This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1467147
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1467147
1 Like
Strike!
My cat’s not ready for the day yet…
If memory serves labor strikes were huge in the past. The actor’s strike barely gets noticed but it should be.
12 Likes
After a few years of deliberate price gouging in response to COVID19, and corporate wealth growth from tfg’s tax cuts for his wealthy friends, people get a little tired of it. Businesses making money from opportunities is fine, but without regulation they go all sociopathic as they vacuum up everything. Corporations that have enjoyed that 40 years of union busting have gotten to the point of labor relations boiling down to take it or leave it. This is America and we do not have to put up with it. The unions are only doing what government and businesses should already be doing. That is to promote the general welfare of the people.
22 Likes
So why isn’t Dem leadership screaming “Card Check” from the rooftops?
Whose side are they on?
4 Likes
Unions of today have been thrown back to their most basic reason for existence. Which is a good thing. That may be why corporate America is now so concerned and resistive. The handwriting is on the wall.
And the behavior of those corporations is made so obvious with what is happening. The studios and AMPTP have not looked so good in this process. I have sort of wondered if this is not resolved well, if it may break the studio mentality further and spawn something different.
13 Likes
There’s a lot of that going around. We got a good rain last night and it cooled down to 65. Good weather to snooze.
11 Likes
The Right spent over a century vilifying unions as Communistic and anti-American, then jumped in bed with the Ruskies as soon as they needed a model for suppression of basic human rights.
18 Likes
inflation… has eroded workers’ purchasing power while company profits and economic inequality have continued to soar
And this is not slavery why …?
5 Likes
Wages stagnated from 1973 to 2013, rising only 9.2% even as productivity grew by 74.4%. . . . U.S. inflation, which soared to 8% in 2022, has eroded workers’ purchasing power while company profits and economic inequality have continued to soar.
I have had a recent “discussion” on this topic with a right wing area resident through letters to the editor in our local paper.
He predictably blamed President Biden for wages not keeping pace with the cost of goods. I felt obligated to remind him that wages are set by the private sector employer, not by the government. I also reminded him that under GOP mythology it is the invisible hand of the marketplace, not the government, that determines the price of goods. I then asked him if he is suggesting that the economy would be healthier if the government instituted Nixon era wage and price controls because GOP economic theory is clearly failing. I’m still waiting for his response.
22 Likes
And you will be waiting til the day TFG reveals his true weight and height. Or when hell freezes over. The dates coincide.
4 Likes
neither am I!
work is kicking my butt this week, lots of big heavy things to build, and I will be back at it tomorrow. (we’ve got a Wednesday deadline) So with my one day off I am planning on moving as little as possible.
(okay, here’s the on topic part of my post):
I am grateful to be Union. There’s been a very noticeable rise in union activity all over, even without strikes. My union was without contract for about 8 months this past year and had an active and visible pressure campaign going on to finally win a decent contract last spring. Strike was always considered a last resort, and ultimately we didn’t need to do it. So striking is an indicator but not the only indicator to measure Union activity. I’m noticing a lot of campaigning and activity from unions locally even without strikes.
Also the Grad students have been unionizing in my area, that’s a good trend to see.
17 Likes
Because we get to pay taxes now.
4 Likes
Because employers do not own employees and their families, and payment in exchange for labor is made; even if insufficient. Also, workers are not hunted down and tortured or killed for leaving the worksite.
7 Likes
Some people who are all in favor of capitalism have no idea how it works. Or how government works. Ignorance in this country is far more widespread than I realized. Sigh.
3 Likes
Chattel slavery and wage slavery are two different forms of slavery.
10 Likes
In a philosophical mood this morning. For millenia humanity has been but raw material to be exploited, used up, discarded by systems of our own design, producing to consume and consuming to produce, utility, efficiency, and greed the only values considered to be operational in the real world. Being itself, buried and obscured by artifice both material and conceptual, the fundamental primordial gift whose rythyms are right, good, beautiful, true, is all but forgotten in lived experience. And yet, our 3 month old baby great granddaughter’s vocalizations say, without words, “Sursum corda!” ( We take heart!).
