The Disruption Series, Part 7: All Unions Are Not Created Equal (1700th Post)

 

 

“There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anytime, anywhere.”

Calvin Coolidge, 1919

 

When Coolidge made that famous statement, it came at the end of a decade that had been a tumult of the movement for labor and workers rights. As I mentioned in an early article, this led to immense public support for Coolidge that would eventually lead to him becoming President. This is rarely pointed out by those who claim to save that power of the union is something that is deep with the American conscious.

A person can be supportive of unions and opposed to work stoppages. The more I think about it, there has always been something flawed about the idea of a strike on a state or national level. I think this was true even in the early days of organized labor. I’m not just talking about the risks to ones family or lives but the whole concept of it.

The union knows that they are dealing with the rich and powerful. They know that these people have the capability to break them and just as importantly have the resources and patience to wait out the workers. They are gambling their memberships lives and livelihoods on the idea that they can stop work long enough for the rich and powerful to lose just enough money by the stoppage to make it cost effective to meet their demands, while at the same time creating enough chaos and publicity for it to make the millionaire look like the bad guys and the workers who are causing the stoppage – and are the visible sign of this struggle – to be the good guys. This is a high risk strategy to say the least, and I honestly find it amazing it has worked at all over the years.

Perhaps one of the greatest tricks of organized labor over the years has been to convince all union members that the struggle of one union is the same  of a completely different one.  I can understand the basics of the argument -   if we let the rich and powerful abuses one group’s rights, they’re doing it on all of us. I just have a hard time seeing it play out in practice when you consider that no two trades  are the same and as a result, the rights that say, teachers need in order to work are the exact equivalent of the ones of coal miners.  Cesar Chavez and Walter Reuther were both powerful labor leaders in the 1960s but no one would have dared send Chavez to handle a Ford strike in Detroit any more than they would send Reuther to handled that of coffee pickers in California.  They might be skilled on the absolute basic ideas of all unions, but they’d have no idea how to handle the specifics of the others.

And all of these stoppages are making the same basic gamble: that the populace who suffer the consequences but have no dog in the fight will understand the nuances and support the workers over the fat cats.  As I have argued countless times both in this series, the average citizen only cares about any part of the labor system when it stops working.  And when they see picket lines of strikers near their places of work, they have a public face to blame. Does a commuter in New York give a damn about why workers on the MTA are marching for higher wages?  No. All they care about is getting to their jobs on time.  Does a Chicago citizen care of if sanitation workers get health care? No, but they do notice when the garbage bags are stacked four feet high on every street corner.  Ronald Reagan has been excoriated by organized labor for firing air traffic controllers when they were on strike. I guarantee you that everybody who was stuck in an airport or a city and couldn’t get home during that period cheered when it was done.  There is a cynical part of me that suspects if you ask the average American to choose between some vague greater good and making sure their routines are uninterrupted, they’ll choose the latter every time. We might think differently if organized labor were just one big union to which we all belong, but that has never been possible. The leftists might argue this is just another way the rich and powerful divide us but its another denial of how big a society we are.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the strike in Hollywood.  Both the WGA  and SAG-AFTRA have cleverly framed themselves as working stiffs united against big corporations. I’ve repeatedly explained that this narrative doesn’t remotely hold water no matter how many times Fran Drescher makes her announcements that it is. Both sides are, for the record, completely wrong in their positions and basically have been from the start because both sides have fundamentally refused to acknowledge reality on any level.

  No matter how the writers and actors try to frame this, they are elitists who are not part of some grand struggle. They are among the luckiest people in their profession, many of whom are very wealthy but think they are underpaid. They have framed this struggle that all of these corporations are fat cats twirling their mustaches and have giant money bins in their homes which they all swim in a la Scrooge McDuck. The fact that for the last decade the industry they work has been financially shaky across the board is a reality they refuse to accept.

