The Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood is closed for business. The union's bargaining documents reveal a cartel of studios that refused to negotiate on a single position. This could go on for a long-ass time:
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The writers are up for it. A lot of people are saying this is the first writers' strike since 2007/8, but that's not quite right. That was the last time the writers went on strike against the studios, but in 2019, the writers struck against their own talent agents - within the space of a week, all 7,000 writers in Hollywood fired their agents. They struck against the agencies for 22 months.
The agencies had consolidated down to four major firms, two backed by private equity who loaded them up with debt that could only be repaid if the agencies figured out how to vastly increase profits. They did so, by unilaterally switching the way they did business with their clients. Instead of taking a 10% commission on the creative wages they bargained for, the agencies started to take "packaging fees" from the studios for putting together a writer, director, stars, etc.
These fees came out of the same budget that the talent got paid from, so the higher the fee was, the less the talent made. Soon, some showrunners were discovering that they were getting 10% and their agents were getting 90%!
The agencies weren't done, either: they were building their own studios, and planning to negotiate with themselves on behalf of their clients. The writers said fuck this shit.
They issued a code of conduct ordering the agencies to knock all that shit off. The agencies swore they'd never do it. Why should they? Every job these writers had ever done came through an agency, and the agencies were staffed with the toughest, most obnoxious negotiators on the planet.
They were sure the writers would cave. After all, the top tier of writers had been handled with kid gloves by the agencies and not ripped off to the same extent as their jobbing, workaday peers. They'd break solidarity and the union would collapse, right?
Wrong. Twenty-two months later, every one of the agencies caved on every single point. Bam. Union strong.
Now the writers are back on strike and it's triggered a predictable torrent of anti-worker nonsense ("striking writers will lead to public indifference to torture!) (no, really) (ugh):
One common theme in these bad takes is that writers are real workers, like, you know, coal miners or Starbucks baristas. They're coddled intellectuals, and haven't the intelligentsia been indifferent to proletarian struggle since, you know, time immemorial?
This is wrong in every conceivable way. For starters, it's ahistorical. #LordByron and innumerable other toffs and poets and such were right there with the #Luddites, demanding labor justice during the #IndustrialRevolution, as #BrianMerchant writes in his outstanding, forthcoming history of the Luddites, Blood in the Machine:
But you don't have to look back to the stocking frame to find this kind of solidarity. As #HamiltonNolan writes in his newsletter, "Hollywood is the single best example of mature labor power in America":
The entire Hollywood workforce, from grips to carpenters, costumers to plumbers, teamsters to medics, is unionized. That includes writers and actors (I'm a member of #IATSE Local 839, AKA #TheAnimationGuild).
I live in Burbank, the entertainment industry's company town (fun fact! The "Hollywood" studios are largely over the city line, in Burbank). Walk down Burbank Boulevard, Magnolia Boulevard, or any of the other major roads, and you'll pass many union halls.
Burbank is a prosperous place. That's thanks, in part, to the studios, whose entertainment products are very profitable.
But working in a profitable industry is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that you will get a share of those profits. Some of the most profitable industries in the world - e-commerce, fast food, logistics - have the lowest paid workforces.
Burbank is prosperous because the unions made sure that everyone - the grips, the costumers, the animators, the actors, the writers, the teamsters and the pipefitters - gets a decent wage, decent health care and a decent retirement.
My pal the set-dresser who worked crazy hours shlepping furniture around sitcom sets for decades? All that work did bad stuff to his joints, which meant that he needed a hip replacement in his forties - which was 100% covered, including his sick leave while he recovered. He was able to take early retirement in his late fifties, with a solid pension, with his health in excellent shape and many years of happiness with his partner stretching before him.
That's what unions get you: a good job that might be hard at times, and the costs of your work are borne by the employer who profits from your labor. As Nolan writes, the point of unions is to "make sure that people! Are! Not! Disposable!"
Unions deliver the American dream. As #PeteSeeger sang in "Talking Union Blues":
> Now, if you want higher wages let me tell you what to do
> You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you
> You got to build you a union, got to make it strong
> But if you all stick together, boys, it won't be long
> You get shorter hours, better working conditions
> Vacations with pay. Take your kids to the seashore
We tend to focus on wages in union discussions, but unions aren't merely about getting better pay, it's about making better jobs. When LA teachers went out on strike in 2019, wages weren't at the top of their list - they bargained for greenspace for every school, replacing rotting portables with permanent buildings, ending ICE entrapment of parents at the school gates, social workers and counselors for schools...and wages.
I really like how Nolan puts this. The way that the studios make money has changed: streaming is clobbering ad-supported TV and movie theater tickets. The studios are adapting. The workers want to adapt, too. The studios would rather "treat[] their work force as a disposable natural resource to be mined, used up, and then abandoned, as business dictates."
A union gives workers "the same ability to adapt to changing industries that companies already have." The studios want to leave workers behind. Unions give workers the collective power to say, "No. You’re taking us with you."
Union workers are wealthier than their non-union counterparts, but that's not just because of higher wages. As Nolan writes, "Unions make sure that the people get to adapt to changing industries, and not just the investors and the business owners."
> [Union workers] have a far greater ability to build coherent, long-term careers, as opposed to a constant treadmill of unstable short-term gigs. In non-union industries, businesses can just act like ships cutting through a desperate sea of workers, scooping up whoever they want and then tossing them overboard as soon as it’s convenient. In a union industry, though, the companies are forced to deal with the labor force as an equal. The workers have their own damn boat.
Advocates for market capitalism insist that market forces increase prosperity for everyone. They say that, in the end, having corporations serve their shareholders results in corporations serving everyone.
But a comparison of unionized and nonunionized industries reveals the hollowness of that prospect. Hollywood is wildly profitable and it pays every kind of worker well. That's because workers have solidarity across sectors and trades.
The Entertainment Community Fund supports everyone else who is affected by the work-stoppage, all the other creative and craft trades whose work has been halted by the writers' struggle.
Because all the workers are in this together. As @adamconover explains in this amazing CNN clip, #DavidZazlav, the head of CNN parent-company Warner-Discovery, made a quarter of a billion dollars last year, enough to pay all the demands of all the writers:
And #CarolLombardini, spokesvillain for the studio cartel AMPTP, told the press that ""Writers are lucky to have term employment." As #JohnRogers says, she "wiped out the doubt of every writer who wasn't sure this negotiation really IS so important, that it actually IS about turning us into gig workers."
The stakes in this strike are the same as the stakes in every strike: will workers get a fair share of the value their labor creates, or will that value be piled up in the vaults of $250,000,000/year CEOs? It's not like the studios especially hate writers - like all corporations, they hate all their workers.
The same tactics that they're using to make it so writers can't pay the rent today will be turned on every other kind of Hollywood worker tomorrow - and when the writers win this one, they'll support those workers, too.
There's a lot of concern about AI displacing creative labor, but the only entity that can take away a writer's wage is a human being, an executive at a studio.
As has been the case since the time of the Luddites, the issue isn't what the machine does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to.
After all, as @cstross points out, a corporation is just a #SlowAI, remorselessly paperclip-maximizing its way through the lives and joy of the flesh-and-blood people who constitute its inconvenient gut-flora:
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