When Steven Green­house announced his retire­ment from the New York Times in Decem­ber 2014, after near­ly two decades on the labor beat at the paper of record, a col­lec­tive gasp went up from the Amer­i­can labor move­ment. Not only was Green­house an ace reporter cov­er­ing unions and work­ers’ issues at the paper, but his depar­ture left only one reporter, the Wall Street Jour­nal​’s Melanie Trottman, cov­er­ing labor at a major nation­al daily.

When historians look back as some of the reasons labor has declined, I'm sure one of the things they will point to is the structural problems in unions themselves—that there were not enough built-in incentives for union leaders to do more to help their members increase wages or to increase membership; that they could just coast year after year.

The Times has not said whether it will seek a replace­ment. But Green­house isn’t dis­ap­pear­ing from the labor beat just yet. He’s already filed his first free­lance pieces and plans to write a fol­low-up to his 2008 book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the Amer­i­can Work­er.

Just hours after return­ing from his first post-retire­ment vaca­tion, Green­house spoke to In These Times about the main­stream media’s fick­le inter­est in work­ers’ issues, the cul­ture of medi­oc­rity through­out much of the move­ment and the smart new orga­niz­ing strate­gies that could breathe some new life back into labor.

Almost all of your fel­low reporters at the New York Times cov­ered beats that were also cov­ered by many oth­er reporters at many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions nation­wide. But when you retired, you were one of the only nation­al labor reporters left. Did that feel lonely?

I start­ed this beat in late 1995, as the metro desk labor reporter for the New York Times, and Peter Kil­born was the nation­al labor reporter. The Wash­ing­ton Post, the Los Ange­les Times, the Chica­go Tri­bune, AP, Reuters all had labor reporters. It was good to have the com­pe­ti­tion — it spurred us all to do better.

After a year or two, Peter Kil­born went onto anoth­er beat and I took over both the nation­al and metro labor beat for the Times. Begin­ning in the late 1990s and over the next decade or so, many news orga­ni­za­tions went through a major con­sol­i­da­tion and shrunk the size of their news staff, and many orga­ni­za­tions stopped hav­ing a full-time labor reporter. It felt odd. I felt there was that much more respon­si­bil­i­ty on me to make sure that when an impor­tant tree in a for­est fell, that some­one — mean­ing me — was out there cov­er­ing it.

Since I was the last man stand­ing, all these PR folks, union folks and Human Resources folks would say, ​“Green­house, you got­ta cov­er this! No one else is gonna cov­er this!” I grew up with a lot of Jew­ish guilt, and it was very easy for peo­ple to guilt trip me.

But over the past few years, dat­ing from the begin­ning of the Great Reces­sion, there has been a rebound in the num­ber of labor reporters, and I think that’s to the good. It’s good to have com­pe­ti­tion — it keeps peo­ple on their toes. The Wall Street Jour­nal has Melanie Trottman cov­er­ing labor full-time, Lydia DePil­lis cov­ers labor more or less full-time for the Wash­ing­ton Post, Ale­jan­dra Can­ci­no cov­ers it half-time for the Chica­go Tri­bune, the Boston Globe and LA Times are cov­er­ing it more, ProP­ub­li­ca did a won­der­ful series about temp work­ers, McClatchy has done a ter­rif­ic series about inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors. We’ve seen this rebound because work­er issues real­ly rose to the fore dur­ing the reces­sion. We’ve seen the Fight for 15 move­ment, increas­ing income inequal­i­ty, increased talk about wage stag­na­tion — all of these devel­op­ments have pushed many news orga­ni­za­tions to say ​“Hey, we real­ly need some­one cov­er­ing labor issues, because they are one of the most impor­tant issues out there in the nation­al polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic conversation.

The mul­ti­plic­i­ty of news web­sites—In These Times, The Nation, Huff­in­g­ton Post, Slate, Salon — they also have been cov­er­ing labor pret­ty aggres­sive­ly. Part­ly because a lot of them tilt to the Left, and they know who their read­ers are, and part­ly because they have smart edi­tors who see what the impor­tant news issues are in the nation nowadays.

You’ve seen the decline of the labor move­ment first­hand over the last sev­er­al decades. Do you think the major­i­ty of union lead­ers real­ly com­pre­hend the extent of the cri­sis that unions are in? Not just intel­lec­tu­al­ly, but are they ded­i­cat­ed to spend­ing a good chunk of their time fig­ur­ing out how to save the ship before it’s sunk? Or are they just think­ing, ​“Well, we’ve had a good run, but I’m just going to ride this thing out until it’s done”?