Similarly the studio heads are acting as though they by starving the workers out they can force the public to turn against them when they get tired of watching reruns on Netflix or Amazon.  This is by far the more likely position that many Americans will hold, but its also fundamentally shaken given the nature of the industry.  The average viewer has become so selfish and entitled by the number of options that they have that they do not want to pay for any part of their entertainment. This is a problem of streaming services own making to be sure but there’s also the problem that too much entertainment is equated by so many viewers as none.  The fact that all of these struggles go on before a public who doesn’t care who wins as long as they can keep paying nothing for entertainment they don’t watch makes this struggle as pointless, to quote Mark Twain, as two bald men fighting over a comb.

And this brings me to the fallout that all the guild leaders have gone out of their way to pretend is irrelevant: that there are other workers whose livelihood depends on the film and TV industry who don’t have any part in the creative process and don’t have the advantage of a union membership or a house to sell. I’ve mentioned them in passing in other articles; now I will be more general.

This month Drew Barrymore announced that she was going to resume filming her syndicated talk show without the involvement of WGA or SAG-AFTRA. She has taken full responsibility for it. She has already been castigated by striking writers and is no doubt excoriated in public for it.  The irony is, she’s actually being a better friend to the worker than the people on the picket lines.

Barrymore is aware that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Hollywood who depend on shows like hers for their livelihoods.  I speak of the caterers, the makeup artists, the hairstylists, the assistants, the editors and all of the other people who make a show work who do not appear in front of the camera or write the script. For the better part of four months these people have had their sources of income drop far further than most members of the WGA or SAG-AFTRA, certainly more than Barrymore.  Barrymore may not have more than a boss-employee relationship with them, but she doubtlessly knows them better than a large percentage of the writers and actors on the picket lines. She has made the decision to put her the livelihoods of these people about her professional and personal reputation. In other words, she’s making the tough and complicated decision to help the working stiff – she’s being a good boss.

But because just as everywhere else, unions operate on the sole purpose of helping or hurting them there is no nuance. Bill Maher made this point very clear just a few weeks ago in a public interview, albeit in a far blunter manner. Similarly Maher has announced he will begin filming Real Time in the next few weeks because this strike affects people other than the writers.

Both are already being excoriated by members of the guild. But I wonder if either of these people (Maher actually might do so in one of his New Rules) might actually decide to call these guilds on their collective blindness to reality.  Hell, I would like a group of these representatives to go to the picket lines or call for a meeting with Fran Drescher the next time she opens her mouth.

Because the hypocrisy is so blatant I’m amazed it’s never been called on. The labor stoppage claim that the corporations are exploiting the but the stoppage is hurting far more people than them.  Whatever victory the guilds end up winning will not do anything to help many of these people who have already lost hundreds of millions of dollars of income.  How would Drescher frame this? “Our victory is your victory?”  That’s as close to trickle down theory as I’ve ever heard, and we all know how much these lefties hated that idea. “Don’t blame us, blame the evil corporations?” “You’re the ones making photo ops saying that you’re being exploited. Not us. We’re just going broke. By the way, when is Dwayne Johnson going to give us ten million dollars?”

Really the most anyone has said about all of the people who aren’t being paid was Jane Levy a few weeks ago, who said that she missed the company of so many of the people who worked on set. Way to stick up for them, Jane.  “Hey, we’re going to go bankrupt in a few months but the star of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist says she misses hanging around with us.”

And I have a message for everybody who gets their income from a movie or TV show but doesn’t have the benefit of a union card or disposable income. When this strike ends and all the actors and writers go back to work, be passive-aggressive towards them.  Make sure certain letters don’t get to them as efficiently as possible. Mess up their lunch orders. Make them spend a little more time in hair and makeup. Take a little longer to make sure your out of shot before they film.  And when the talent begins to complain about your poor work attitude (because they will have short memories) shrug your shoulders and say something like: “I guess you forgot to negotiate for that part in your agreement” or “You’re making it impossible for me to work under these conditions” or maybe even “Those weeks walking the picket line really didn’t give you much sympathy for the working stiff.”  Hell, if they fire you, you can say: “I wonder if Drew Barrymore is hiring. I hear she cares about the people who work for her.” I will grant you it’s petty, vindictive and narrow-minded, but hey, this is Hollywood.