Why Labour Needs a National Newspaper

I’ve always believed that the labour movement should have its own newspaper - a national daily paper that looks pretty much the same as the ones that workers read on their coffee breaks, lunch hours etc.. It would cover the same stories that we read about in the other papers but with one major difference: It would look at these issues from a working class perspective, not from businesses’ point of view like they do now.

So in that light, I would like to comment on two stories that recently appeared in the local newspaper:

First up, from the Edmonton Journal came the headlines "Anarchists Sow Mayhem". The article went on to talk about the rock-throwing, the tear gas, water cannons and fires that took place in Quebec City at the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) summit. To be fair, they did interview some of the protestors, yet somehow they missed the story about the real violence that occurs everyday in countries in the south. They didn’t report of the workers in a Guatemalan garment factory who were fired simply for demanding washrooms in their workplace. They didn’t talk about the young women in an export-processing zone in Haiti who are forced to take birth control pills everyday (on the job) because pregnancy would affect their productivity. We never hear of the trade unionists who are beaten or missing or killed simply for trying to organize their communities.

Another story trumpeted the so-called "Democracy Clause" in the proposed new agreement. They seemed to think (and were quite proud of the fact) that they had addressed the main issue of protestors in Quebec. What they missed was the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the agreement itself! Let’s be clear, this agreement isn’t about free trade per se, it’s about giving large corporations the right to undermine democratically elected governments in the Americas. It’s about these same corporations having unfettered access to natural resources and cheap labour with the freedom of moving investment dollars across borders. And any government that stands in their way can and will be hauled into their trade "tribunals" (read Kangaroo court) and fined for trying to protect their countries interests. And, as Bruce Cockburn tells us, they call it democracy.

These are just a couple of examples of the way newspapers put their own spin on the news as it unfolds. Until we can get a paper like the Labour News home-delivered on a daily and national basis, we always have to read the paper or watch the news with a critical eye. We need to ask ourselves who is benefiting from this type of reporting and what is really happening to workers and their families.

And remember, if you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.