverse types of organizations.

The need for this type of collaboration is clear, but the challenges of achieving it in the current media moment are enormous, and will require much more substantive and thoughtful reporting than has been dominating mainstream coverage to date.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

Working Labor Back into the News

In her last post, CWCS affiliate Denise Narcisse looked at the Pew Center’s latest research on the digital divide in America and noted the ways in which digital deprivation for poorer and working-class families amounts to a form of social and economic disenfranchisement.

To be sure, one of the most serious implications of the digital divide is the barriers to information lower income and working-class citizens need to fully participate in the political and social spheres of their communities and of the nation. But, even if working-class and poor Americans were to gain regular access to digital news and information sources, I wonder what kind of news and information they would find. For as traditional commercial news organizations migrate to the web, too many are replicating the structures and agendas that have elided the experiences and interests of the poor and working classes for most of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

It is certainly not news to note that commercial mainstream news media abandoned the working class quite some time ago.  The reasons for this desertion are numerous and widely cited: advertisers increasingly want to appeal to more affluent readers, reporters and editors no longer come from working-class backgrounds, and corporate media ownership encourages an ethic of business.

These factors, combined with the steady downsizing in newsrooms that began long before the crisis of competition with online news, resulted in the replacement of substantive issues stories in mainstream commercial media (the sources relied upon by most working-class people according to Nielsen) with cheap-to-produce stories about celebrities and scandals. For example, The Pew Research Center found that in 2007, the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Iraq, that Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith received more extensive coverage than the war, noting that, “During the two days immediately following Smith’s death, nearly a quarter of the news from all sectors (24%) was devoted to this story. Public interest did not match the amount of coverage, and 61% of Americans said the story was being over-covered.”

One result of this is that Americans who rely solely on commercial media for political knowledge and hard news are being denied critical information and analyses of the national and international events that may ultimately affect their daily lives.

In their recent book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols cite a recent study by a group of communications researchers that finds Americans with a high school education or less who rely on commercial media for news, score just above the 20^th percentile in political knowledge of international and right at the 40^th percentile for domestic hard news, compared to the next lowest group, British news consumers, who score just above 50 percent and 60 percent respectively. For McChesney and Nichols, the data suggest that American “commercial media systems tend to marginalize the poor and working class,” endangering the very purpose of a free press system.

Furthering the disenfranchisement of the working class is the skewing of coverage of workers issues, part of the mainstream media pursuit of an affluent consumer base designed to appeal to advertisers.

McChesney and Nichols cite Christopher Martin’s benchmark analysis, Upscale News Audiences and the Transformation of Labour News, which documents the emergence of news coverage targeted at an “upscale” readership, in which he charts the shift in labor coverage in the U.S. and Canada evidenced by content analyses of coverage of transportation strikes in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Toronto Star. Martin chronicles the movement in news accounts of the strikes from accounts of legitimate disputes between workers and management to tales of inconveniences suffered by the majority of consumers using transportation services. For Martin, this reconfiguration of news is related to the increasing consolidation of media and its adoption of the practices and ethic of big business, and this adoption is apparent in the narrative frames, and even in the language, in which the strikes are presented, notably in the commonplace phrasing that management makes “offers” while unions make “demands” or, as Mc Chesney and Nichols observe, “Poor and working-class people are, for all intents and purposes, only newsworthy to the extent that they get in the way of rich people” (51).

And, while the burgeoning economy of online news sites and blogs has led to increased awareness of working-class lives and struggles (as evidenced by this site) these issues often remain relegated to specialized sites and targeted user searches. Many mainstream sites still foreground the business beat at the expense of the labor beat and the former rarely represents the interests of the latter in a way different from what Martin describes. And too often, when working-class people are featured in mainstream accounts, they serve as anecdotes or catchy narrative leads to pave a colorful path to the “experts,” the real sources for the story.

There are of course, exceptions. Some excellent examples of stories that chronicle the lives and issues of working class Americans have emerged in the major dailies, particularly since the start of the Great Recession. Anne Hull of the Washington Post has written about the struggles of working class Americans with precision and detail, and Steven Greenhouse of The New York Times reports on the complexities of labor, economics and politics in a way that connects policies with people.

