Steven Greenhouse, the labor correspondent for the New York Times, took a buyout this week. That decision immediately reduced by 50 percent the number of reporters at major U.S. newspapers who cover labor full-time—even as the dismal situation of the American worker becomes a central preoccupation for American politicians and policymakers.

To some extent, labor reporters are falling victim to the very same workplace trends they cover. “Newspapers are under the gun financially,” observes Greenhouse, “and they’ve laid off a lot of workers.” Editors, he said, don’t view labor as “the sexiest beat.”

Labor coverage’s decline—like that of labor unions—long predates print journalism’s circulation slide. At Newsweek, for instance, as long ago as 1985, covering labor was no more than an entry-level job. Bob Cohn (today president and chief operating officer at the Atlantic, then my fellow grunt at Newsweek) became labor and workplace correspondent at the tender age of 22. Back then, he and I would swap wisecracks about what a backwater the beat had become.

But by today’s standards, labor and workplace coverage was flooding the zone. “The 10 to 15 biggest newspapers all had labor writers,” Cohn recalls. “The newsmagazines all did.” Now, with Greenhouse’s departure from the Times, the only full-time labor reporter left at any of the big newspapers will be the Wall Street Journal’s Melanie Trottman.

Will the Times replace Greenhouse? It won’t say. "Given that we're still in the middle of this [buyout] process,” said Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy in an e-mail, “questions like this one are not likely to be settled until early in the new year.” For his part, Greenhouse says, “I’m sure they will name someone to replace Bill Carter as TV reporter”—Carter is also taking a buyout—“and I’m hoping they will name someone to replace me.”

The logic of mainstream news outlets losing interest in the labor beat over the past 40 years goes something like this. In the middle of the 20^th century labor was a big story because labor unions and working people generally were major players in American life. During the 1960s, even children (I was one) knew the names of prominent labor leaders—George Meany at the AFL-CIO, Walter Reuther at the United Auto Workers, Jimmy Hoffa at the Teamsters. Give yourself a gold star if you can name the three people occupying those jobs today. (Hint: the third name will sound familiar.) Even A.H. Raskin, who covered labor at the Times during the Great Depression and the four decades that followed—and whom Greenhouse met  “when I was a little copy boy here a year out of college”—achieved minor celebrity.

Between 1948 and 1964, the historian Judith Stein points out in her book Pivotal Decade, every Democratic presidential nominee kicked off his general election campaign with a Labor Day rally in Detroit’s Cadillac Square. But as the proportion of private-sector workers covered by union-negotiated contracts declined from about 40 percent in 1954 to less than 7 percent today, the American worker largely fell off the media’s radar. It probably didn’t help that these were also the years during which the most prestigious newspapers chased an ever-higher income demographic to impress advertisers who were ever-more-focused on the luxury market. (As I write, the Times is just concluding an international conference about luxury itself.)

Today, of course, labor unions are so weak that the very phrase “Big Labor” has come to sound like a cruel taunt, like calling a bald person “Curly.” By the logic of media coverage, that means neither they nor the American working class that (not coincidentally) has declined along with them warrant much media attention. Even within the left press, only In These Times and Labor Notes cover labor with any real consistency.

Surely, though, the labor story warrants more attention today than it did during labor’s heyday. Think of wage income as water. When there’s plenty for everyone, water isn’t much of a story. When there’s a drought, it should be front-page news. Nobody disputes that America is in a wage drought, and has been for some time. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, our nation’s median household income, at $51,939, is lower not only than when the recession began, in 2007 ($56,436), but also than when it ended, in 2009 ($54,059), correcting for inflation.