Strike Thoughts
I’m taking a break from working on the novel to reflect about the ongoing writers strike. We really aren’t being unreasonable here, folks, and if you want to help us sending an email to the various big networks and studios stating your support for the writers will help. Think about this — they are offering us a one time flat feel of $250 dollars for an episode or a movie that will be downloaded in perpetuity, potentially millions of times while the studios get money each time and the writers, actors, directors get nothing.
Finally, the studios are losing _in a week_ what it would cost them to give us _all_ of our demands for the next three years. This isn’t about reading an equitable agreement, it’s about breaking the union. We can’t let that happen. Please support us.
Melinda
December 21st, 2007 at 7:22 am
I’m oddly ambivalent about this whole situation. Let me set the background: I don’t approve of labor unions or of strikes, as they exist in present society; they’re based on forcibly preventing willing workers from contracting with willing employers at individually chosen wage rates, and on forcibly preventing them from carrying out those contracts if their co-workers are refusing to do so, whether through legally imposed duties or through extralegal violence. (Anecdote: Back when I had a corporate job, some of my co-workers talked about having a union; I said that I wouldn’t willingly join a union, and one of them told me, “You could get your tires slashed.” This reflects, at least, a common attitude of sympathy for union vigilanteism, which I don’t share.) I have no objection to an employer’s choosing to deal with a union—rather than having this imposed unilaterally by a majority vote of employees—or to employees choosing to have a voluntary association to represent them; but I tend to envision myself in the position of the worker who is either compelled to support the union and work on terms negotiated by it, or excluded from working by not belonging to the union.
On the other hand, what your particular union is asking for in this case strikes me as perfectly reasonable, and I hope you get it. That old contract may have been fair when electronic media were a tiny fraction of the income from video works; it’s unreasonably small now that they’re becoming the dominant income stream. Given that royalties have been found to be a good way to motivate creative talent, in the long run I would expect firms that don’t pay royalties on electronically distributed content to find their talent pool shrinking—and if some firms don’t break ranks, conceivably the whole industry might be left with no decent writers. It strikes me that it’s time for a new set of terms to emerge. So if your strike succeeds, I expect it will both make me better off, as a media consumer, and make the industry healthier in the long run. I can’t wish for you to fail in this particular case. Indeed, I discuss my general sentiments at such length specifically to make it clear how persuasive your goals seem, and not to argue for my general views on labor law and ethics.
For comparison, in the very small field of game writing, Steve Jackson Games not only pays royalties on electronically published books as well as physically published books, but offers a higher royalty rate, reflecting the lower cost of producing pdfs. If anything, writing for electronic publication pays better per copy sold than writing for print publication! On the other hand, when my recent electronic title, the new edition of GURPS Supers, did well enough to justify a print edition, SJG did NOT say, “Well, you’ve gotten paid for the pdf, so here’s a quittance fee for hard copy rights.” The amounts of money involved are tiny compared to those in your industry, but the same general principles seem to make sense.
December 21st, 2007 at 8:54 am
I too grew up very ambivalent about unions. My father owned a company and employed about 140 people. Occasionally union organizers came around, and the employees always voted unanimously against unionizing. The reason — my father paid benefits that were higher then what the unions were getting from other companies in the same industry.
Then I grew up and realized that owners like my father are few and far between. Your argument that sic… preventing willing workers from contracting with willing employers at individually chosen wage rates… seems unrealistic when you have a single employee faced with a multi-national corporation. That single individual’s bargaining power is so low as to be non-existent. It’s the same reason we insist that a defendant has a lawyer to represent them. No individual should have to face the power and might of the state alone.
I’m a member of SFWA and a member of the WGA. I can tell you which one is preferable. The best SFWA can do for me is make me a loan from the emergency medical fund. With the WGA I have heath coverage. SFWA has a grievance committee that does good work, but it’s manned by volunteers. The WGA has lawyers who will do battle for me if my work is stolen. H. Beam Piper was reduced to eating the pigeons he captured and he died destitute. I have a pension.
Have there been abuses by unions? Of course. They, like corporations are run by human beings with all the good and bad that implies. But at least the united power of workers in your field making sure that nobody gets left behind gives you a chance of being treated equitably.
December 21st, 2007 at 10:09 am
I can second what Melinda says. I grew up in a management sided household and I remember calls in the middle of the night when the workers went on strike.
