Workers’ struggles: from newspaper carriers to climate change

Higher Seminar co-hosted by the Department of Media and Communication Studies and the Department of History at Södertörn University

During this seminar co-hosted by the Department for History and the Department for Media and Communication Studies, we discuss two cases of workers struggles tackling fundamental societal and planetary questions, namely the formation and outlook of the public sphere and the workers’ involvement in the climate change.

The messenger is the medium:
On newspaper carriers as a soft media infrastructure
Messengers are part of the long durée of media history. Carrying news, information, personal messages, and gossip between different entities, messengers have constituted a medium for a long time and are nowadays remediated in digital chat applications going by the same name. Newspaper carriers is one example of such a phenomena and part of the more recent history of modern mass media, as a largely invisible group of workers that for long was essential for news distribution.

In this paper, we explore the history of Swedish newspaper carriers through the lens of the union struggles within the Swedish Transport Workers’ union. This focus allows us to explore and make visible the influence of a profession that has largely been overlooked in media as well as workers history.

As media workers “below the line” newspaper carriers crucially influenced newspaper production. Mobilizing around working conditions, the workers for example put pressure on the newspapers in terms of the size and weight of the papers with consequences for the editorial work i.e. the length and number of articles that could be included in the paper. There was also a strong stance against commercial advertising and additional supplements that had consequences for the financial situation of newspapers. Hence, through their union struggles newspaper carriers directly influenced the outlook of newspapers in Sweden in the post-war era. We explore the unionization and specific struggles of newspaper carriers as part of the invisible history of Swedish mass media in the welfare state era. In extension we consider newspaper carriers as soft media infrastructures that had a crucial role and influence on the formation of the Swedish public.

Fredrik Stiernstedt, Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies and Anne Kaun, Professor of Media and Communication Studies

Transnational dialogues: Labour and Climate Change in the Oil Industry
Oil and gas phaseouts are at the center of debates to lower carbon emissions. Whose voices define the problems and solutions for reducing greenhouse gases? Company experts point to technological methods of capturing carbon and sustaining the life of the petroleum industry and modestly building renewable energy. How do workers in the global North and South express their perspectives? Listening to workers in Norway, the US and Nigeria provides other ways to understand the debates on phaseout, clean energy, environmental impact and just transitions. After watching a short video, the audience will be asked to comment on how video dialogues offer an intervention into polarized discussions on climate justice.

Vivian Price, Professor, Interdisciplinary and Labor Studies, California State University, Dominguez Hills.