Representing Labour: Mass Medias Portrayal of Amazon Warehouse Workers during COVID-19

Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic questions of labour have been brought to the forefront of local, national, and international conversations in relatively new ways marking a potential shift away from the dominant neoliberal consensus. A consensus normally concerned with issues concerning capital rather than issues concerning labour. This recent emphasis on labour has been reflected in the news media across the United States where questions regarding workers working conditions and workplace safety and health risks have been raised and discussed. Yet, the dominant media has often maintained an antagonistic and fraught relationship with labour since the inception of the labour movement in the United States. With the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the news industry since the 1960s, this antagonistic relationship between the dominant media and labour has only been intensified, leading to coverage of labour and issues pertaining to labour being further disregarded or marginalized by the dominant press in the United States. Focusing specifically on the coverage of Amazon warehouse workers' labour unrest under COVID-19, this thesis examines the re-inclusion of workers in American newspapers of record, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. By examining whether and how the framing of labour in these newspapers of record have shifted in the March 2020 to November 2020 period, this thesis explores how these newspapers of record reflect and refract a potential hegemonic rupture building throughout American society; and concludes that the dominant media's tendency to marginalize workers and budding labour movements suggests the need to de-marketize the news media in order to change how the dominant media frames labour.