As best I can tell, the labor battle in Wisconsin is a big story--and maybe the biggest labor story in years. But as Amanda Terkel reported at the Huffington Post, that doesn't mean you're going to see union advocates on the Sunday chat shows. Terkel noted:

A union official told the Huffington Post that when none of the Sunday shows' producers reached out to them to book a labor representative this week, several unions started to pitch the shows with affected workers and local and national leaders who they felt could discuss the protests. The official said the response from the shows was essentially "thanks, but no thanks."

Terkel's original post has been updated to reflect the fact that NBC's Meet the Press has announced that it will add Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO to its roundtable. The show will include an array of Republicans and conservatives: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, John McCain (because how could you have a Sunday show without him?), Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.*). Liberal MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell will also be on hand.

Shutting out labor is nothing new. A FAIR survey in 1995-96 found:

John Sweeney and Thomas Donahue, candidates for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, were the only guests who were labor leaders. Instead of worker representatives, the shows invited the CEO of United Airlines, the CEO of Continental Airlines, a Goldman Sachs analyst, retired basketball stars and political satirists.

Last week on ABC's This Week the roundtable segment was titled (on the show's website) "Roundtable: Unions vs. Tea Party." They did manage to find a Tea Party congressman (Steve Southerland), along with right-wing regular George Will and right-leaning reporter Jonathan Karl. On the other side? Democratic strategist Donna Brazile.

(Corrected: Emanuel is a Democrat)

As Josh Marshall noted recently, one of the assumptions in the media discussion about Wisconsin is that Republican politicians are playing on public outrage over the perks given to public workers. That assumption took a hit after a new Gallup Poll, reported on the front page of USA Today, found this:

Americans strongly oppose laws taking away the collective bargaining power of public employee unions, according to a new USA Today/Gallup Poll. The poll found 61 percent would oppose a law in their state similar to such a proposal in Wisconsin, compared with 33 percent who would favor such a law.

But another interesting finding from the Gallup Poll hasn't received much attention. They asked this:

As you may know, many U.S. state governments are facing large budget deficits this year. Please say whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following ways state officials could reduce their budget deficits. How about reducing pay or benefits the state provides for government workers?

One might assume that the public would support government workers taking a pay/benefit cut. But the findings are surprising: 44 percent favor or strongly favor such reductions; 53 percent oppose/strongly oppose.

Back to Marshall's point--this finding makes the prevailing media assumptions appear even weaker. On Sunday in the Washington Post, Dan Balz wrote this:

Given the precarious condition of state budgets, there is some public support for reducing pension and health benefits for public employees. Favorability ratings for unions are at a historical low, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. And the public is divided over whether it supports unions or state governments in such disputes, though tipping slightly to the unions.

In fact, if the Gallup Poll is any indication, the public hasn't decided to save money by cutting public workers' pay.

Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher (7/21/09) is reporting that newspaper union representatives claim a victory of sorts in the Boston Newspaper Guild's refusal to accept a deal that "called for smaller benefit cuts and a furlough, but a higher 8.3 percent salary reduction." The Boston Globe eventually agreed instead to "a 5.94 percent salary cut, a one-week furlough, a pension freeze and healthcare cost increase."

Strupp quotes Guild president Bernie Lunzer saying the result "does demonstrate that there is strength in bargaining," that "people can push back" and they "are correct now to question what management is doing, to pursue more control over their futures":

Boston is among the few guild locals in the past year to reject contracts that called for concessions. In many cases, from the Denver Post to the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, guild members have approved furloughs, pay cuts and various benefit reductions when management asked....

"People will take concessions and take less when they believe it is being done fairly," says Lunzer. "There is not a [guild contract] situation out there that isn't a difficult one."

But Boston was somewhat different in that the guild rejected an initial offer even amid threats of a shutdown and sale of the paper, a sale that appears inevitable. In recent weeks, guild locals at the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., and the Indianapolis Star have also rejected contract proposals. But leaders in both of those units believe new contracts will be approved.

On the subject of negotiations "being done fairly," Lunzer goes into details when describing how the "New York Times Company, which owns the Globe, used the controversial lifetime job guarantees of some 170 guild members as an unfair issue in the recent bargaining." While "the guild agreed to give up that protection in this latest agreement," Lunzer asserts that "the issue was exploited by New York Times management... to cause divisiveness."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: Jonathan Tasini on the Boston Globe/GM (6/12/09).

Jessica Heslam of the Boston Herald gives ample space (6/12/09) to New York Times chief Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to proclaim he had "no alternative other than to proceed with the wage reduction" of 23 percent at the Boston Globe, because the Globe union's "Guild leaders made [agreement] impossible," and even quotes the Newspaper Guild president admitting "mistakes were made." But the telling part comes in a quote showing even the most corporate of figures aghast at NYT Co. conduct:

Retired General Electric CEO Jack Welch "tweeted" on Twitter yesterday and blasted the Times Co.'s "brutish" treatment of Globe workers. Welch said the Times "certainly would be crucifying any company with labor practices like theirs."

When your lefty media criticism is coming from a notoriously hardnosed media owner like Welch, you know we're in trouble. Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Jonathan Tasini on the Boston Globe/GM" (6/12/09).

If you've ever wondered why the New York Times' labor coverage is just so bad, a lot can be learned by looking at the company's treatment of its own workers. Newspaper Guild president Dan Totten has published an open letter (6/3/09) about how the Boston Globe-owning Times has chosen to "behave in a highly challenging situation" and what his union has "learned about New York Times Company management--and its unwillingness to share the pain of overcoming this crisis":

Guild members haven't seen a pay raise in four years. And they are well prepared to take a pay cut to help preserve the Globe and its mission. Management, on the other hand, received healthy bonus payments in February 2009--just weeks before New York threatened to shut down the Globe.

