Barrie Clement (right) trips the light fantastic at a union reception

Yesterday’s Media Guardian carried a very interesting article by Peter Wilby, which gave a number of clues as to the way work and union issues are reported in the UK. It concerned the apparently rapidly approaching extinction of the last of the UK’s labour correspondents – a once mighty journalistic species, who bestrode Fleet Street, filling significant chunks of the papers, back in the days when unions ruled the earth.

Today though, they’re nearly all gone – with the sad news that one of the last of the big beasts, the Indy’s Barrie Clement, may be about to hang up his trilby. Labour issues are being split into the business section for company news and finance, and the careers section for fluffy employee advice. Serious analysis of what’s happening to the world of work is falling through the gap sometimes, as speculation and political gossip seem to be crowding it out of the limited column inches available. And of course, unions are being mentioned in papers a lot less than they used to be.

This tends to reduce stories involving unions down to two dimensions, and we end up with easy-to-spot row-based stores like “Travel Chaos as Strikes Loom” or “Union Boss Slams Government”. Every season throws up a crop of “___ Of Discontent” headlines, And if your correspondent’s depth of industrial relations expertise only goes as far as the last FPB or CBI press release they read, they mightn’t know that industrial action was a tiny fraction of the real Winter they’re likening it to.

For non-sensationalist stories, unions now compete with any number of shonky PR surveys put out by recruitment agencies, employment lawyers, or office lunch cafe chains. And face it, a union-led story is always going to come 2nd to “99% of workers have sex on the desk, whilst playing minesweeper, on expenses, claims a new survey of 3 people”.

Unions need to up their game on imaginative stories, as they can’t count on people finding them inherently newsworthy any more. This isn’t always a bad thing for the reader, but it is hard to do on voluntary sector money.

The article makes a *slight* overstatement in the number of press officers at the TUC – it’s more like 3 than 11 – but hey, obviously the author isn’t a labour correspondent, so can be forgiven for not knowing anything about it! The big 2 unions might have more than this, but I think 2 or 3 is the norm for large unions, and in the smaller ones, one or two people might cover the entire comms brief, writing the magazine, website and internal newsletters, as well as press and campaigns. Hardly the kind of resources needed for a repositioning of union communications.

There might be a silver lining though in the wonders of teh interweb. Have a look at the output of the Guardian’s own David Hencke, a very hard-working Westminster correspondent who also has the industrial brief. David’s union stories may regularly get spiked for the dead tree edition, but make much more of a presence in his own podcasts and blogs. Let’s hope the grand new multi-channel future hasn’t come too late for the dinosaurs!

Hat tip: James Richards