Everyone is a laborer, regardless of job or profession, so everyone has a stake in economic justice issues. Exposing more Americans to those issues and how they directly affect working Americans is the mission of More Perfect Union. Launched by Faiz Shakir, executive editor, and many other experienced journalists in February 2021, More Perfect Union primarily creates video content to reach the widest audience possible, focusing on labor issues.
“We start from the question of what most people in America are dealing with, fighting against, suffering from or trying to address in their lives. We then connect the answers to policymakers and a political discourse so people can better understand why and how some of these things are happening,” Shakir said.
Shakir and his team use advocacy/persuasion journalism to share the economic justice issues that affect both the people who agree and disagree with its progressive perspective. The next five channels people watched who also viewed More Perfect Union videos on YouTube during the past 30 days were Fox News; Fox Business; MSNBC; Brian Tyler Cohen, a progressive pundit; and Midas Touch, another progressive platform.
According to Shakir, More Perfect Union is a small 501(c)(4) social welfare organization with 28 full-time employees. It has had more than 450 million total views in less than three years, including more than 600,000 TikTok subscribers — its largest platform.
A high-profile example of More Perfect Union’s advocacy journalism is its involvement in convincing President Biden to visit UAW strikers on their picket lines. Having been a leader in the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, having relationships with senior policymakers in the Biden administration and having previously interviewed Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW, Shakir and More Perfect Union were able to contribute to that event.
More Perfect Union has also covered the activities of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, including reporting on the Delta campaign, the largest private sector, single-unit drive to establish a union. Sara Nelson, international president of the association, said More Perfect Union is “providing a huge service.”
“It’s reporting on what’s happening in labor, and people want to know more about it. People are favorable of unions. More Perfect Union is an educational and reporting service that injects the working-class message into the general narrative. It’s providing a voice that simply didn't exist in traditional media,” Nelson said.
Hamilton Nolan, a journalist with many years of experience reporting on politics, labor and inequality, agrees with Nelson and says humanizing labor issues in media content is a More Perfect Union strength.
“More Perfect Union does a great job of creating the human stories of people suffering at work and people fighting for their rights. The challenge in labor reporting has always been convincing a mainstream audience to care about it. More Perfect Union provides high-quality labor reporting and has discovered the formula for making its video content go viral online,” Nolan said.
More Perfect Union’s The Classroom series resides on its YouTube channel, and according to Shakir, “The Classroom is meant to present the big issues in this economy that we want to unpack for you told through the lens of a working-class person.”
Nelson added that since more newsrooms have been unionized, reporters are more conscious of labor issues because they’ve experienced it.
“Every single reporter, every single person working at a news outlet, has to understand part of their job is telling the labor story. It’s in everything. It’s in every business story. It’s in fashion stories. It's in social event stories,” Nelson said.
Bob Sillick has held many senior positions and served a myriad of clients during his 47 years in marketing and advertising. He has been a freelance/contract content researcher, writer, editor and manager since 2010. He can be reached at bobsillick@gmail.com.
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