Abstract
There is a new breed of trades union press journalists - and they are fast breeders, writes Routledge. Union membership has more than halved, to 6.5 million, since the mid-1970s, yet there are dozens of media officers in the labour movement, and a clutch of ex-union PRs are in the House of Commons, some of them in senior ministerial positions. "By the same token," writes Routledge, "the number of journalists specialising in industrial affairs has diminished almost to vanishing point, yet the number of full-time spin-doctors seeking to bend their ear has sharply increased. Some kind of inverse Parkinson's Law is at work, requiring the number of press officers to rise in direct proportion to the decline in trade union activity. What is going on?"
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