Rolling Labor Action Thread

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"

Cited in that Matt Stoller article:

Ten years ago, 33% of TV writers were paid the minimum rate. Now, according to the WGA, 49% are. Accounting for inflation, writer pay has declined 14% in the last five years. The median weekly writer-producer pay is down 23% over the last decade, with inflation factored in.

Thanks for the link.

and the companies for which they write ... their profits haven't gone down much or have they?

Bandcamp United has won its vote:

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2023/05/19/bandcamp-and-bandcamp-united-release-joint-statement-on-union-vote/

More WGA strike talk

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-screenwriting-life-with-me-1096076/episodes/138-your-wga-strike-questions-173016839

Michael Schur interview in Deadline

https://apple.news/AW5YT5dDlTv2GEoC8q1nd9w

Great interview, thanks.

This one might be even more enjoyable

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/05/meet-the-writers-strikes-secret-weapon-hollywood-teamsters-boss-lindsay-dougherty

Good Shohei Ohtani analogy on that Michael Schur interview.

The WGA strike coming not that long after Covid production shutdowns of just a couple years ago is pretty brutal on not just writers but working actors, all the day to day production people as well.

Emmy campaign season is in full swing and it's astounding the studios have not even started talks after a month of strikes. Contempt is a good word.

Err, 2 weeks+. Feels like a month.

SCHUR: Look, there are 600 television shows; there’s one Mike White. The purpose of the guild is to protect the 599 people who aren’t that one person, right? It’s like, (the Los Angeles Angels’) Shohei Ohtan is a hitter and a pitcher. If all baseball teams told all of their employees that they had to both be all-star level hitters and pitchers because one guy did it, that wouldn’t seem fair. And it’s not a perfect analogy, but the goal of the union is to protect the 7000 episodic TV members who aren’t the very small number of people who prefer to do it in the way that they prefer to do it. And if the very worst thing that happened was we saved 6,958 jobs and four people had to hire three consultants to give them a second set of eyes on their episodes of their show, I think we would take that deal.

“The WGA strike coming not that long after Covid production shutdowns of just a couple years ago is pretty brutal on not just writers but working actors, all the day to day production people as well.”

I’m hoping all these unions team up and show one another solidarityz

Ha, the “z” shouldn’t have been there

You love to see it

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/david-zaslav-booed-boston-university-graduation-writers-strike-1235497440/

Lol

Get his ass

Lol @ this David Simon interview.

"I'd rather put a gun in my mouth"

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177194215/tv-writer-david-simon-weighs-in-on-the-writers-guild-of-america-strike

Interesting take from Simon

Re: use of AI in writing

SIMON: Not only I think is it a fundamental violation of the integrity of writers and also of copyright to - you know, when I sold all the scripts I sold, you know, 150 to HBO and, you know, maybe another 50 to NBC, I didn't sell them so that they could be thrown into a computer with other people's and be used again by a corporation. So...

That is kind of true, from a business and legal perspective, because AI could be used as a way to obscure chain of creation. Studios are usually on a hair-trigger alert about not accepting any kind of unsolicited material, because they are subject to so many idea theft claims. And U.S. copyright law is hear an all-time high point in terms of legitimizing infringement claims for even de minimus copying.

Normally studios have to be on guard to be able to show independent creation or "clean room" development of their materials at all times to defend such claims. The fair use defense to copyright infringement is less friendly to allegedly transformative uses after Goldsmith v. Warhol.

So unless you know and can trace all the inputs into AI generated writing, it can start down a slippery slope of essentially idea theft or copyright infringement if the inputs include copyrighted material. This cuts both ways too. A writer could choose to use AI in their writing, but normally has to warrant that all material is original, so if they choose to use AI they are then exposed to claims for breach of the warranty that all material in script is original.

Again, I don't think any of this means no one can or should use AI in creation. It's just what makes a Guild production version not. Plenty of writers do non-union side projects all the time.

Re musicians

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/why-songwriters-cant-have-their-own-writers-strike-yet/

Fantastic piece, this

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/opinion/wga-hollywood-writers-strike-unions.html

Gift link version of above story.

Thanks for that, Ned.

Here’s another strike:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-31/amazon-workers-walk-out-to-protest-climate-office-return-policy#xj4y7vzkg

This is all worth listening to, but there’s a really interesting point made at around the 42 minute mark of how little it would cost the studios to get to where WGA is asking them to go.

https://postshowrecaps.com/tv-show/the-writers-strike-a-discussion-with-wga-member-justin-shanes/

The DGA seems to have squeezed something out of the studios

https://deadline.com/2023/06/directors-hollywood-studios-reach-deal-new-contract-1235399542/

SAG authorizes strike if it comes to it:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-06-05/sag-aftra-strike-hollywood-labor-amptp-strike-authorization

98% margin! The equal of the WGA authorization vote.