Rolling Labor Action Thread

Bah: https://bit.ly/bcu-update

In 2019, two major gold-industry giants in Nevada merged ops. Over the past year+, current & former workers have shared disturbing workplace issues, harassment & more w/ our reporters. This week, union workers secured a contract ✊https://t.co/0Wfuj0dkbg

— Paige Blankenbuehler (@PaigeBlank) March 31, 2023

Whaddup WGA

"AI can't write Tariq's raps!" Abbott Elementary writer/creator/actor @quintabrunson holds the line, alongside #AFM47 musicians outside Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank 5/5#WGAstrike #WGAstrong #dothewritething pic.twitter.com/gbcKQkAL6H

— AFM Local 47 (@AFMLocal47) May 8, 2023

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-coral-reef-of-humanity-encircling

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/business/media/netflix-writers-strike.html

The Nolan piece was enlightening and changed my mind in some ways, but I still think that people whining that they’re not getting paid enough when the average WGA member salary is 100k is a bit ridiculous. I know that’s probably a minority opinion, but oh well

what percentage of WGA members are on a salary

You should put that opinion back in your pants table

That “average pay” statistic reminds me of how cities try to bust teachers unions with propaganda bullshit like, “THE AVERAGE TEACHER MAKES $75K/YEAR AND THEY GET SUMMERS OFF!” Right, and new teachers make shit, teachers work 12 hour days, pay out of pocket for classroom supplies, and are paying off six-figure student loan debt. And that’s not coming close to scratching the surface. I suspect the majority of writers don’t make $100k/year, but good for those who do. And those who do make that much, it’s from the residuals that studios are fighting against, which is one of the key reasons for the strike. Those making that much aren’t striking because they’re not getting paid enough (though relative to studio execs, they absolutely are not getting paid enough), but because younger writers and those just entering the field will never get paid that much, or anything close to it, if the execs get their way.

yep. solidarity’s supposed to be a good thing i thought

Don’t get me wrong— I support the strike, but as Nolan notes, absolutely loathe most of what is on television or streaming services. If it goes away makes no difference to me or my life, so my support is more tepid than it is for (let’s say) teachers unions, nurses, Starbucks workers, and etc. Just not as gung-ho about it as some people seem to be.

Fucking wild dude

I dont’t have kids or kids in school i dont care what happens to the teachers’ union.

See what a dipshit i sound like?

Teachers are important

Who can forget the famous rallying cry, “An injury to one doesn’t really affect me directly, so my support of the workers in this instance is tepid, and the outcome surely won’t have a cascading effect on other industries”?

Again, I support it. But I’m not going to be posting about it all over social media and donating to a strike fund, that’s all.

people whining that they’re not getting paid enough when the average WGA member salary is 100k is a bit ridiculous

wait until you hear what the average studio exec salary is

What is it like having a brain that smooth

Eh, I can take the abuse.

Excited to hear your views when the DGA and SAG contracts are up at the end of next month

teachers unions, nurses, Starbucks workers

I am distracted thinking this is a quote from Idiocracy

It is, in a way

_ teachers unions, nurses, Starbucks workers_

I am distracted thinking this is a quote from Idiocracy

it's not about you, sorry

I don’t like Starbucks coffee and I don’t think Starbucks is important so I don’t care if people who work there get exploited

So, by saying that I tepidly supported a strike because I have major issues with what the industry produces— what I perceive to be propaganda and pap to control people— I deserve scorn and insult.

I did a bunch of reading after unbookmarking this thread last night. I support the strike much more fully now, despite still feeling the way I do about what it produces. Yes, I realize I was missing some nuances and forgetting the ability to hold two somewhat contradictory beliefs at the same time.

Sorry for lashing out at you, felicity.

You didn’t initially say that, it was this point that people took issue with

I still think that people whining that they’re not getting paid enough when the average WGA member salary is 100k is a bit ridiculous. I know that’s probably a minority opinion, but oh well

I didn’t!

As noted in the depression 77 thread, I have been in an unstable financial situation for years now, and sometimes my class antagonism— reading that 100k figure, for example— brings out the worst in me and sort of blinkers me to the reality that most WGA writers aren’t making much.

Thank you, table.

I think other people have covered what's objectionable about the "some animals are more equal than others" angle in a labor action support thread more directly, but I see you take the point.

If you've seen Idiocracy you might understand that the inclusion of Starbucks in that phrase was kind of funny as a hierarchy. I don't love being personally attacked for that, but I would defend your right to say whatever you want.

As for $100k average salary, I don't know if you realize just how expensive it is to live in LA or what the low end of the salaries are, but the fact that the entertainment production industry is competitive yet unionized basically top to bottom is kind of miraculous. The question seems to be why aren't more industries able to organize and achieve such relatively high average salaries making it possible for everyone to live relatively comfortably? We know the money is there, just pooling at the top.

Hi felicity, I had to leave California because I couldn’t survive there, even making close to the most I’ve ever made in my life, which was about half of 100k. I do realize how expensive it is, but seeing as how I literally lived in a truck for several years while being assistant manager of a luxury retailer, I still think that 100k is a decent amount of money, California or no. I would be absolutely slaphappy to make anything close to that, which I don’t foresee ever happening in my lifetime.