Yet, with the opportunities of the internet and the demand for news organizations to reinvent themselves comes the opportunity for the profession to further rediscover its working-class roots and mission– if news producers can see both a means and a benefit for undoing the damage, for as John Nerone notes in a 2009 article for Journalism:

The past half-century of neglect leaves a lot to overcome: the media have worked hard to encourage ordinary people to think of themselves as consumers rather than as workers, and to regard any overt appeal to the working class as not just biased but old, dreary, and boring.

Nerone believes, however, that there exists potential for news organizations to reconnect to their working-class readers, and that because traditional filters and gatekeepers are falling away in the new media economy, that such a reconnection is not only possible but beneficial, because in today’s economy, more and more people self-identify as workers. Indeed, with the most recent Labor Department data showing that 80 percent of the economy is tied to the service sector, Nerone may be on to something.

If news outlets continue to try to rely on advertising for revenue, which Nerone believes is probable, but McChesney and Nichols do not, then in theory, news sites can rely on advertisers who now recognize the importance of reaching the working-class, an appealing proposition, particularly for local news outlets, which many agree might be best positioned to carve out a niche in the online economy. In fact, People magazine has recently begun developing stories about working class people, telling CWCS co-director John Russo, that they understand that most of their readers are working class women.

Endorsing this rather optimistic view, Robert Niles of OJR: The Online Journalism Review lists the five most important beats for a local newspaper/newssite, and included in this list is the Labor Beat:

We eat. We learn. We work. But how many publications cover work, from the worker’s perspective? Business stories typically focus on the management side. But what about the pocketbook and workplace politics issues that employees face? Where’s the coverage of that? This is the home for your consumer reporting, including household finance and budgeting, but also for local development issues covered from an employee’s point of view. Are development incentives helping create jobs and pay for workers, or just fatting management’s pockets for projects that would have happened anyway?

For both Niles and Nerone, the resurgence of the labor/work beats would, at a local level, help to refranchise working class news consumers. And, if these stories were done in a way that explains the relationship between state, national, and international policies and the everyday lives of the working citizens, news sites could do much to return to the mission of journalism and to remedy the deficits in democratic participation.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking Through Stories: Journalism Education, The Liberal Arts, and the Working Class

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately (as have many others) about the state of the university, the media, and the role of liberal arts education in both, and how the shifting ideas about each might affect working-class students, and since I’ve titled this entry, “Thinking Through Stories,” I want to begin with a story.

In my Feature Writing Class last week (the title is a holdover from when our curriculum was heavily centered on traditional newspapers), students were vetting and brainstorming possible topics for narrative journalism pieces that they had gleaned from clippings from our local newspaper. I wanted them to understand that most of the best “feature” pieces, while sometimes distinguished from “news,” are sparked by news values.

One student offered a brief clip about a pregnant Amish woman killed in a collision between a horse drawn buggy and an automobile, in one of the several bucolic Amish communities within a short driving distance from the de-industrialized cityscapes of Youngstown.

His peers peppered the conversation with questions critical to the story: How many of these accidents occur on average? How many lives are lost? How safe are the horse drawn buggies, and are there any regulations for transporting children in them? All of these questions are essential to fully reporting the story, and yet I wanted them to think in broader terms, to identify themes or points of connection that make for great narrative.

A young woman offered up a statement of theme that was both simple and powerful, one that has stayed with me since that class: “It’s about two very different cultures traveling on the same road.”

From this theme the students worked through many of the complexities of the story, identifying possible reporting and writing practices and noting what pitfalls or traps the journalist might also encounter: What kind of access is realistic? How can he avoid coming off as a mercenary cultural tourist? A common thread that emerged from the discussions of this tragedy was how little most of us really know about the people of these communities, residents of towns that many of us routinely bisect in our cars on trips to the outlet mall.

Regardless of whether this story pans out, the value lies in the thinking process, which reveals how journalism and journalism education engage strongly with the premises of liberal arts education. A narrative piece done well, I tell my students, traverses back and forth between the specific and the broad.  It draws clarity from disparate sources of insight and information, from all of the sources of information reporters know—data, interviews, and of course, observation. It is relevant, but not necessarily in the narrowly focused, “what does this have to do with me?” way that has become a misguided mantra for both media and higher education. And students who do journalism well use knowledge they have gathered from many courses and disciplines—history, sociology, political science—to name a few.

