Thanks to the support of union barbers, brewers, and cigar-makers; millworkers, machinists, and clerks; and letter carriers, beer drivers, and pressmen, the first edition of the Portland Labor Press appeared in print on Aug. 31, 1900. 

We have no surviving copies. But we do have microfilm of the second issue. Published Sept. 6, 1900, it sets out the paper’s purpose: “to give to the trade unionists as well as the general public of this city a paper which they could rely upon for accurate information in regard to the labor movement.”

Begun as the Portland Labor Press, the paper changed its name to Oregon Labor Press in 1915 and Northwest Labor Press in 1987. This issue marks 125 years of its work to chronicle an extraordinary movement that — then and now — fights for the dignity and wellbeing of workers. 

Portland Labor Press was far from unique in the era of its founding. Americans were voracious newspaper readers in 1900. Portland, then a city of 90,000 residents, had two dailies, The Oregonian and the Evening Telegram, and added a third in 1902, the Oregon Journal. From the late 1890s to the mid-20th century, local labor newspapers similar to the Labor Press could be found across the United States. 

If there was a labor press heyday, it was the first half of the 20th century. In 1925, there were nearly 400 newspapers along the lines of this one — focused on local coverage for a readership of multiple unions. In 1946, there were still over 350. 

Labor newspapers were seen as crucial to labor movement fortunes. Samuel Gompers, before he became the first president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), had been editor of the cigar makers union journal. He also edited the AFL’s first newspaper in 1887, writing most of the copy and editorials himself. Over and over for many decades, Gompers and other AFL leaders exhorted affiliated unions to support local labor presses. 

Oregon labor leaders considered the Labor Press essential to getting out the word. “Publicity for the cause of labor is the great service of the Labor Press,” wrote Oregon AFL leader Ben Osburne in 1934. “All local unions not now subscribing to the Labor Press should do so at the earliest possible moment.”

Sister publications decline and disappear

Yet for all that official support, labor presses around the nation began disappearing at an accelerated pace as early as the 1970s. In 1975, an AFL-CIO-affiliated association for labor papers surveyed labor newspaper editors and found that 44% of regional and community labor presses had reduced the number of pages per issue and an equal number had reduced frequency. Within two decades, most had ceased publication altogether. Today we know of only nine remaining “general labor” newspapers in the United States — newspapers like this one that report on multiple unions in a local area. 

What happened to the others? And why did this newspaper survive where others failed? 

Answers to the first question may be straightforward enough. Newspapers and the labor movement have both been in decline since the 1950s. U.S. newspaper circulation peaked at about 1947. And the American labor movement peaked in 1954 when 33.5% of workers were union members; last year the figure was just 9.9%.

How did this paper survive while swimming against that tide? That’s a question many others have asked.

Independence adds to credibility

One answer may be the paper’s unusual degree of independence. Many other labor newspapers were set up by local labor councils as official house organs. The Portland Labor Press was founded as an independent venture by a handful of unions that put up capital and committed to subscribe their members. Over the years, that structure persisted, with additional labor organizations invited to buy “stock” and join in governance. Though it was a nonprofit corporation from the beginning, in practice in the early years it seems to have operated like a cause-oriented small business. The editor depended on the continued support of local labor organizations for his salary, but maintained that support by producing something union families wanted to read. 

Then and now, the labor organizations that owned shares elected a board to oversee the editor. From the beginning the board gave editors broad latitude and trust. But editors’ independence did have limits. In 1908, editor R.A. Harris backed Democrat William Jennings Bryan for U.S. president over Republican William Howard Taft. Nationally, the AFL supported Bryan but local labor leaders supported Taft, and editor Harris appears to have been forced out shortly after.

In his 1962 annual report, Oregon Labor Press editor James Goodsell said that having spoken with editors of other labor papers, he wanted to thank trustees of the shareholding unions for the “truly remarkable degree of editorial freedom” they’d given him. “I’m proud of the great degree of confidence that you have placed in me, and I hope I can continue to merit it.”

Goodsell’s successor Gene Klare echoed that.

“One of the keys to the success of the Labor Press has been its relative independence,” Klare wrote in a 1969 report to the paper’s board of directors. “There is no one labor union official who is able to say print this or don’t print that. That gives a Labor Press sparkle, vigor, and a liveliness that too many labor papers lack.” 