The major­i­ty of lead­ers of major unions — the Steel­work­ers, the Auto Work­ers, SEIU, AFSCME, the AFT, CWA — they see that there’s a cri­sis, and they’re try­ing to get things going. They’re all doing more orga­niz­ing than a few years ago. But one of the major prob­lems unions face now, is even if they’re doing 20% or 30% more orga­niz­ing, it’s still not near­ly enough to over­come the longer-term struc­tur­al trends that are reduc­ing union density.

The growth of the gig econ­o­my, of inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors, of part-time work­ers, young peo­ple often know­ing very lit­tle about unions, the greater employ­er resis­tance to unions — there are just a lot of trends in soci­ety that are under­cut­ting unions. And even if unions increase orga­niz­ing mod­est­ly, even if they orga­nize 100,000, 200,000 work­ers in a giv­en year, it’s still not enough to reverse labor’s slide. That would require much larg­er orga­niz­ing dri­ves and a much greater per­cent­age of suc­cess than we’ve seen over the past few decades.

I’m not sure whether unions have the will to do that. And even if they had the will, I’m not sure whether they have the orga­niz­ing exper­tise and mon­ey to do that.

Has labor cov­er­age declined because the over­all labor move­ment has declined? Or is it more about shift­ing pri­or­i­ties of main­stream media?

Unions used to be a very influ­en­tial part of the econ­o­my, and thus were a big part of the nation­al con­ver­sa­tion. They no longer are. Union den­si­ty is down to 11.1%, one third of where it was in the 1950s; union den­si­ty in the pri­vate sec­tor is 6.6%, less than one fifth of what it was in the 1950s; the num­ber of strikes is prob­a­bly about one-thir­ti­eth per year of what it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Labor unions as an enti­ty are just not mak­ing as much news as they were 60 years ago.

At the same time, many news­rooms have cut their staff in large num­bers, and many decid­ed that labor cov­er­age is more expend­able than some of the oth­er issues. They just said that labor isn’t as sexy. There isn’t as much demand for labor as there is for Bey­on­cé or Tay­lor Swift.

I think some of those orga­ni­za­tions got rid of their labor reporter because they thought labor cov­er­age was often too sym­pa­thet­ic towards work­ers and unions. I know this was true at one orga­ni­za­tion — I won’t say which — where I thought the reporters’ cov­er­age was excel­lent and pitched straight down the mid­dle, but pub­lish­ers thought it was too sym­pa­thet­ic to labor and not sym­pa­thet­ic enough to busi­ness. That reporter got kind of pushed out.

When you start­ed on the beat, unions were essen­tial­ly act­ing in the same ways as the old indus­tri­al unions — approach­ing cam­paigns the same way, engag­ing in the same kinds of actions — and assumed that the media would come run­ning. Fast for­ward to today, where the most impor­tant labor cam­paign in the coun­try, Fight for 15, is, some would say, prin­ci­pal­ly based on cap­tur­ing media atten­tion. What does this mean, that labor has gone from try­ing to impede pro­duc­tion on the fac­to­ry floor to now stag­ing actions so that reporters will come running?

The very first sto­ry I cov­ered as a labor reporter in late 1995 was the elec­tion of John Sweeney as pres­i­dent of the AFL-CIO. He tried very hard to get the unions in the AFL-CIO to switch to an orga­niz­ing mod­el from a busi­ness union mod­el. And after he was elect­ed, many unions start­ed to do more orga­niz­ing. But still, most of what most unions did remained the ser­vice model.

Unions have felt very torn. On the one hand, they’ve real­ized that to grow, to rev up the union move­ment, they real­ly need to adopt the orga­niz­ing mod­el. But they also real­ize that their mem­bers often like the ser­vice model.

Even with Sweeney’s efforts to con­vince unions to do far more orga­niz­ing, it still was­n’t enough to reverse the decline in union den­si­ty. In look­ing back at it now, we can see that Sweeney’s push and the push in the 2000s fell short in revers­ing labor’s decline.

Now unions are try­ing to fig­ure out what they can do — ​“How do we get out of this hole? How do we get cre­ate some excite­ment for labor?” In his new book Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why Amer­i­ca Needs a New Kind of Labor Move­ment, Tom Geoghe­gan says it’s not worth hav­ing a strike at all unless that strike gets huge atten­tion and huge pub­lic sup­port. You don’t want a strike that’s just ignored as a pri­vate dis­pute — that does­n’t call into play larg­er issues.

In my view, the Fight for 15 is a smart effort to tap into the wide­spread resent­ment against low-wage jobs. It’s very hard to union­ize young peo­ple and peo­ple in these kinds of mar­gin­al, low-wage jobs, because peo­ple are often scared of get­ting fired. The Fight for 15 has done a very impres­sive job in mobi­liz­ing a lot of peo­ple. And one way it’s done that is by mobi­liz­ing the news media to write about what’s going on.