It is, or should be, our greatest challenge as educators to help students become curious about people and ideas they do not know.

When we step back and look at the changes in the journalism profession and responses to these changes, an interesting microcosm emerges. Technology and consumer demands have radically altered the business model, and those of us charged with preparing future journalists are having hard conversations about how best to meet the challenge. We know that our students’ chances of landing a traditional job, especially on a newspaper, are slim at best.

And yet, they still come—and in increasing numbers. Reasons for this are varied and speculative and many (myself included) have written about them before. One of the most compelling, however, is that, according to Lekan Oguntoyinbo, “the continued relevance of journalism schools may also lie in the underlying motives of a new generation of students choosing journalism as a major. Many of these students increasingly see journalism as a liberal arts major that teaches them skills for an array of other professions.”

Many students see the profession itself more broadly , in part because journalism has expanded to so many new channels and forms, and they  understand the opportunities that can come from a journalism education that maintains a broad liberal arts viewpoint. Yes, we teach technology now, but many of us see it not simply as a means to a vocational end, but rather as a kind of rhetorical tool– we teach students how different platforms can convey different elements of compelling true stories. Approached from this perspective, journalism education in a multi-platform age can be a powerful means of returning to the roots of liberal arts education, which at its core should provide students with a set of tools applicable to many opportunities.

We might note, too, the parallels between these conversations and similar debates about the future of liberal arts in the university.  As student “success” is increasingly defined as securing a job related to one’s major, politicians and policy makers reward universities for narrowly focusing education on technological task-driven skill sets aligned with one particular job in one particular industry.

This emphasis applies especially to education for working-class students.  For them, the implications of this shift are far-reaching, for as I have written before, it essentially creates a two-tier system in which liberal arts training is reserved for elite private colleges, while public and access institutions become the workforce training centers.

As a consequence of educational policy and missions that enforce this distinction, even unwittingly, many working-class students will essentially wind up paying for the job training once undertaken by employers—an unfair equation at best. Perhaps more importantly, this approach encourages students to define their futures at a very early age and deprives them of the kinds of choices that a liberal arts background may provide. Our journalism students won’t necessarily find jobs as journalists, after all, but they will find that the research, critical thinking and communication skills they develop now will help them navigate many other professions and seize many other opportunities

Even more troubling, this shift to the narrow vocational education may deprive these graduates of the tools they need to realize their greatest potential, for, as Valerie Saturen observes:

If a liberal arts education becomes a luxury, the implications for civil society are profound. A broad-based higher education provides an environment that fosters the critical thinking skills that are the hallmark of informed, responsible citizenship. Disparity in education equals disparity in power. By making a well-rounded education available only to the elite, we move one step closer to a society of two classes: one taught to think and rule and another groomed to follow and obey.

To be sure, this trend is not likely to diminish anytime in the foreseeable future, but public universities should assume a more thoughtful and innovative stance in negotiating the demand for vocational training, and perhaps take a page from journalism. We can teach students the practical skills required to land a job, but we can also do a better job of integrating all that the university has to offer. We can revitalize the role and the mission of liberal arts to teach our students to negotiate between the specifics and the broad implications and foster the kind of critical thinking that will make students, to borrow a term from business, “entrepreneurial” in the very best sense of the word—well rounded, intellectually agile, and capable of navigating the increasing complexities of a changing world.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

Community Journalism in the Recession

It is not news to note that along with traditional working-class occupations, one of the hardest hit business and employment sectors, even before the recession, is the traditional news media. Rocked by, to use a favorite business journalism cliché, a “perfect storm” of technological innovation, shifts in consumer habits, and of course declining advertising revenue, reports of the death of the traditional newspaper may not be greatly exaggerated.

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s latest report, The State of The News Media confirms that newspapers lost 26 percent of ad revenue in 2009, for a three-year total loss of 41 percent. And the projections for the future are equally grim.  The report suggests that, for newspapers, “the metaphor that comes to mind is sand in an hourglass. The shrinking money left in print, which still provides 90% of the industry’s profits, is the amount of time left to invent new revenue models online. The industry must find a new model before that money runs out.”

As my colleagues and I have noted before, the consequences of this revenue bleed are dire, for both information and, indeed, democracy. After all, original reporting, as Pew confirms, still comes primarily from these same traditional outlets that are faced with dwindling resources.

