Editorial: The labor movement’s back. We need reporting to cover it.
by the Editors
One year ago, we launched Strikewave with a simple goal: to elevate stories on the struggle for workers’ rights with a militant voice.
In the year since, we’ve had a lot to cover. Since November of 2018, Los Angeles teachers, Wabtec workers, General Motors workers, Chicago teachers and support staff, and more have struck for their communities, their rights on the job, and their dignity. More and more gains have been won by credible strike threats averted at the eleventh hour, such as in Oregon’s public sector and with Kaiser Permanente workers. We are living in the midst of the biggest strike wave many of us have ever known, and workplace rights and unions have moved to the forefront of the nation’s political agenda, pushed by new generations of unionists that wish to rebuild the militant wing of the movement.
Striking Chicago teachers even made Saturday Night Live.
We’ve grown from fifty subscribers the day of our first newsletter to over a thousand today, including rank-and-file activists, staff, union leaders, and unorganized workers that want a voice at work. We’ve published pieces from journalists like Shane Burley and Kim Kelly, interviews with labor leaders like Sara Nelson, and reporting from rank-and-file workers on the front line of their workplace struggle. Our editorial collective members have been interviewed by podcasts and news outlets about our work.
Over the past year, we’ve provided a platform for freelance journalists, activists, and rank-and-file workers: one which pays, funded through the donated time and money of our editorial collective. We refuse to ask freelance journalists and activists to donate their labor, both out of a sense of justice, and because we realize that growing labor reporting requires paying labor journalists. As we mark our one year anniversary, we’re recommitting to providing a platform for the publication of labor reporting which provides fair compensation for original work.
Providing that platform is more important now than ever. Layoffs and closures at outlets like Vice, ThinkProgress, Deadspin, and Splinter, along with the continued gutting of independent journalism by private equity vultures, have pushed freelance journalists covering labor to increased precarity. Although labor stories have grown in volume (and newsrooms have increasingly organized), traditional print and broadcast media has yet to recover the level of in-depth labor coverage that the news media once provided. Important labor stories, especially in the South, go unreported and unknown by the broader labor community.
We need better, more sustainable ways to fund a resurgence of labor reporting that matches the movement’s resurgence.
To that end, today we’re:
Launching a redesigned website to better highlight our reporting.
Launching our public submission guidelines, including information on rates of pay.
Launching a fundraiser to raise incorporation costs and seed funds to pay labor journalists a fair wage for their work.
In the near future, we will launch monthly and annual contributions to Strikewave. The proceeds will go to operating costs, compensating editorial crew members that derive their primary source of income from freelance journalism, and paying our contributors. Our goal is to put Strikewave on a sustainable footing to support labor journalists and labor reporting.
To make that happen, we need your support.
We’ve come a long way in the past year, and the strike wave shows no signs of slowing. As long as workers are fighting for dignity on the job and in their communities, we need to support independent journalism reporting on their struggle.
When we fight, we win—and we need reporting to tell the stories of those victories.