ILCA To Set Up Labor Media Center In New Orleans

ILCA Convention: Beyond Katrina

The International Labor Communications Association will set up an
experiment in labor media at its biennial convention to be held October
18-20 in New Orleans.

Indy media centers, organized by progressives to teach people
journalistic skills and provide resources to create their own media,
have sprung up in locales across the country in recent years. But labor
has been slow to embrace the practice even through working people have
important stories to tell that mainstream media will not touch. Seeing
New Orleans as a city exemplifying the problems workers throughout
America are facing--racism, immigration, housing shortages,
environmental degradation and the use of crises to impose privatization
and de-unionization--ILCA will spend three days there training labor
communicators and rank-and-file unionists as they go out and report the
stories of the working class communities still struggling with the
aftermath of Katrina and the bungled recovery.

More information about the convention, to be held at the Loews New
Orleans Hotel, and the media center will be available soon on
http://www.ilcaonline.org


ILCA 2007 Convention and Awards

October 18-20, ILCA will gather the largest group of labor media
activists and professionals ever assembled to tell the stories of New
Orleans. We will establish a labor media center for three days where we
- you - will be the media, capturing the issues behind the tragedy and
their meaning for all of us. Together we will demonstrate the power of
labor*s voice! More information is available at
http://www.ilcaonline.org/



Howard Kling

ILCA New Orleans Convention
Media Center Project

How You Can Help!

What we’re planning. The 2007 Convention of the International Labor
Communications Association, AFL-CIO, CTW, CLC will be held in New Orleans
this fall, October 18-20. Our hope is to bring at least 150 labor
journalists and media activists to New Orleans not to chat about media but
to do what we do best, in this case to tell the worker’s and union story
about Katrina / Rita and their aftermath. For three days we intend to run a
media center from our convention and connect the labor media workers who
will be attending the convention with local people who can give and set up
interviews, show locations, provide information and insights and generally
be resources.

What kind of impact can we have if labor’s collective voice is raised for
three days in New Orleans? How much more of the story of destruction and
exploitation and struggle and movement can we get out if we all focus our
work on one very important place for the time we have? Can that transform
labor media in general, and can that help the struggle to rebuild and for
justice even just a little bit? We hope the answer is that we can have an
impact, can get the stories out, can further justice and can transform
ourselves. This convention / conference should be like none other we have
done – the usual sit your seats and talk about media in workshop after
workshop. This time we’re going to act, together.

Of course we know real change and the full story only comes about with
continual and tenacious work and we’re apologetic for our inevitable plan to
breeze into to town, pound around a bit, and then leave with our privilege.
Yet despite this clear weakness, New Orleans is the right place for us to
be. To not commit to telling the New Orleans story is an even bigger
problem. So we think it important to take the chance that our work there
can be helpful and that the relationships and media created will endure
beyond the short time we have.

How you can help. So we need your help or this won’t happen. We need to be
able to put together multi-media teams to explore different situations and
issues and organizations and work and people, and the continuing struggle to
rebuild New Orleans. Given what we are trying to do and the limited time we
have, we’re hoping we can do this in a fairly organized way. The best we
can think of is to bring all of you who will help us to our convention on
Friday, October 19th to connect with the teams we will have put together.
From there each team will be able to travel together around the city,
wherever you need them to go to cover your story, to find the visuals and
interviews and other elements that will come together in good journalism.
Each team will include print, video and radio / audio professionals. This
is a crazy idea and a daunting organizational task, but we think it will be
very worth it.

It is certainly easy to see New Orleans as a conjunction of the ills and
forces of neoliberalism and rampant corporate dominance of our culture,
institutions, government, solutions and problems. We hope some people will
explore the broad issues that existed before the hurricanes but that are now
brought into full focus by the failed national response to the disaster:
global warming, environmental racism, immigration and guest worker, the
destruction of union labor, the driving down of wages and conditions,
skyrocketing housing costs, the displacement of a huge segment of the
African-American workforce of NO, and the disintegration and elimination of
a collective, government, public commitment to the general welfare, to our
cities, to our communities and a withdrawal of responsibility for protecting
and rebuilding New Orleans.

So we need you to help us get at these broad issues, ones we’re sure you
know all too well. Of course the way this will probably happen is through
the particulars you know about and have experienced in your daily lives and
through your union or organization, etc. Some ideas to think about and that
will help get out a variety of stories converging on the broad issues,
include:

ÿ What happened to workers in general as a result of the hurricanes?

ÿ What happened and is happening in their communities?

ÿ What industries were affected and how? What happened to your workers?

ÿ What’s happened to your workplaces?

ÿ How were your union and your members impacted? What’s happening now?

ÿ What has happened to the working class of New Orleans, both the better
off, unionized sectors, and the poverty-wage workers?

ÿ How have race and class intersected before and after Katrina?

ÿ What has happened to your neighborhood and the neighborhood where your
members live or lived?

ÿ What has happened to jobs in your industry? Where did they go? Who has
then now? What are you doing?

ÿ What has happened to the environment in the city, the delta, your
neighborhoods, etc? What is being done?

ÿ What conflicts have you lived related to prevailing wage laws, elimination
of jobs, the exploitation of immigrant labor, the destruction of education,
the destruction of housing,

ÿ What work are you involved in to reclaim and rebuild New Orleans? What are
the obstacles?

ÿ What are the bright spots?

ÿ What coalitions and organizations have you built since, or used, to bring
social and economic justice to New Orleans? What projects have you been
involved in?

ÿ What kind of support have you gotten?

ÿ What role does government continue to play? What role are unions playing?

ÿ What conflicts are there between union activities and priorities and those
of other parts of the community? What, if anything, is being done to bridge
the differences?


There are certainly many, many more questions but hopefully this will help
you figure out how to help us. We look forward to being with you in
October.

Howard Kling