Meanwhile, as newspapers devote more emphasis and resources to online journalism, the Pew Project suggests, their focus shifts to “disseminating information” rather than “gathering it, making news people more reactive and less proactive.” The report rightly notes that this shift grants more power to newsmakers, who, through press releases and press conferences now take their own accounts directly to the public “in a less vetted form, sometimes close to verbatim.”  Such accounts  also quickly become fodder for commentary via the web. Absent from many of these news opportunities is the supplemental reporting that “would unearth more facts and context about the events,” so that “while technology makes it easier for citizens to participate, it is also giving newsmakers more influence over the first impression the public receives.”

And yet, despite these important concerns, one of the brightest spots in the otherwise bleak forecast for media is community journalism– and this is where the convergence of the media and the economic meltdowns gets interesting. While traditional media continued a steady decline over the past year, citizen and community media expanded.

As Michele McLellan points out, community journalism projects are evolving as hybrids between old and new media, between professionals and citizens, and between for profit and not-for-profit groups, resulting in the creation of “exciting experiments that will help shape the future of news, information, and civic engagement.”  Increasingly, projects like Oakland Local and YSU’s thenewsoutlet.org explore means to “mix community building with professional standards of reporting.”

Indeed the “perfect storm” cliché might just hold weight for the ways in which media and communities, particularly recession-hit working- and middle-class communities, might work together to redefine their futures and affect positive change.

Recent studies and anecdotal observations reveal some interesting albeit conflicting findings of the effects the current recession on community building and engagement.  Taken together, even with the contradictions, these trends might point to some opportunities for media and for the communities they serve. For example, while the Civic Health Index gathered by The National Conference on Leadership charts a decline in civic engagement defined by traditional metrics of participation in volunteer organizations, the study also finds that a re-definition of civic engagement to include tangibles like food and shelter, what might be termed “working-class issues,” makes the picture more complex. The study finds that

Even though they are disproportionately affected by the economic downturn, low-income Americans are still finding ways to give back to their communities. Thirty-nine percent of respondents with an income less than $50,000 reported helping others by providing food or shelter, compared to only 27 percent of Americans with a higher income. Overall, 50 percent of Americans gave food or money to someone who was not a relative, while 17 percent allowed a relative to live in their home and more than one-in-ten took in non-relatives.

Annie Gowen of The Washington Post chronicles a sense of renewed solidarity in one D.C. neighborhood in which neighbors were banding together to respond to the problems of foreclosure, increased crime, and blight caused by the recession. The sources she cites indicate that technology and an active younger generation, one comfortable with the tools of media, might actually increase engagement, a finding confirmed by the aforementioned Civic Health Index, which finds that “Millenials who use social networking sites for civic purposes are far more likely to actively engage in civic participation in their communities.” In fact, this group leads the way with a 43 percent community service rate.

News organizations, partnering with community groups, universities, and other not-for-profits must increasingly become catalysts of civic engagement in order to remain viable in the shifting news economy.  Journalists are well positioned to take the lead in this new information/organization ecosystem by realizing and returning to their strengths: helping to set community agendas, guarding accuracy in reporting and transparency in government, and gathering and presenting information in ways that serve the members of the community. Academics, particularly those involved in media, community-based research, and working-class studies, can contribute to this revitalization by helping community members identify ways to use new and traditional information technologies for community change and greater civic involvement.

So while the traditional newspaper may in fact be dying, media outlets may also be reborn as something far greater and far more useful. By taking active leadership roles, traditional news outlets and practitioners can transform the role of the professional from that of competitor with citizen journalists and “upstart” outlets to that of mentor, or better still, partner in the retooling of the information needs of their communities. The community information needs of the digital age will best be met by innovative partnerships between traditional and new media and community organizations and universities, as creators and delivers of content take cues from news consumers, who increasingly integrate content from multiple sources to stay informed and relevant.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

(Mis)Remembering the Good Old Days: The Politics of Nostalgia

I live in a suburb of Youngstown, in what is arguably a sterling example of the “white-flight” communities that have weakened our cities. My reasons for doing so would take too much time to discuss here, but the short version is that my partner grew up on a farm and here we have more than an acre of land—it’s a compromise, and I like the town. It reminds me of the New England community in which I grew up.