Then I grew up and became a freelance photographer and discovered just how badly slanted an “even playing field for bargaining could be.” Even where the law appeared absolutely clear (as in copyright rights), companies made demands for ownership and most people gave in. Not legal. Shouldn’t be enforceable. But most people don’t have the ability to fight it.
The most public example of this I can think about is the way Siegel and Schuster were treated with their creation “Superman.” It is so bad, I was able to do my big writing project in law school about it and it was later published by the Los Angeles Lawyer–the month after Jerry Siegel died, unfortunately. The property was essentially stolen from them for less than $150 and it took lawsuits (which they didn’t win) and a shaming by other creators (hand in hand with a revision of the Copyright Law) before they were able to obtain a small (it got better) stipend and CREDIT for Superman–in the late 1970s. As a result of this paper, my contracts professor said to me “I now realize that there really isn’t an even playing field for bargaining contracts.” That was really worth it to me, because my fellow photographers, illustrators, novelists, and so on have no right to bargain collectively and as corporations have turned into multi-national megaliths, freelance markets have disappeared and the corporations present one-size fits all, take it or leave it contracts where the corporations take everything and pay rates that equal old one-time rights.
By comparison, the WGA, which arose during a period where all writers were true employees (slaves) of the studio system, allows writers to collectively bargain. Yes, they gave in to the legal fiction that the employer is the owner of the copyright to their work which carries over today (unfortunately) to spec scripts, but they also know that there is a floor below which the Studios cannot take them. A few writers–and Melinda and I both know some of them personally–are in a position to get better deals today. But the vast majority of novices and journeymen writers do little better than the Minimum Basic Agreement which is at the core of this strike. For many of those writers, the issue is immediate–the script they are working on at a particular stage, because there is NO guarantee they will get to go on to the next step in the process, let alone a next script.
In all aspects of the arts, the willing buyer has every advantage over the willing seller. The only power the willing seller has is to say no to a bad deal. And that is what the WGA on behalf of its members at the end of October.
December 21st, 2007 at 2:00 pm
You’re right, Melinda. It’s all about breaking the union. And, just as union-busting was a big thing in the first half of the century when we had an industrial economy and the unions were all in manufacturing, now we’re getting the same thing in the information economy too. Making words ain’t a whole lot different from making steel.
December 22nd, 2007 at 3:02 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-v2zwKDggI
Anti-union rhetoric about workers and employers freely entering into contracts with one another is fine in theory, but history has shown that in real life it leads to sweatshops, child labor, hideous working conditions, and every other form of exploitation.
My father was International Longshoreman’s Association, my mother was ILGWU, and we were still poor enough to qualify for the projects. I shudder to think what our lives would have been like without their unions.
December 22nd, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Anti-union rhetoric about workers and employers freely entering into contracts with one another is fine in theory. . . .
You know, it’s all very well to talk about anti-union rhetoric, but I wasn’t making a public speech. I was making a comment explaining ethical concerns that I actually feel. I really am a libertarian, and my libertarian grows out of ethical concerns that have been important to me since I was in my early teens. They may not be your ethical concerns, but it strikes me as arrogant for you to dismiss any ethical position that you don’t share as “rhetoric.” It certainly does not encourage me to view your position more sympathetically.
I wasn’t trying to pick a fight, and the other people who responded to me didn’t try to give me one, which I consider praiseworthy. The primary point of my comments, in fact, was to say that despite an inclination to reject unions and their goals out of hand, in this particular case I looked at what this particular union is asking for and I thought it was entirely reasonable. Your comments haven’t caused me to change my mind on this. But they might have, because they have a certain combative tone that makes me feel the impulse to grab a bigger figure of speech and throw it back. Is that really the reaction that you want to inspire?
Let’s not fight. Take the good will and go in peace.
December 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 am
Dear William,
I didn’t read George’s post in the same way you did, but I can see how it might have hit you that way. This is one of the drawbacks to the internet — no body language, no vocal tone to give us our cues.
Knowing George as I do, I can assure you that his comment was not meant as a attack on you, or a desire to pick a fight.
Thank you for looking at all the facts and continuing to offer us support.
December 24th, 2007 at 1:19 am
I don’t believe that I said anything personal or inflammatory in that previous post. Have “picking a fight” and “having a disagreement” become synonymous?