Careful control of costs

Trusted to be true to the cause, Labor Press editors were able to maintain the support of local union members and leaders, in good times and in bad. 

But careful cost management may go just as far to explain this newspaper’s survival. Keeping down costs was an imperative from the start.

“The subscription price has been placed at a low figure so as to bring the Portland Labor Press within the reach of every wage-worker and to cover the expense of publication,” the paper announced on Sept. 6, 1900.

Editors took great care to keep subscription rates as low as possible. Rates were $1 a year at the paper’s founding in 1900 and remained $1 a year 16 years later. They were still just $2.04 a year in 1960 and remained at that rate until 1973. Today they’re $14.16 a year. If they’d risen equal to inflation, those bulk subscriptions would be $31.02 a year if you started from 1916, and $22.46 a year if you started in 1960. Undoubtedly that caution with money limited the paper’s resources and staff. But it very likely contributed to the paper’s survival. 

Another factor was a commitment to saving up reserves. By the 1930s, the paper had amassed reserves amounting to months of operating expenses. That continues to be the case today. Reserves give the paper some time to take steps and recover when lean times come or crisis strikes.

How it changed over time

So the Northwest Labor Press survived and now turns 125, even as hundreds of other labor newspapers ceased to publish. Owing to technology, in some small ways it’s a better and more attractive paper than ever. But today’s pages are a shadow of the much greater scale and impact the paper had in earlier eras of labor might and the primacy of newsprint.

Start with the sheer size and frequency. Today’s paper most often consists of eight or twelve pages mailed out twice a month; the pages are 11” x 14” — “tabloid” size in newspaper parlance. But for its first 82 years, the Labor Press was weekly. And for its first 42 years, it appeared at “broadsheet” size with massive pages as big as 18” x 23.” In 1909, the Labor Press consisted of eight 17” x 23” pages a week. Inch for inch and word for word, the Labor Press of 1909 was more than four times the paper it is today. 

Of course, circulation is another variable. Year by year fluctuations tell a story of the paper’s struggle to survive. This issue is being mailed out to 42,121 addresses (about 77% in Oregon, 20% in Washington, and 4% in other states). Labor Press board minutes don’t report circulation figures until the 1940s, but based on that, we know that Labor Press circulation quadrupled from 10,000 to 39,600 during the World War II years, plummeted to 18,000 after the war, and fluctuated between 18,000 and 33,000 over the next 15 years. Circulation grew steadily in the 1960s, reached 55,000 in 1970, and appears to have reached a peak of 68,000 in 1982, just before a crisis that was to threaten its existence.

Postage threatens to stamp out labor’s voice

As strange as it may sound, for the last 55 years, the single greatest threat to the paper’s survival has been postal rates. 

“The only thing that could create a sudden and serious financial crisis for the Oregon Labor Press would be an increase in postal rates,” editor Goodsell warned in a May 1962 report to the board. 

Since the nation’s founding, the U.S. Post Office had been a department of the federal government, and to promote an informed citizenry it had always been government policy to charge reduced postal rates to newspapers and magazines; the nonprofit publications of unions, churches, and veterans groups paid even less. That changed when Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. Restructured as a government-owned corporation, the renamed U.S. Postal Service (USPS) would now have to pay its own way by charging the full cost of delivery. Increased periodical rates were supposed to be phased in gradually over 16 years starting 1971, and throughout the 1970s, postal rates paid by the Labor Press rose 25% a year. But in December 1981, Congress agreed with a proposal by President Ronald Reagan to implement the 1987 rates immediately. Labor Press postage costs doubled during a deep economic recession which hit unions hard. Within a year, Labor Press circulation dropped by 25%. To survive, the Labor Press ended 81 years of weekly publication and went to twice monthly.

Klare mourned the loss in an April 1983 report to the board. “This means at a time when the labor movement should be sending more information to its members in the way of economic, political, legislative and union news, it is sending out less.”

And yet, the paper persisted. Forty-three years after its near-death experience, the Labor Press continues to have the support of more than two dozen subscribing local unions, operates in the black in most years, and has substantial reserves as a cushion against calamity.