Everyday, I walk my dogs through the village, and on most days, I talk with my neighbors, who according to voting statistics are primarily conservative, and who according to me, are generally very good neighbors. Because I grew up in a place like this, I know to avoid talking about religion and politics, but this past Saturday, I let down my guard and got an earful of insight into our current political climate, one too often sustained by broad generalizations that divide the working middle class and the poor.

A local business owner, a man I like for his big dreams and for his openness, treated me to the familiar “Tea Party” mantra in passionate and patriotic oratory—more freedom, less government, no unions, no healthcare/socialism, no entitlements, and then of course, a return to Reagan conservativism.

As a former journalist and a teacher of aspiring journalists, I avoid disclosing personal details and discourage my students from first-person interjections, even in my Opinion Writing class. The argument goes that by taking oneself out of the equation, one focuses more on facts and policy issues thereby allowing for a greater connection to broader audiences who might not otherwise identify with the persona of the writer. This weekend I broke my rule and put the theory to the test.

I told my neighbor that my parents lived in a public housing project until the birth of the sixth and seventh children of their ten children(twins — we were the result of strict adherence to the church’s stance on birth control), and during these years, they also received food assistance. My father, who didn’t graduate high school, worked as a short order cook, as a dishwasher, and at a host of other jobs.  My neighbor exclaimed that this was exactly the point—my father was one of the “good ones,” who used the system as “way up and not a hand out.” But the truth is, and I told him this, that my father might not have found a “way out” save one life-altering opportunity: after numerous fits and starts he landed a job as a truck driver and therefore membership in the Teamsters union.  The union afforded my father job security, a decent wage for his manual labor, and perhaps most importantly, health care for his children which, in turn, allowed him to keep the house he had recently bought with a government backed loan for WWII vets, the house in which I grew up in a small, safe community with a solid public school system.

Had my father not had the good fortune of his union job, it’s quite probable that the expense of my sister’s minor spina bifida or of the more routine episodes of broken bones, childhood illnesses, decades of dental care, or that one terrible car accident might have plunged us back into poverty, with no bootstraps with which we might lift ourselves back up.

Of course, my neighbor insisted that my father represents a different generation, one with a presumably superior set of values that enabled them to get ahead—and he is partially right in his nostalgia. My father’s generation was different in that much of his adulthood and, and a part of my childhood were spent in an America in which the gap between the poor, the rich, and the middle class was not as pronounced as it is now. As Paul Krugman notes, “The Greatest Generation,” to which my father belonged, was much more equal, largely because of “more or less deliberate compression of wage differentials during World War II.”  And that equality lasted more about 30 years thanks to “a powerful union movement, which is at least in large part a change in the political climate, but then remained in place for several decades more.”

Krugman explains that over the last 30 years, the movement to the far right of the Republican Party created tacit support for union busting policies of the 80s – remember PATCO? That caused a decline in union power and membership, which in turncontributed to the enormous gap between rich and poor and between rich and middle class.

Frank Rich argues that while this anti-healthcare ire finds its locus in the Tea Party doctrine of “more freedom, less government,” the resistance is really linked to the dwindling power of the white majority.  While I agree with his analysis, I think one can’t discount the power of nostalgia, a point hinted at by Rich.  In public discourse, Jane Hill notes, nostalgia makes it possible for “people who benefit from the practices that they believe are legitimated by tradition” to at the same time “put forward their political interests.”

The current movement against government involvement in health care and the power of unions illustrates this.  As Krugman’s analysis suggests, many of those who are calling for a return to “the real America” forget what led to current problems.  The great days for which they yearn were built in part by strong unions that advocated fair wages and decent affordable health care, as well as government programs and policies that limited the gap between rich and poor.

Nostalgia explains the contradiction between the often fierce support some offer for Social Security and Medicare and dire warnings that government involvement equals “socialism.”  As a recent New York Times poll shows, a majority of those claiming allegiance to the Tea Party, who are on average at least 45 years-old, oppose government healthcare, but they favor the continuance of Social Security and Medicaid, programs staunchly criticized by conservative poster-boy Ronald Reagan, who campaigned against Medicare on behalf of the American Medical Association (AMA), according to Larry DeWitt.