The Fight for 15 is a real­ly inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in 21st cen­tu­ry union labor mobi­liza­tion. It’s not a typ­i­cal labor orga­niz­ing dri­ve where they’re try­ing to get 51% of peo­ple to vote for a union — it’s to cre­ate a mass move­ment to pres­sure McDon­ald’s, Burg­er King and Wendy’s to cry uncle and say, ​“Okay, we’ll agree to $15 wages, we’ll agree to neu­tral­i­ty to allow you to union­ize.” What the Fight for 15 move­ment is demand­ing is very ambi­tious. But to get there, they will still have to exert far more pres­sure than they have thus far.

But for labor jour­nal­ism, what does this tran­si­tion to media-focused union orga­niz­ing mean?

I don’t think the only rea­son Fight for 15 holds these strikes is to get press atten­tion. One could debate whether it’s a major­i­ty of what they’re doing. Clear­ly they want media atten­tion, but they also want to mobi­lize people.

I was inter­view­ing Karen Nuss­baum, head of Work­ing Amer­i­ca, and she said one of the huge prob­lems that labor and pro­gres­sives in gen­er­al face in Amer­i­ca face is that if they are going to achieve any­thing sub­stan­tial, they have to get peo­ple to believe in col­lec­tive action again. And my strong sense is that the strate­gists behind Fight for 15 are try­ing not just to get media cov­er­age, but to get Amer­i­cans to believe in the pow­er of col­lec­tive action.

You have not only report­ed on unions’ cam­paigns, but also unions’ dirty laun­dry. Why is that important?

When I start­ed cov­er­ing labor, the Team­sters, LiU­NA, the ILA, the UFCW, HERE were all cor­rupt unions. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, pros­e­cu­tors and some union lead­ers have done a very good job over the last two decades in root­ing out a lot of that cor­rup­tion. I think the Team­sters, UFCW, LiU­NA and HERE are much clean­er unions than they were two decades ago. (I still think it’s a prob­lem in the ILA, in the Oper­at­ing Engi­neers — they have a ways to go.) But whether one’s writ­ing about busi­ness or politi­cians or the NFL or unions, if there’s wrong­do­ing, the press has to hold those wrong­do­ers accountable.

A big prob­lem in many unions is that some salaries are still way too high, some union lead­ers don’t work hard enough, some union lead­ers don’t work hard enough to expand the unions to serve. Too many times you call a union offi­cer at 4:00, and all the lead­ers in the local area have gone home. Too many union offi­cials see their jobs not as a cru­sade to help work­ers, but as a way to make a good, fat income while only work­ing 7 hours a day.

That’s less true now than it was 5, 10, or 15 years ago, because I think John Sweeney tried to kick a lot of union lead­ers in the der­rière, to say, ​“You have to do more. You can’t see unions jobs as sinecures, as a way to hire your fam­i­ly mem­bers.” I think peo­ple see that [union lead­ers] have been far too com­pla­cent, too many union offi­cials saw their jobs as sinecures, did­n’t do near­ly enough to involve and mobi­lize the rank-and-file, they did­n’t do near­ly enough organizing.

My guess is that when labor his­to­ri­ans look back, they will say that, in the 1970s and ​’80s, and despite John Sweeney’s noble efforts in the 1990s, there just has­n’t been enough effort to grow labor, to orga­nize more work­ers. And now labor has shrunk so much, trea­sury has declined so much that they’re at a near­ly-crit­i­cal point that might make it extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to turn around, even if it did every­thing right.

And this cul­ture still exists at the very moment when the ship is sinking.

We labor reporters see what’s hap­pen­ing in Wash­ing­ton, with the pres­i­dent of the nation­al, inter­na­tion­al unions. But it’s much hard­er to know what’s hap­pen­ing with var­i­ous locals in Cincin­nati or Boise or Phoenix. I remem­ber in the Car­pen­ters’ Union, I was pret­ty shocked to see many busi­ness agents who were mak­ing $120,000, $130,000 a year — gen­er­al­ly more than many New York Times reporters were earn­ing. And I thought well, instead of hav­ing all these busi­ness agents mak­ing $120,000 a year, maybe it’d be bet­ter to have two orga­niz­ers mak­ing $60,000 or $70,000 a year.

Joe Hansen, Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed Food and Com­mer­cial Work­ers, set out to real­ly turn around the cul­ture of his union. But his union was in many ways a group of fam­i­ly-run fiefs. Despite his best efforts, Joe was unable to get a lot of UFCW locals in var­i­ous cities and states to real­ly become to become the kick-ass orga­niz­ing locals he want­ed. He had very lit­tle pow­er over them. And they did­n’t do much organizing.

