Take those factory fires which occur with such regularity on the peripheries of India’s capital city. What is striking about the two recent fires that broke out in January and March this year in Bawana and Sultanpuri respectively, and which took away many lives including that of children, was that both occurred in illegal units; that conditions of work within them were hellish, and that the workers had found themselves virtually locked in when the infernos raged.

Yet how do we even know that such conditions exist without any direct knowledge or experience of them? Systematic media reporting on this sector could have bridged the distance, but it does not exist. All we have then are post-facto explanations for why sanitation workers choked to death while cleaning the sewage system of a five-star hotel; why a domestic worker was driven to hang herself in her employers’ drawing room; or how shop-floor tensions spun out of control and led to rioting in a prestigious car manufacturing plant.

Once in a while, there are national and international reports that throw some light on new developments. For instance, how many of us knew that India reports the highest percentage of workers in the informal sector in South Asia (along with Nepal)?: “Close to 81% of all employed persons in India make a living by working in the informal sector, with only 6.5% in the formal sector and 0.8% in the household sector”, according to a new ILO report (‘Nearly 81% of the Employed in India Are in the Informal Sector: ILO’, May 4). So thick is the apathy that even when an estimated one lakh workers protested the current regime’s anti-labour policies last November outside parliament, it was met by a sea of media silence (‘Media’s Indifference to Labour Issues Is Muzzling the Already Vanishing Voices of Workers’, November 25; ‘Massive ‘Mahapadav’ Protest in Delhi Highlights Plight of India’s Workers’).

There are important structural reasons for this excision of interest in the lives of such a large number. Even the lexicon of labour reporting has undergone transmutation. There’s rich irony when “labour reform”, once all about ameliorating the poor working conditions of those who labour, now signifies the new virtues of deregulation and flexibility of employment for the greater profitability of the entities that hire them.

The tipping point, as the writer of the piece, ‘Rough Edges: The Vanishing Tribe of Labour Reporters’ (January 31) correctly identifies, came with the economic liberalisation of the ’90s. “As the public discourse became more skewed towards identifying GDP rates as the sole marker of the country’s economic well-being, the condition of workers in the informal sector seemed to increasingly matter less. The media became enamoured by growth rates, and the labour ministry became a shadow of its former self. Labour reportage became ‘business journalism’,” she writes.

As a journalist of that period, one was always made conscious of the suspicion with which class as a category to understand society was looked upon by editors – caste in any case hardly entered the newsroom. As managements began to play a bigger role in information gathering, an anxiety grew within organisations that vibrant reportage on trade unionism would in some way result in radicalising journalists and create problems for these companies.

The tonality of reporting on strikes gradually shifted from the empathetic to the hostile, with readers and viewers now being constantly alerted to how their interests were being trampled upon by striking workers – how buses wouldn’t run, milk supplies would be hit, schools would be shut – rather than on the reasons for such action. There is enough media research to indicate that negative media coverage accorded to a certain category of the population directly shapes popular attitudes towards it. Unsurprisingly, this was also a period when trade unionism among journalists began to wither away even as the contract system slowly came to replace the guaranteed permanent employment of an earlier era.

This brief recall could be useful perhaps to understand the value of ‘The Life of Labour’, a feature that The Wire (India) introduced over a year ago which brings readers the “latest news updates from the world of work”. The question is whether such an addition would go some way in countering the negative attitude to labour coverage, whether from the perspective that such pieces are “boring” or that they are irrelevant and disruptive.

It would be fair to say that ‘The Life of Labour’ is possibly not the most popular on The Wire’s content menu, it also lacks primary news gathering and is essentially a compilation. Yet I would rate it as an extremely valuable addition for any media platform that sees itself as informing public opinion. Its clockwork-like like weekly appearance is useful for those who have a deeper interest in labour as a subject of research, scrutiny or work.

Even the general reader, I dare say, would be curious about why bank employees are on the warpath over the cash crunch in the economy or why IBM, long viewed as the standard bearer of the ‘American Dream’, has been ruthless in axing a quarter-million of US white-collar workers, most of whom are over 40 (‘The Life of Labour: Win for Striking Nurses in Delhi, Bank Workers to Strike Against Cash Crunch’, April 22). I, for one, found extremely interesting that short piece on India’s first union – Madras Labour Union – which has just completed its centenary run and also did its bit to resist “colonial power and exploitation” (‘The Life of Labour: 100 Years of the Madras Labour Union, Another Factory Fire in Delhi’, April 29).

Pamela Philipose

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