Newsworkers Unite: Labor, Convergence, and North American Newspapers

Abstract

Contributing to political economy, communication, and labour studies, McKercher begins her study in the 1960s to bring forward three significant changes affecting communication workers today. Given that newspapers of the distant past tended to be separately owned businesses, with an obligation to their readers and a stake in the community in which they operated, they have increasingly become vertically and horizontally integrated into multi-media, and national or multi-national conglomerates that are more accountable to their shareholders than their workers, readers, or community. Developments in computer technology have facilitated and intensified this corporate convergence, and as McKercher demonstrates through chronological and detailed descriptions of changes in newspaper production, newsworker's jobs (from editors and reporters to the print and mail workers) have been fundamentally altered, and either consolidated, contracted out, or eliminated. Similar to other industries, this combination of corporate and technological convergence has resulted in a net loss of workers' control over their jobs, their tools and their employment security, instigating a corresponding change in organized labour. As McKercher suggests, union members in the communications' industries are in the process of rethinking and reorganizing themselves, transforming their organizational structures, ideas, and practices traditionally based on clear divisions of labour, discrete union jurisdictions, and separate employers, to those that encompass the complete range of workers across the TIME industries, adding to what she calls "labour convergence."