Modern industrial relations coverage: hold the presses

Australians know little or nothing about the secret war, the guerrilla war going on against workers - they have heard very little about the new militancy and terrorist tactics adopted by employers and their managers.

Many Australians will have personal stories about skirmishes or battles in their workplace, or the battle scars from a supervisors ravings and rantings, but they won't connect these incidents with the wider war and the new militancy of the bosses.

And that is in good part because the media has largely withdrawn from covering work issues and the trade union movement.

In Sydney today the main newspaper read in the working-class suburbs, The Daily Telegraph, does not have a full-time labour reporter - one of that paper's Macquarie St parliamentary reporters is expected to keep an eye on the industrial round, at the same time as he keeps an eye on State politics, especially the coming election.

The big quality broadsheet paper the SMH has a 'veteran' IR reporter in Brad Norington - but nowadays he seems unable to get anything in that paper unless it is about Labor Party-Union strife, or some internecine factional battle or election inside a major union.

Even the ABC has in recent times allowed the field of regular reporting of IR to lapse.

Only the news wire service AAP has a dedicated full-time industrial reporter in Natalie Davison. She covers the traditional IR beat - and her copy supplies most of the knowledge about the struggle of working families that is irregularly picked up by the both the SMH and The Daily Telegraph as well as commercial radio in this city.

In recent weeks Natalie has not been available to report on the general IR round because she - like several other industrial rounds reporters - has been caught up with the Cole Royal Commission. This Commission has successfully focussed almost all Sydney, and national media, on lurid allegation about violence in the building industry.

The little space given to work issues completely disappeared while Cole was in Sydney, because the Royal Commission sucked up the daily 'quota' of media space given to IR stories.

While the collapse of the industrial round is the probably most extreme in Sydney it is reflected in most other states. Melbourne though is a little different. In large part, because the ACTU is based in Melbourne, that city has a lot more reporters dedicated to covering the IR round on a full-time basis.

Mark Phillips, the Herald Sun's full-time industrial reporter, gets, almost on a daily basis, one, two or three traditional IR stories about stoppages and disputes into that paper - it is hard to understand why his working-class readership are more interested in these issues than Sydney's Daily Telegraph readers who - in marketspeak - have similar demographics.

An inkling that the retreat from industrial reporting may also be on in Melbourne might be read into the fact that at The Age this round has recently dropped from being a two-person round to a one-person round. Paul Robinson is now left by himself to keep an eye on these issues - but at least he is getting more copy into his paper about the travails of working life, and less about internal union disputes, than happens at the sister Fairfax paper in Sydney.