The living movement in our pages

In the last two years, most of its 125-year archive has been made searchable online, and what an incredible record it is. Looking through it at nwlaborpress.org/archives, you can glimpse the world that once existed. And as with any local newspaper that spans one and a quarter centuries, the passions of each era find their expression on its pages. 

In the 1900s and 1910s you see an exuberant working class culture in which union men gather in halls to smoke cigars, hear lectures, and watch boxing matches, and union families turn out for orchestras, sack races, and beauty contests. Socialists and anarchists were a big part of that era’s labor milieu, and the Labor Press reported on their meetings and campaigns with sympathy and curiosity. 

After American entry into World War I, a patriotic mania takes hold, when the annual Labor Day parade was repurposed to promote “war bonds” to support “our boys” overseas. 

In the 1920s, labor enters a decade-long defensive crouch, under constant attack from an employer-led “open shop” movement and desperate to prove its respectability in an era when anti-immigrant “100 percent Americanism” was a slogan of the day. 

Bitter battles with employers erupt during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But that’s also the period when organized labor “emerged from a semi outlaw status” and became “an accepted American institution,” as editor S. Eugene Allen later put it in 1946.

From 1938 to 1955, Labor Press archives reveal a union movement that was fiercely divided. Through most of its history, this newspaper stuck to a stance that might be called “ecumenical” — not taking sides or fanning the flames of disputes within or between unions. But the CIO years were a big exception: The Labor Press was firmly in the AFL camp, and wrote darkly of the doings of the CIO. In a rare instance of intervening to dictate editorial policy, the Labor Press board passed a resolution in January 1942 commanding that “no article appear in the Labor Press extolling the CIO or communists in any form,” casually conflating the two.

Anti-communist fervor had started to appear in the Labor Press during the 1919 red scare after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. But judging by the number of times the word appeared, anti-communist feeling peaked in 1941 and again in 1951.

During World War II, with the nation fighting a war on two fronts, local unions like Machinists Lodge 63 and Teamsters Local 162 competed to show their patriotism, running full page ads urging members who weren’t already in uniform to spend 10% of their wages on war bonds. 

When it came to attitudes about race and the sexes, the Labor Press was most often a product of its time. In 1916 you could find in its pages an advertisement for a vaudeville show by the “peerless minstrels,” featuring a “famous blackface comedian.” But the paper was usually more progressive than the times. In the 1920s front page editorials thundered against the Ku Klux Klan, which was momentarily ascendant. And in the early 1960s, editorials pushed laggard local unions to desegregate. A 1951 letter from Mrs. O.D. Cook, union organizer, criticized the Labor Press publishing pictures of “pinup girls … without enough pinned on them.” Women were rare then as union members, but they would begin to demand respect. In the 1950s, the Labor Press published a woman’s page featuring shopping tips, favorite recipes, and dress patterns submitted by wives of union members. Because subscribing unions are concentrated in the building trades and manufacturing, men still make up 83% of union members that get the Labor Press, but the paper has made an effort to report on efforts to recruit, retain, and elevate women in their ranks.

One hundred twenty-five years after its birth, the Northwest Labor Press is a rare survivor of a once-thriving network of labor newspapers. Sustained by the loyalty of local unions and a belief that workers deserve a newspaper of their own, its pages are a living record of struggle and solidarity, chronicling victories and defeats with an independence that has earned it trust for generations. In an era when both labor and local news are under threat, its survival is more than a milestone — it’s a reminder that battles for workplace dignity and fairness are stories worth telling for generations to come.

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SURVIVING SISTERS

Only nine sister publications survive today — print newspapers like the Northwest Labor Press that report on the union movement for their local labor community.

• The Labor Paper Peoria, Illinois, 1896-
• Labor World Duluth, Minnesota, 1896-
• Union Advocate St. Paul, Minnesota, 1897-
• The Chief New York, New York, 1897-
• Minneapolis Labor Review Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1907-
• Labor Tribune St. Louis, Missouri, 1935-
• Sacramento Valley Union Labor Bulletin Sacramento, California, 1928-
• The Building Tradesman Detroit, Michigan, 1952-
• Labor Beacon Kansas City, Missouri, 1953-