Because I do disagree, and very strongly, when you talk about your inclination to “reject unions and their goals out of hand.” Even if you do make an exception for the WGA in the present strike.
I’m glad you support that writers, but saying that what this particular union is asking for is “entirely reasonable” implies that what other unions have asked for in the past was somehow not entirely reasonable. That’s certainly not the way I see things.
The things the ILA and the ILGWU fought for were entirely reasonable, as I see it. Things like a living wage, safe working conditions, health care, pensions.
To a large extent it was the American Labor movement, and their success in achieving such goals, that gave this country such a large and stable middle class… a middle class that is now eroding as the gap between the rich and poor grows wider.
What is UNreasonable, from my point of view, is the truly obscene amount of money corporate CEOs are getting these days, with their stock options and golden parachutes. These days a lot of big corporations — and not just in the entertainment industry — like to cry poormouth and say they “can’t afford” to keep paying heath care for their employees, even when the salaries and bonuses of their CEOs and CFOs and vice-presidents keep escalating higher and higher and higher.
I am sorry if you found the word “rhetoric” offensive. What I was trying to suggest was that the arguments you put forward in your first post — all of which I have heard before, from both libertarians and conservatives — were abstract and theoretical in nature. The link I posted, the famous ILGWU song, was intended to be my rebuttal. Sure, the song is hokey, but it is also very human, and the lyrics make a very basic point about what unions are about.
My father worked on the docks for more that twenty years. It was hard, difficult, hazardous work, and in the end the hazards did catch up with him, when an accident on the job sliced off half his foot. Because of the union, his medical bills were taken care of, he was able to draw disability, and the rent continued to get paid. If the same thing had happened fifty years earlier, before the International Longshoreman’s Union organized the dockworkers, he would simply have been cut loose and left to fend for himself. “Hey, this guy has only half a foot, let’s hire one of these young strong guys instead.”
What do you do when your ethical concerns come up against real people, really suffering?
December 24th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Okay, All,
I let George’s post go through because I think he’s making some interesting points that are worth discussing. But let’s all treat each other with kindness and respect. I hate flame wars and I will start deleting posts if I think they’re getting too hot or too personal.
So, George’s final question is where I finally broke with Libertarianism. I embraced that philosophy for many years when I was young and strong, and hadn’t been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and I thought the world was totally my oyster.
My final parting of the ways came when my mother was dying of lung cancer, and I found myself faced with a completely broken health care system where I had to scream abuse at insurance companies to get her into the hospital when she was desperately ill after chemo because the doctors were terrified of the insurance company and the privately owned hospitals because they got punished financially when they recommended care.
Then my mom got thrown out of hospice because she didn’t die fast enough. I tried to hire round the clock care, but it was impossible. Basically Carl and I were going to have to quit working, and try to do shifts to care for her. It was impossible because we had to work to pay our own bills. I finally found a nursing home. (That was a whole other story, most of these places weren’t fit to house my dog), but the fees were so high it was going to bankrupt my mother within a few months. Fortunately she had the good luck to die within 30 hours of being admitted to this place, before we were back to quitting our jobs/work to care for her once the money ran out.
We’ve had a fundamental cultural change where we don’t have large extended families that encompass several generations and where the very young and the very old can have care. Since that societal model has broken down we need a new one, and society, communities, government has stepped in to replace that “Kith and Kin” system.
It’s not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got, and we have to work to support it. The idea I shouldn’t offer some support to the society that supports me seems unfair and unworkable. I drive on roads built by the state, there are police and fire departments, etc. etc. I think a lot about this because it’s hard to write that check every April. I guess I just want a society that looks out for it’s members — especially the weakest among us.
December 26th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Some things work with a purely capitalist model (commodities trading, retailing), others don’t (health care, education). The mistake that gets made is when proponents of one system or another insist their model works for everything. Nothing works for everything; a healthy society needs a mix of systems to function properly.
January 6th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Just to provide closure for this, I want to say that I don’t think I can respond further to the various comments without debating the subject of unions (or, even more broadly, the subject of capitalism versus socialism)—and that wasn’t what I came here to do. I came here to say that I think that what this particular union is asking for is justified, and I hope you get it. I hope it’s clear that I still do so.