By Doug Cunningham

Labor Voices 3 is a conference that starts Thursday in New York City to explore how to develop a national labor media strategy that will help strengthen the labor movement. Conference Co-Chair Marty Fishgold says that labor so far has failed to build a strong national media network.

[Fishgold 1]: “The unions have not developed a media network, a national media network for workers, that has reached into the communities where they are trying to organize."

When John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, Fishgold says, the labor federation had lots of money to spend on media.

[Fishgold 2]: “Most of it was spent on going over the heads of the labor media and workers and going directly to the corporate media to reach out through fancy television ads, and PR firms, where representatives of those firms got huge commissions, and never developed the labor media or the grassroots media."