5 Likes
That’s because of production lag time. With the recent SCOTUS ruling that AI-generated content cannot have copyrights attached, studios will be less eager to use it at the level the unions were (rightly) worried about. They’ll still want the protections in writing, but that bit, they’ll have an easier time getting now. A lot of this is going to come down to ‘how much did the studios get made ahead of the strike that they’re trickling out, now?’
Take Disney, for example. The strike began on May 2nd, almost 4 months ago. Ahsoka just started hitting Disney+ this past week. Season 2 of Loki hits in October. Scripts and even shooting for both series was done well before May. But the lengthy post-production process (F/X, editing, etc) meant they were somewhat insulated from the strike’s effects.
So what Disney’s missing out on right now is having Rosario Dawson on the late-night circuit. Hiddleston will probably still do Graham Norton, because that’s the BBC. But there’s a strong chance he’ll go on there to not talk about Loki. Instead, he’ll go on and talk about… the strike.
The marketing machinery can’t use the actors it relies on. That’s why the marketing strategies are kind of… stupid… right now. The fourth Expendables movie drops next month, and the marketing is all about it being rated R again (E3 was PG-13 and it got a bit of bitching online). But no press junkets from Statham or Stallone. The machine’s coughing some, but it’s still running… for now.
But that’s not gonna be the case forever. As soon as they run out of the stuff they already had planned to trickle out, the picture changes. They probably have a few big-ticket items they got in the can long ahead of time for the Christmas season. But do they have enough for spring? Can they last into next summer? Doubtful. And when that crunch starts to get closer, shareholders are going to start asking ‘what the hell are you idiots doing?’
Whether the strike gets noticed… I dunno, how active is your YouTube feed?
I mean, sure, they’re not YouTube Top 10 or anything, but YouTubers like LegalEagle, CinemaTherapy, Joe Scott, Dominic Noble, Steve Shives, and others, have all addressed the strikes, with CinemaTherapy and Noble going so far as to say ‘Youtube creators have been asked not to engage with the studios’ material, so we’re not’.
Shives (whose content is mostly comic book and Star Trek stuff) is doing things like spending a month (so far) highlighting Star Trek episodes that apply to labor issues. He’s even gone so far as to do a video comparing Moody’s analysis of what giving the strikers everything would cost the studios ($600M/yr was the top end of their range) with the reported net Income of the ‘Big 5’ studios + Netflix in 2022 (~$22B).
Incidentally, that $600 million annual cost from Moody’s includes the Directors Guild deal the studios already settled. So the actual cost of the writers/actors strike would be less. And Moodys’ estimate is industry-wide, so it includes the costs borne by Apple and Amazon.
10 Likes
Here’s a personal anecdote: I used to be pro union, then I made my way (barely) into middle management at a nonprofit that unionized and saw first hand how corrupt and dishonest unions can be. Management holding a vote instead of voluntary recognition = loud public criticism against the org for “union busting”. Staff are cornered and given hard and heavily skewed sales pitches about the benefits of unionizing (yes there are benefits but there are also costs beyond just fees). People who control the union can manipulate the system to get better wages and policies that benefit themselves. They can use their position to damage “out” factions within the union. Unions can be like a cult, governed by all the dynamics of capitalism and politics that people hate. Would be curious the extent to which unions have harmed their own reputations through these kinds of dynamics.
2 Likes
My biggest disappointment with Biden has been his blocking the railroad strike.
4 Likes
Unions, like any other organization—and especially like any other organization that exists as a check on the corruption of other organization, must be strenuously policed against corruption. Ideally, this comes from within, but the only way to be sure it gets done is to have it done by a segregated population, either silo’d within the org (Inspector Generals, Internal Affairs divisions, etc) or by an outside auditor.
It’s not an issue of ‘are unions good or bad’, it’s an issue of ‘unions are full of people’.
12 Likes