I think one of the biggest prob­lems the union move­ment has had over the last two decades is this huge growth in retail — not just Wal­mart, but Tar­get, Kohl’s, Dol­lar Gen­er­al — and there’s been extreme­ly lit­tle in the way of orga­niz­ing efforts. Again, when labor his­to­ri­ans look back, they’re going to say, ​“Where was the labor move­ment in try­ing to orga­nize retail?” After Wal­mart became a humon­gous com­pa­ny, UFCW belat­ed­ly tried to orga­nize it, but by that point, Wal­mart was already too pow­er­ful to confront.

We read about some recent union­iza­tion suc­cess­es — at Delta and Amer­i­can Air­lines, for exam­ple. And these are impor­tant. But I think labor needs 3, 5, 7 times as great a lev­el of orga­niz­ing if it’s real­ly going to turn things around.

Over the years, you’ve also cov­ered the rise of ​“alt-labor” orga­niz­ing. How do you feel about the new kinds of orga­niz­ing mod­els you’ve seen?

While on one hand there have not been enough for­mal union­iza­tion vic­to­ries, com­pared to ten years ago, there is a grow­ing restive­ness among work­ers, a grow­ing mobi­liza­tion, both in the for­mal labor union sec­tor and in the kind of ​“infor­mal” work­er sec­tor. Fight for 15 is the biggest labor mobi­liza­tion we’ve seen for years, OUR Wal­mart is gath­er­ing momen­tum. It’s still not enough to cause Wal­mart to agree to major changes, but we’ve seen some of these work­er cen­ters do very impres­sive things. The Coali­tion of Immokalee Work­ers in Flori­da has won extreme­ly impres­sive wage gains and improve­ments for toma­to work­ers. The Los Ange­les Alliance for a New Econ­o­my has con­vinced the city coun­cil in Los Ange­les to agree to a $15.37 wage for hotel work­ers; it’s achieved major gains for thou­sands of work­ers, with the help of orga­nized labor, with the help of Unite Here.

The Work­ers’ Defense Project in Texas has won some mod­est gains for some con­struc­tion work­ers to $12 an hour, it’s won work­ers’ comp guar­an­tees, it’s won safe­ty train­ing. This is not near­ly as much as the UAW or the Steel­work­ers won in the 1950s and 1960s, but in a place like Texas, in this day and age, those are gains not to be ignored.

So there is grow­ing mobi­liza­tion, grow­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion. There’s some­thing in the air — and more going on than there was 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. Whether that will be enough to cre­ate a new labor move­ment, to real­ly begin to turn things around for work­ers, is the big question.

Can union sup­port­ers and pro-labor pub­li­ca­tions cov­er the labor move­ment well?

I am not a labor his­to­ri­an, but I imag­ine if one were to look back at labor’s huge orga­niz­ing days in the 1930s and ​‘40s, there were sure­ly some pro-union jour­nal­ists writ­ing for lefty and union jour­nals, and I imag­ine that their writ­ing helped pro­pel orga­niz­ing. At a time when unions con­tin­ue to try to get their act togeth­er, they are cer­tain­ly aid­ed, not hurt, by writ­ers for var­i­ous web­sites who are open­ly pro-union.

But if these jour­nal­ists are too uncrit­i­cal and too enthu­si­as­tic about every sin­gle thing labor does, it’s a prob­lem. Union lead­ers often make mis­takes: Some of them are too com­pla­cent, some make strate­gic mis­takes, some are still cor­rupt. And it’s impor­tant that jour­nal­ists, whether for the New York Times or for In These Times, hold labor lead­ers account­able, just as they hold busi­ness lead­ers accountable.

One of the big struc­tur­al prob­lems unions have had going back 50 years is that union lead­ers can be very mediocre. The union lead­ers who’ve done next to noth­ing to help work­ers can still remain in pow­er for 20 or 30 years. When cor­po­rate exec­u­tives do a lousy job, they’re out on their behinds very quickly.

I think, again, when his­to­ri­ans look back as some of the rea­sons labor has declined, I’m sure one of the things they will point to is the struc­tur­al prob­lems in unions them­selves — that there were not enough built-in incen­tives for union lead­ers to do more to help their mem­bers increase wages or to increase mem­ber­ship; that they could just coast year after year.

Still, though, I think that what labor has going for it is that many mil­lions of Amer­i­cans see that some­thing is fun­da­men­tal­ly bro­ken in the econ­o­my. There’s real dis­may about wage stag­na­tion, income inequal­i­ty. And the ques­tion is whether that can be trans­lat­ed into some type of move­ment that will lead to col­lec­tive action, to col­lec­tive voice, to increased wages and to make sure that when com­pa­nies do well, they share more of their prof­its and pros­per­i­ty with their workers.

This is an extend­ed ver­sion of an inter­view that first appeared in the March 2015 issue of In These Times.