Labor Media in Chicago: Issues and Perspectives

          by Larry Duncan, Jan. 1997 lduncan@igc.org


On a summer evening in 1928 John Fitzpatrick, President of the Chicago
Federation of Labor, sat down in front of a television camera at Navy
Pier. His image and voice were then transmitted to a receiver a few
miles away at Union Park on Ashland Avenue, at the north end of today's
Union Row neighborhood.(1)

Virgil Schoenberg, Chief Engineer at WCFL - the Chicago Federation of
Labor's new radio station - optimistically declared, 'At WCFL station we
have clearly demonstrated that television is here. What is needed now is
the adoption and refinement of laboratory equipment for home television
receivers.' Schoenberg hoped that union members and locals would run out
and construct television receiving sets, issuing in an exciting era of
union militancy using the cutting edge of a new technology. That was not
to happen yet. 

Commercial television (to say nothing of labor television) was still, of
course, decades away. The Chicago Federation of Labor would first devote
its efforts to developing its radio station, WCFL. 

Although the life and death of WCFL as labor media is best described
elsewhere (2), it left an important legacy to Chicago labor radio and tv
(such as they are) in the late 1990's. 

When the Cable Commission Hearings began in 1983 in the Chicago City
Council, the Committee for Labor Access was created, and its first task
was to provide testimony at the hearings to strongly support the need
for one or more of the free public access channels to be set aside for
labor programming. The CLA (the parent non-profit for Labor Beat, the
cable-tv series) was surprised to find out how disinterested the Chicago
Federation of Labor was in this idea. Only one CFL representative,
Michael Bruton of IBEW 134, testified at the hearings, and his stated
interest was not in a labor channel, but in how the new franchise
agreement with the city would impact on cable installation jobs for IBEW
members. 

From the very start, Committee for Labor Access was left on its own to
struggle with all of the issues related to developing labor programming
on the new access channels. 

The president of the CFL at that time was William Lee, who occupied that
position from 1946 to 1984. The attitude of the CFL toward the potential
of labor programming in cable tv flowed from its position, under
President Lee, on labor programming on WCFL. 

As labor historian Nathan Godfried notes, when Lee took control of the
CFL in 1946, he immediately began to dilute the radio station's labor
orientation, substituting instead programming consistent with other
commercial radio stations. Throughout the 50s WCFL was simply viewed as
a revenue-generating instrument for the CFL. It finally failed, however,
to commercially compete with its main rival, WLS, and in 1978 the
station was sold to Amway, a notorious anti-labor corporation. (3)

President Lee and the CFL during the 1983 cable tv hearings saw little
need for labor to develop an independent media presence, even though
channel slots, editing, and training would be provided virtually free of
charge. 

This opposition to developing an independent media voice for the labor
movement had been around for decades in the national AFL-CIO. Godfried
suggests that this point of view had a political basis: 

'Trade union elites promised a responsible, predictable, and peaceful
work force in exchange for a growing economic pie, nominal welfare
reforms from the state, and token participation in policymaking. The AFL
commitment to this corporatist ideology manifested itself in the
federation's approach to the mass media. During the early 1920s, leaders
of the AFL rejected pleas from local unions for the establishment of an
AFL newspaper chain throughout the country. While local leaders talked
of the need to counter the anti-union propaganda of the capitalist
press, the AFL Executive Council explained that labor had to make
decisions based on 'utility, expediency, and business judgment.' AFL
officials hoped that the expanded work of their 'Information and
Publicity Service will result in a constantly improving standard of
accuracy in daily newspapers even though not owned or controlled by
Labor.'' (4)

Although the Chicago Federation of Labor back in the 1920s stood largely
in opposition to the AFL's corporatism, by the early 1980s the CFL had
long since adopted more conservative ideology. And this may have
contributed to CFL President Lee's enthusiastic indifference to any
independent media for Chicago labor. 

In the intervening years, however, enormous changes had taken place in
the commercial mass media. The process which has led to today's
corporate media monopolies of Turner/Time-Warner, Disney/Capital
Cities/ABC, CBS/Westinghouse, and NBC/General Electric...these processes
were already well underway on the eve of the Chicago cable tv hearings
in the early 1980s. And they had alarmed even Lane Kirkland's somnolent
AFL-CIO. 

The AFL-CIO in Washington created a media arm called the Labor Institute
for Public Affairs, and one of LIPA's early missions was to promote
nationally the idea that union locals, federations, internationals and
district council should all start seriously thinking about using public
access channels, radio stations, computers - in other words, late 20th
century technology. 

LIPA met with limited success in achieving these goals, and was, of
course, confined by the degree of commitment from the AFL-CIO. Since the
election of the new AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, LIPA has been
dissolved into something called the Broadcast Division. After one year
of the Sweeney presidency, little is known about the new Broadcast
Division, and no general media strategy statement from the AFL-CIO is
yet available. 

The Union Producers and Programmers Network (a national organization
which has autonomy from the AFL-CIO, but a working relationship with it)
has in the last few years lobbied the AFL-CIO to take serious steps
toward establishing a national labor cable channel, but so farr nothing
has come of this. 

The Sweeney administration may prove to be as lukewarm toward labor's
media independence as his 20th century predecessors in the AFL-CIO. This
flows from the corporatist outlook of softening labor's class
independence from corporations, their political parties, the state
institutions controlled by corporations, and the ubiquitous
corporate-controlled media. 

