Introduction

Public disorder in the form of industrial strikes and its representation in the media has been studied in varying contexts with much focus on confrontation and picket violence (Waddington 1992), and its framing in terms of war between the state and workers’ unions (Hart 2014). It is therefore common to find that in reporting industrial strikes, the use of language alongside pictorial representations in the media can project these negative themes and create a situation in which news audiences are led to take sides with either of the social actors involved in the industrial dispute. This is mainly because in such instances as reporting industrial disputes, the news media is characterised in its role of ‘watchdog’ (Berkowitz 2009), thus purporting to represent factual details of events. In this chapter I examine the media representation of the 2011 nationwide public sector workers’ strike in Botswana, paying specific attention to how the use of quotations that are attributed to external voices sets the tone of framing of the strike. While the events of the strike did not result in far-reaching picket violence, one of the ideas that I discuss in this chapter is how the views expressed by external news sources project a sense of looming disorder. In addition, and more significantly, I examine how, despite the use of quotations that are attributed to external voices, news writers take on particular stances in their coverage of the strike. Before looking at some scholarly views on the feature of attribution in the news, let us briefly look at the context of the public sector workers’ strike in Botswana.

The Public Sector Workers’ Strike in Botswana

Before the strike began, the public sector union representatives had lobbied for a 16 per cent salary increase and entered into negotiations with the representative committee of the employer, the government. However, the negotiations collapsed, leading to the negotiation of strike rules between the government and the public sector workers’ unions. The strike itself lasted for approximately eight weeks, starting on 18 April and ending on 6 June 2011. One of the central arguments advanced by the government during the negotiation process was that the economic status of the country could not allow for an increment in salaries for the public sector, due to the global economic recession from which the country was still recovering.