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Anya Schiffrin, who directs journalism training programs for the Columbia-based Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), has long been conscious of the need to sensitize the media on how to cover labor stories, particularly from a global perspective. She could hardly have anticipated, though, that just as she and colleague Liza Featherstone were releasing their new guide, Covering Labor: A Reporter’s Guide to Workers’ Rights in a Global Economy, the story of immigrant workers and their rights would make headline news.
Written by a mixture of academics, journalists and human rights activists, Covering Labor is the third in a series of textbooks for journalists published by IPD, a think tank on economic development established in 2000 by University Professor Joseph Stiglitz. The two previous titles concern globalization and oil.
Unlike many other journalism training organizations, IPD focuses on producing a variety of low-cost “backgrounders” for journalists covering finance and economics in developing countries, which can be downloaded from the program’s Web site. The site also offers links to information in Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese to promote wide distribution of the training materials.
Participating in a panel discussion in early April to launch their new work, Schiffrin and Featherstone explained that their objective was to help reporters improve their understanding of labor issues in their own countries and throughout the developing world.
“Journalists are not writing enough about labor,” Schiffrin said, noting that when they do, they are often ill prepared. Indeed, when she started her research for the book, she’d been appalled by the lack of suitable materials, as well as by the fact that what little has been written tends to be Eurocentric, ignoring the issues of globalization confronted by places like Vietnam, Turkey and parts of Africa. Not only is Covering Labor concerned with the issues faced by the developing world, she said, but reporters in developing countries can obtain it free of charge.
Featherstone, author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart, attributes the lack of labor coverage to the growing economic gap between journalists and their readership during the last 50 years. She said that newspapers with high-income demographics, like the Times and the Wall Street Journal, assume that their audience will ignore labor stories. “Editors believe that readers will not connect labor issues with their lives, so the papers don’t commit resources.”
She suggested that all kinds of good stories could have been written about the erosion of health care benefits for workers at companies like Wal-Mart. “That could have been a great window to look at the issue of leaving the provision of health care up to the employer.”
Schiffrin, a former Knight-Bagehot Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism, concurred with Featherstone’s point while also reminding the audience that even a magazine with an extremely upscale demographic like the New Yorker has published some outstanding labor stories over the past couple of years.
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