I think that your question about unionization of Hollywood and how it can serve as a model for other industries is the most salient part of the WGA strike for me. I wonder whether Davis covers any of this in Prisoners of the American Dream, a book I’ve read but not in a few years.

This podcast is goes a bit into the ins and outs of things. The latest episode has ER creator John Wells as a guest.

https://deadline.com/2023/05/deadline-strike-talk-podcast-week-2-billy-ray-todd-garner-john-wells-1235364794/amp/

"Don’t get me wrong— I support the strike, but as Nolan notes, absolutely loathe most of what is on television or streaming services."

The longer the strike goes on surely the less will be produced. Even from that pov it's a good idea to support the strike if you hate TV.

I have a lot of thoughts about all of this, but the reason I’m tracking this story (more than a lot of other stories) is because it’s one of the more *public* and visible tests of whether AI will replace people.

(Obviously this has been a thing on various levels for a while but the notion of television written by algorithms might leap out a bit more.)

I asked one of the striking WGA writers at an event what the biggest sticking points were. She mentioned the studios were refusing to guarantee that they wouldn't use AI to write any parts of scripts in the future.

If that's true, it seems incredibly contemptuous of audiences as well as writers. The studios want the prestige of Guild artistry but want to cut corners on one of the most cherished parts of the craft. (No one's stopping them from posting on YouTube.)

I would think writers could use AI as starting points for scripts. Some genre fiction writers are already using it.

The key here is that the human labour isn't devalued.

AI is here to stay, so the key is figuring out how and when to deploy it— it has actually proven a very successful tool for university teaching, but I digress.

I also just want to note that a dear friend of mine is going through some absolutely batshit drama with her academic union at the moment, and the union leadership is entirely at fault. My own experiences of being in a union have also been unhappy. I am still a member of two unions, but there’s a LOT of work to be done in both of them, and one of them is a lost cause— adjuncts, NTTs, and TT professors have completely different frames of reference and goals, and a union whose leadership is driven by TT people will never adequately serve those who are not.

Which again, is not to say that I am not a proud union member, but that there is a sort of blanket “unions good” sentiment among so many people on the left that really elides the lived experience of many people in the unions.

I joined my faculty union two months ago, and, yeah, as a teaching (i.e. NTT) professor I've already noticed the caste system.

yeah, absolutely true. i support unions in general wholeheartedly, and have been in various unions and have seen a very wide set of realities depending on both leadership and membership - like the job itself, depends on the members to put in work to keep it alive and thriving

Definitely been in the arcs of that. When I first formally joined the UC as a full-time employee, there was a burst of new union energy to replace what had been seen as an ineffective earlier version of it with a new one; it won resoundingly and for a few years good things were done. But it all kinda petered out in the late 2000s and honestly if I hadn't been finally reclassified and therefore given a distinct salary boost in mid-2008 -- thankfully a month or so before the big crash -- I was strongly considering looking elsewhere. Active membership had dropped to something like 25% of the workforce represented and it was all kinda sluggish. But in the early 2010s a new crew started firing up a bit and worked out the affiliation with the Teamsters via their public worker arm, and after basically getting a good holding pattern in place, they massively boosted active paying membership -- a big boon when the Janus decision hit since we were somewhere in the high 80% percent range regardless, and so the money hit wasn't so bad -- and scored two big contract wins since, most recently last year just before the grads went on strike. (I suspect there was cascading pressure not to face a dual strike at that point since we'd been out of contract for a few months.) There was both good active leadership overall in terms of communication and outreach on the UC-wide level and the campus level, and we've since put in a lot of work to expand and affiliated unrepresented employees in both the UC system and the CSU to boot; getting in other unrepresented non-librarian employees is a current big focus -- a division I've never understood, since I've been lucky enough to have that the whole time.)

Which again, is not to say that I am not a proud union member, but that there is a sort of blanket “unions good” sentiment among so many people on the left that really elides the lived experience of many people in the unions.

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table),

I mean ... cops have unions, and they're one of the most powerful in terms of local US politics (the proposed city budget includes cuts to cops ... there will be performativity by the pigs, I'm sure) ... but that's a classic "wedge issue" for the left ... locally, our teachers' union has been on strike all week, and there's been pushback of the "this is bad for the kids" type, but putting the blame on the teachers, as opposed to the district.

Cop unions are unions in name only because cops aren’t workers.

and cops don't respect picket lines

Yikes

As a coder and someone with a computer science degree I want to tell you where I believe AI is going. 2/

— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) May 13, 2023

in Florida if we don't reach 60% membership we're declassified, and, heh, unlike police and fire unions, we're not allowed to use payroll deduction

https://reason.com/2020/06/17/the-case-for-abolishing-police-unions/

Feel like the AI stuff is a distraction that the studios are happy to concede on/use as a distraction.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/can-a-writers-strike-save-hollywood?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email

"As a coder and someone with a computer science degree let me tell you why my films are terrible"