Speaking before Business for Social Responsibility in 1996, Sweeney
declared, 'We want to help American business compete in the world and
create new wealth for your shareholders and your employees. We want to
work with you to bake a larger pie which all Americans can share and not
just argue with you about how to divide the existing pie. It is time for
business and labor to see each other as natural allies, not natural
enemies.' (5)

The labor media which has been - and presumably will be - done once the
new Broadcast Division gets sorted out, will likely be in-house
communication: unions reaching their membership. No independent labor
outreach to the mass, general public is yet envisioned. 

The CFL has, since the arrival of cable-tv in 1986, made no effort in
tv, radio or print to establish a regular, independent voice for labor
in the Chicago area designed to reach the public. The Federation News in
January, 1997 will cease being an newspaper aimed at union members, and
become a newsletter. 

Other than Labor Beat (cable tv) and Labor Express (radio), there are no
series in electronic media in Chicago. Setting aside one video about the
Tribune Strike produced in 1986, the CFL had created no tv. None of the
labor education programs at the area's main universities have produced
any videos, nor brought into play their official resources to produce a
series. Some district councils (ACTWU/UNITE) have made periodic videos
only. The institutions which should be mobilizing their organizational
resources remain silent, or dabble with labor's media crisis
halfheartedly. 

The failure of the Chicago Federation of Labor - labor's chief
institution in Chicago - to respond to the media crisis is also
reflected in the CFL's general failure to respond to the overall attacks
against labor. This is one reason the labor coalition Jobs With Justice
was formed by dedicated union leaders frustrated with the CFL,
rank-and-filers, and community groups. Now, through Jobs With Justice,
militant solidarity actions are organized, because the CFL has no
enthusiasm for this. 

The enormous task of answering the big guns of the anti-media giants in
Chicago has been left to a handful of rank-and-file labor media
activists and their supporters. Labor Beat/Labor Express survives
through selling videos, support from progressive union locals, the rare
small grant, money out-of-pocket, and the encouragement of rank-and-file
workers starved for television and radio that is working class in its
outlook. 

This is a far cry from the early days of WCFL radio, which received the
full, official backing of the CFL along with a serious budget. In those
days, Chicago's labor radio pioneers envisioned WCFL as developing into
a grandiose, national hub: 

'...[CFL Secretary Edward] Nockles wanted WCFL to become 'big' and
'powerful'; to reach all across the nation via enhanced power, a clear
channel, and short wave relay stations...The 'father of labor radio' 
made a fundamental mistake in the late 1920s and and early 1930s: He
attempted to make WCFL into a mirror image of the radio monopoly
stations which he so hated. By trying to create WCFL as a powerful
regional and national broadcasting outlet, Nockles took labor radio away
from its initial strength - the working class and ethnic neighborhoods
of Chicago... WCFL might have served as a model for other labor organs
and progressive groups. It could have created a network of grassroots
radio stations by sharing technological, programming and managerial
resources.' (6)

More so perhaps by necessity than design, Labor Beat/Labor Express in
the 80s and 90s has been forced to benefit from this lesson in history.
A lucky combination of low-fee public access production facilities and
donated air time from WLUW-FM, along with late 20th Century flow-cost
technology in small-format equipment have made feasible the grassroots
organizational model. Likewise, a number of other small production
groups, some rank-and-file and independent like CLA, others attached to
labor education programs at universities or unions, now operate
nationally. The existence of these scaled-down groups in such cities as
St. Louis, San Francisco, Minneapolis and New York have been vital to
the survival of the Labor Beat show, which enjoys a symbiotic
relationship with this grassroots network. 

But there is no reason why some aspects of the two models can't be
combined in developing the best national strategy for the coming media
war between labor and the corporate propaganda powerhouses. The central
labor council-backed, highly-funded model needs to be controlled so that
it does not try to commercially compete with other media, and keeps a
clear labor orientation. Small, grass-roots production groups also need
to flourish. They can become a valuable source of programming for a
projected national labor channel, a way of keeping labor tv anchored to
a rank-and-file point of view, and a buffer against the vagaries of
high-end funding inevitable in the bigger operations. 

One important hybrid of these models is 'working tv' out of Vancouver,
BC, Canada, a member of UPPNET. Probably the best all-around labor tv
show on the North American continent, it is fully backed by the British
Columbia labor movement, which supports the NDP, a political party of
labor in Canada. 'working tv' has a strong, rank-and-file outlook, and,
due to major union support, had a 1996 budget of $100,000. 

Labor tv and radio in the Chicago area endure an ongoing crisis. What
exists falls far short of what labor media needs and deserves. 

These problems can be overcome through the political development of
organized labor recognizing its need to end its present corporatist
strategy, and to seek serious, independent forms of struggle across the
board, including independent tv and radio programming aimed at the
general, non-organized public as well as union membership.r

--------------
1 Federation News, June 23, 1928, p. 1
2 'The Origins of Labor Radio: WCFL, the 'Voice of Labor', 1925-1928',
Nathan Godfried, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 7,
No. 2, 1987, pp. 143-159
3 'The Tragedy of Labor Radio: WCFL, 1926-1978', Nathan Godfried, Paper
presented at Union for Democratic Communications Annual Conference,
'Grassroots Communications,' New York City, Oct. 26-29, 1989
4 Ibid.
5 The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1996
6 'The Tragedy of Labor Radio: WCFL, 1926-1978'