Modern industrial relations coverage: hold the presses

Once industrial power became centralised in Melbourne, with Bill Kelty at the epicentre of the Accord, the NSW Labor Council was seen to be sidelined and irrelevant. The Sydney IR gallery quickly died - though the Melbourne Gallery survived, almost intact, for a few more years.

When the centralised Accord era came to an end, industrial relations became decentralised and the relative importance of the ACTU disappeared, but the Sydney IR Gallery was never revived and re-created. The Gallery was dead - and the IR round is now coughing and spluttering.

During this period the nature of work and workplaces changed dramatically - from big workplaces to miniscule workplaces, from manufacturing and resources as the dominant employer to the service industries as the job creator.

It was also the time when the importance of the daily newspaper as the primary source of news dived dramatically, to be replaced first by TV news - and now increasingly by the short commercial radio news bulletins which need to tell sometimes complex stories in seconds.

The media Big Wigs watched these changes and watched union membership dive, the power of unions rapidly diminish and - probably after a bit of tea leaf reading with the aide of the marketing department - decided their readers and their viewers and listeners were just not interested in learning about unions and strikes any more.

Now even the ABC and the AFR seem to be going down the same track.

Important stories are just going unreported. And the less working people and their unions appear in the media the less relevant we seem to the community.

We all know the line - which comes first the chicken or the egg?

Very few unions in Australia put the time into getting media attention for their battles - let alone their victories.

Few unions factor a media strategy into their organising campaigns - the media is always an afterthought

Unions such as the AMWU can still, relatively easily, get a hearing - but it is not because of the human crisis facing their membership but rather the cost on the economy, and business people, that comes from a large manufacturing dispute involving their members.

In smaller states - especially where union power is still strong, and membership is relatively high, and there is a State Labor Government and the competition for media space is less aggressive - some unions are still getting more than a modicum of news coverage ... or at least better than what we see in Sydney.