Indeed, while this entire process began with one threat, the Times Company now hopes to finish things with another--the prospect of an immediate 23-percent pay cut.

The company's best offer to Guild members effectively cuts pay 10.3 percent forever. Management, however, will endure a 5 percent pay cut only through December 31. Guild members have been preparing for significant pension and retirement plan cuts, including an end to any 401k match. Unbelievably, the Times Company has actually boosted the matching contribution for management 401k plans by 66 percent.

Totten goes on to say that even "under tremendous financial pressure, there are good examples being set elsewhere," citing Gatehouse Media New England--"which owns 100 community newspapers in Massachusetts"--where "senior managers will shoulder the largest pay cuts (up to 15 percent)" and the Boston Phoenix owners who "also reserved the biggest hits for top management in a recent round of costcutting." Totten notes that "that's one way to cope with such a challenge--sharing the pain and being a true partner with workers. It's just not the Times Company's way."

Washington Monthly contributing editor Art Levine has a piece for In These Times (5/31/09) reporting on economist Anne Layne-Farrar's recent congressional appearance in which she

warned about the horrendous impact of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its potential to increase union membership from between five and 10 percent, she said, 'would result in an increase in the unemployment of around one and a half to three percentage points.'

Levine tells us how "Fox 'Fair and Balanced' News, naturally, in its TV report neglected to mention that her 'research' was funded by the corporate-friendly, anti-union 'Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs,'" and directly takes on Layne-Farrar's estimate "that 600,000 jobs would be lost in the first year after the EFCA became law":

Layne-Farrar massages the data using a complex "regression analysis" to connect the dots between card check, higher unionization rates and more unemployment, putting the loss at between 600,000 and 2.6 million new American jobs in the first year.

"That's bullshit," says Canadian labor economist Charlotte Yates, now the Dean of Social Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. "I don’t know of any credible economists who say [now] there is a direct correlation between unionization and the rise in unemployment."

Despite being so flawed as to elicit such strong exclamations from prominent academic economists, "since the report's publication in March, this statistic has circulated through the media, showing up on MSNBC, CBS News, the Wall Street Journal and, in spades, Fox News." For more on corporate media coverage of EFCA, read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (2/09) by Janine Jackson.

Spotting a May 31 Washington Post column "that blamed the United Auto Workers for the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM," Dean Baker declares (Beat the Press, 5/31/09) that the D.C. daily "showed yet again why it is known as "Fox on 15th Street":

So what if Toyota has managed to profitably run a plant in California represented by the UAW for more than two decades? So what if wages of unionized autoworkers in profitable car companies in Europe and Japan are the same or higher than in the United States? So what if the proximate cause of the bankruptcy was incompetent economic management in Washington and an explosion of incompetence and greed on Wall Street?

At the Washington Post, the line is blame the unionized auto workers--after all, they earn $57,000 a year. Except, of course, by the calculation in this column. Richard K. Bank, a man with no obvious qualification other than his dislike of unions, told Post readers that GM, Ford and Chrysler have labor costs of close to $110 an hour. The would come to $220,000 a year for a full-time worker.

"Of course," Baker notes, "this has no basis in reality, but it helps advance the anti-union case, so it's good enough to get in the Washington Post"--thus leading directly to the scathing headline of Baker's piece: "Do You Hate Unions and Working Class People? You Can Write for the Washington Post. No Knowledge Necessary!"

Read the FAIR Action Alert: "ABC's Overpaid Autoworkers" (12/5/08).

Asking "Can We Get Reporters to Stop Saying That EFCA Takes Away the Secret Ballot?" Dean Baker bluntly states (Beat the Press, 5/7/09) that "it's not true." Even though this is one of the "most often repeated lines of the opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act"--"that it will deny workers the right to vote decide on a union with a secret-ballot election"--Baker explains exactly how "that is wrong, wrong and wrong":

First of all, workers do not currently enjoy that right. Maybe that should be repeated a few times in case there are any very slow reporters reading: Workers do not currently have the right to a secret-ballot election to decide whether or not to be in a union.

Under current law, an employer has the option to recognize a union based on a majority of workers decision to sign cards requesting recognition. That's right, folks; under current law, employers can decide to recognize a union without a secret-ballot election.

In fact, with the EFCA, "the decision as to whether or not to have a secret-ballot election or to organize through majority sign-up would rest with workers, not employers." Which means that "anyone who claims that they oppose the Employee Free Choice Act because they support workers' right to a secret ballot, they are not telling the truth. The media should be pointing this out." See the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (2/09) by Janine Jackson.

Writing that someone needs to "Tell the WSJ: Workers Can Already Unionize Without a Secret Ballot Election" (Beat the Press, 3/10/09), Dean Baker details how big media still gets this wrong:

Okay, let's see if we can teach the Wall Street Journal something this morning. In an article reporting on the prospects for the Employee Free Choice Act in the Senate, the WSJ told readers that "the bill would allow unions to organize workers without a secret ballot, giving employees the power to organize by simply signing cards agreeing to join."

Wrong! The current law already allows workers to organize by majority sign-up. They can also have a union de-certified by majority sign-up. The difference is that under current law it is the employer's option to accept majority sign-up or to demand an NLRB election. Employers who wish to prevent unionization can demand an election. They can then delay the actual election for several years. They can use time to require workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions. They can also fire the key organizers, thereby undermining the organizing drive and intimidating workers.

Summing up that "the main change in the law" is that "under the Employee Free Choice Act is that workers, not employers, would decide the method for union certification," Baker insists "the WSJ should be able to get this one right"--or are these misrepresentations willful? Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (2/09) by Janine Jackson