Reagan also mastered the art of pitting the working class against the poor. Lost in the shiny mythology that has become the Reagan legacy, a mythos largely unchallenged by mainstream media, is the Great Communicator’s invention of the “welfare queen,” as DeWitt recalls:

When a welfare recipient in Chicago was publicly exposed in 1977 for having defrauded state welfare programs out of $8,000 by using two identities, Reagan transformed the news report into a story regarding a “welfare queen” who drove a Cadillac and who collected an annual tax-free income of $150,000 by using “eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and . . . collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands.” Reagan repeated this story of the Chicago welfare queen multiple times over the years, growing it like some kind of political fish-story with each re-telling. In the end, it seems clear that he could not distinguish his own mythical version from the historical one.

Reagan mainstreamed his disdain for the unions and for the poor, and he birthed the ethos that permeates today’s recession weary middle class: that one is lucky to have a job and the poor are poor because they lack the character of my father’s generation.

Rooted deeply in evocations of the golden ages of the Reagan years, or back further to the bootstraps ethic of the greatest generation, or further still to the founding fathers, the current anti-everything movement dissolves historical contingencies and uncomfortable facts into a nostalgia that ignores the role of unions in post-war prosperity, or the founders belief that only male land-owners should vote, or Reagan’s loathing for what his budget director David Stockton once labeled, “closet socialism,” Social Security and Medicare, or the fact that once he realized the popularity of these programs,Reagan abandoned his fantasy of dismantling them but stayed stringently on his union-busting course.

My neighbor is fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and non-white.  I respect his opinions, even when we disagree. As we spoke, he remembered instances that run counter to the Reagan mythology.  He was surprised to hear that, I, a Democrat am not “anti-capitalism,” and that I recognize the advantages this system brought my family. I understand his deep-rooted love for this country and his worry that things are changing too quickly. As I walked back past the rows of carefully restored historic homes to my own, I was reminded of how much we can learn from one another when we move our conversations beyond rhetorical flourishes wrapped in a kind of nostalgia for a past that likely never was and instead engage one another in civil discourse, discourse that acknowledges the faces, friends, and families behind public policy.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies

The Myth of the Benevolent Boss

Following this year’s Superbowl, viewers who stayed tuned to CBS were treated to the premiere of the network’s new series, Undercover Boss, in which COO of Waste Management Corp., Larry O’Donnell, dons coveralls to go undercover in his own corporation.

The premise of the show according to CBS is that

Each week a different executive will leave the comfort of their corner office for an undercover mission to examine the inner workings of their company. While working alongside their employees, they will see the effects their decisions have on others, where the problems lie within their organization and get an up-close look at both the good and the bad while discovering the unsung heroes who make their company run… O’Donnell’s mission is to garner an up-close look at his company and workforce to see how and where improvements can be made from both an operational and morale standpoint.

In the premier episode, O’Donnell, alias “Randy,” cleans toilets, picks up trash and sorts recyclables alongside his workers, and in so doing he comes to realize that… wait for it…manual labor is hard! Randy is also surprised to learn that, unbelievably, when trash collectors are followed by supervisors in conspicuous white pick-ups, they feel as though they are being spied on and that when his company eliminates positions, the work load is shifted onto remaining employees who receive no additional compensation for their extra labor.

In the blogosphere the show has already attracted much attention, mostly negative, and largely deserved.   The New York Post reported that unlike a “reality” show, for which participants are paid, the network has labeled the show both a “docu-narrative” and a “formatted documentary,” which CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler tells Josef Adalian “…hits all of the same visceral high points of our scripted shows. It’s emotional, it’s funny, it’s compelling, it’s full of surprises…”

And it’s also a bargain for the network because as “documentary” CBS is not bound to pay any of the participants as it would with scripted or “reality” shows. Responding to TV Squad’s reports of the uncompensated appearances, a CBS spokesman said, “No one in the company is being paid for participation in Undercover Boss. Neither the employees, the executives, nor the companies receive compensation for participating in the show.” The blog reports that the workers in the program signed releases to be in a documentary film, which means it is not covered by the television actors’ union, thus eliding the requirement for minimum payments for TV appearances.

As incredible as the irony of a “docu-narrative” that chronicles the plight of workers without paying them might be, equally disconcerting is the meta-narrative that drives the series, described by Tassler as “aspirational…it’s wish fulfillment and it’s a new form (of reality).”

Randy/Larry rides along with a female trash collector.  When he learns that under the watchful eye of the aforementioned supervisor surveillance truck, she is reduced to urinating into a tin can rather than compromising productivity by taking a bathroom break, he appears visibly shaken., Undercover Boss suggests that O’Donnell’s experience will lead to better policies, as O’Donnell tells NPR’s Linda Holmes:

I was out working a residential route, and I then found out that one of the policies that I had put in place was actually causing a lot of frustration out there in the field. So we’re working right now on improving our communication and our coaching between the supervisors and the drivers.

When pressed by Holmes to reveal “tangible” changes in corporate policy, O’Donnell responds with non-specific corpo-speak about motivational videos and better communication instead of actual policy shifts.  The white truck isn’t going away anytime soon, probably because it is part of a strategy to save the company more than $100 million and increase divided to stockholders, as outlined in the company’s most recent annual report.The episode focuses on five “unsung heroes”—the trash collector, a cancer-survivor field office worker performing three jobs (due to corporate streamlining of positions also noted in the annual report) to support her family and hang on to her home, a dialysis patient who blows O’Donnell away with his positive attitude, a plant worker who must race back from lunch to avoid what appears to be an illegal pay docking policy, and a toilet scrubber who makes his job “fun.” While the first two voice complaints about corporate policies, all perform their jobs with capability and aplomb, and each (save the trash collector) is tangibly rewarded: the field office worker is promoted to a salary position, while the dialysis patient and the toilet scrubber are given temp gigs as in-house motivational speakers.  Meanwhile, the middle manager responsible for enforcing the time clock policy is roundly taken to task by O’Donnell, although O’Donnell later tells NPR the whole issue was a “miscommunication.”

Absent from the narrative is union representation, which is perhaps not surprising given Waste Management’s troubled history with the Teamsters that culminated with a lockout of workers in 2007 and has resulted in at least one settlement with the union over its practices toward organized labor.

Instead, even as the show glorifies the unsung worker, it also perpetuates the myththat all workers need to improve their lots is a positive attitude and a benevolent COO, a mythology that ignores some of the stark realities of corporate culture.

Media promote that mythology, perhaps unwittingly, through a recession narrative  that valorizes workers’ willingness to sufferithe necessary indignities of work life because they are, and should be, grateful just to have a job during the economic downturn.. Such stories tend to ignore the contradictions of the narrative in favor of the media friendly package.The narrative says that companies are struggling, but a recent Sagework analytics study shows that waste collection is among the industries experiencing the largest sales growth over the last twelve months.

At the same time, overall worker productivity rose 7.2 percent, according to the most recent Labor Department statistics, as employers wring more labor from existing workers and, in many cases, engage policies that CNN’s Peter Walker notes “would have been seen as too radical, or too likely to antagonize unions, before the crisis.” , Indeed, pri.org charts a rise in wage and worker’s rights violations during the same period.

The goal of the CBS program is, in itself, laudable: to connect the disparate dots between top-level policy and the daily lives of workers. But by perpetuating the “feel-good” narrative over the more complex contingencies of the real story of workers and bosses in a tough economy, the show engages in nothing short of myth-making, which as John Drakakis notes, is born of an impulse to produce

…a series of essentialist meanings which function to transform a sequence of historical and political events into a series of permanent, one might say almost literary truths, which can when deployed by the powerful constituencies, deflect resistance or challenge by framing the historically contingent as a ‘tragic’ necessity…

While Drakakis is referring specifically to instances in which pundits evoke literary frames for politically complex realities, his thoughts are relevant for cultural productions like Undercover Boss, that in mythologizing the corporate narrative, reduce complexities to what Roland Barthes has called the “depoliticized speech” of myth. The idea that bosses value their workers and care about their needs enough to change company policies is, sadly, more a myth than a reality.  It reinforces another problematic myth: that labor unions aren’t  necessary.  If workers do their jobs the best they can, then the boss will respond to their needs.

Perhaps CBS is banking on the appeal of these myths in producing Undercover Boss, but skeptical viewers will recognize the truth in the smirks of O’Donnell’s management team when he explains that the company’s policies make workers unhappy.  And the strategies outlined in Waste Management’s annual report remind us that profit always matters more than people.  So much for the myth of benevolent management.

Tim Francisco, Center for Working-Class Studies