Creative Class on Strike
Hollywood and the news media are roiled in labor disputes.
A little over a month ago, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, citing changes wrought by streaming services and potential changes coming from artificial intelligence that had disrupted their profession. Not only is that dispute still unresolved, but they have also been joined by others.
Yesterday, SAG-AFTRA members overwhelmingly authorized a strike for television and theatrical actors over similar concerns.
In a powerful show of solidarity, SAG-AFTRA members have voted 97.91% in favor of a strike authorization ahead of negotiations of the TV/Theatrical Contracts, with nearly 65,000 members casting ballots for a voting percentage of 47.69% of eligible voters.
The strike authorization does not mean the union is calling a strike. SAG-AFTRA begins negotiations on June 7 with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The affirmative vote on the authorization empowers the union’s National Board to initiate a strike if the AMPTP won’t reach a fair deal with the union. The current SAG-AFTRA TV/Theatrical Contracts expire at midnight on June 30, 2023.
“The strike authorization votes have been tabulated and the membership joined their elected leadership and negotiating committee in favor of strength and solidarity. I’m proud of all of you who voted as well as those who were vocally supportive, even if unable to vote. Everyone played a part in this achievement,” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher. “Together we lock elbows and in unity we build a new contract that honors our contributions in this remarkable industry, reflects the new digital and streaming business model and brings ALL our concerns for protections and benefits into the now! Bravo SAG-AFTRA, we are in it to win it.”
“I could not be more pleased with this response from the membership. This overwhelming yes vote is a clear statement that it’s time for an evolution in this contract. As we enter what may be one of the most consequential negotiations in the union’s history, inflation, dwindling residuals due to streaming, and generative AI all threaten actors’ ability to earn a livelihood if our contracts are not adapted to reflect the new realities. This strike authorization means we enter our negotiations from a position of strength, so that we can deliver the deal our members want and deserve,” said SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland.
This comes on the heels of a deal reached this weekend between studios and the Directors Guild of America.
The union that represents thousands of movie and television directors reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios on a three-year contract early Sunday morning, a deal that ensures labor peace with one major guild as the writers’ strike enters its sixth week.
The Directors Guild of America announced in a statement overnight that it had made “unprecedented gains,” including improvements in wages and streaming residuals (a type of royalty), as well as guardrails around artificial intelligence.
“We have concluded a truly historic deal,” Jon Avnet, the chair of the D.G.A.’s negotiating committee, said in the statement. “It provides significant improvements for every director, assistant director, unit production manager, associate director and stage manager in our guild.”
The deal prevents the doomsday Hollywood scenario of three major unions striking simultaneously. On Wednesday, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, will begin negotiations for a new contract with SAG-AFTRA, the guild that represents actors; their current agreement expires on June 30. SAG-AFTRA is in the process of collecting a strike authorization vote.
The entertainment industry will be looking closely at what the directors’ deal — and the actors’ negotiations — will mean for the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers. More than 11,000 writers went on strike in early May, bringing many Hollywood productions to a halt.
Over the last month, the writers have enjoyed a wave of solidarity from other unions that W.G.A. leaders have said they have not seen in generations. Whether a directors’ deal — or a possible actors’ deal later this month — undercuts that solidarity is now an open question.
W.G.A. leaders had been signaling to writers late last week that a deal with the directors could be in the offing, a strategy that it said was part of the studio “playbook” to “divide and conquer.” The writers and the studios left the bargaining table on May 1 very far apart on the major issues, and have not resumed negotiations.
My initial reaction was that if the directors, writers, and actors all had similar grievances, they could essentially take their ball and go home. That pretty much represents the main talent necessary to make films and television programs. Why not just band together and cut out the middle man? Of course, United Artists tried that more than a century ago with middling success.
It’s not just the entertainment industry, either. The reporters for nation’s largest newspaper conglomerate have also walked out.
Hundreds of journalists are walking off the job Monday and Tuesday at two dozen newspapers owned by the Gannett company. They’re protesting working conditions at their papers and launching a lacerating attack on Gannett’s chief executive.
The newspapers, in seven states, include The Arizona Republic, The Austin American Statesman, The Florida Times-Union, The Asbury Park Press and others. The journalists and representatives at their union, the NewsGuild, accuse Gannett of undercompensating them for years. And, they note, they are now being asked to do more than ever.
According to Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild, corporate executives have eliminated 54% of the combined workforce of Gannett Co. since it merged with GateHouse Media four years ago to make a newspaper behemoth. Financing for the merger loaded up the new Gannett Co. with debt that led to hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts.
The walkout is said to be the largest labor action in Gannett’s history. Workers are focusing their ire on Mike Reed, the former GateHouse chief who now leads the new Gannett Co. The staff demanded that shareholders at an annual meeting Monday morning cast a vote of no confidence in Reed’s leadership. The meeting, however, was brief with no questions taken by Reed, according to Schleuss, who said he attended the meeting.
While we’ve certainly seen strikes by actors, writers, reporters, teachers, and the like the pace seems much higher than in the past. There’s a lot of economic disruption happening all at once and it’s impacting people who previously had considerably more bargaining leverage.
Historically, labor unions—and the threat of strikes—were the province of relatively unskilled workers. People doing repetitive tasks on an assembly line didn’t need considerable education or training; they were just bodies. Because they were essentially interchangeable and imminently replaceable, they were ripe for exploitation. Collective bargaining was the remedy: while replacing any particular worker was easy, replacing all of them at once was difficult. Even more so once Federal labor laws made it harder to fire workers during labor disputes.
Applying that same rubric to highly skilled workers always struck me as odd. The sort of folks we’re talking about here aren’t interchangeable cogs in a machine. Some directors, writers, directors, and reporters are far more valuable to the enterprise than others, so bargaining collectively makes little sense for them. It does, of course, make sense for those on the lower end of that scale—those still trying to get their start in the business or those who are simply less talented and thus more easily replaced.
Things are apparently so bad in the movie industry right now that even the likes of Tom Hanks—who’s surely doing pretty well—are calling attention to it.
Tom Hanks has weighed in on the Writers Guild strike, saying that “like minds” are going to have to come together for the “common good” of the industry. Promoting his new book on CBS Mornings, Hanks was asked by co-host Gayle King about the strike, which is now in its second week. [The report is from May 9]
“The entire industry is at a crossroads, and everybody knows it,” he said. “The financial motor has to be completely redefined. And there is some degree of pie here that is going to have to be equitably distributed by the people who are responsible for the content – not the folks who make the deals for the content, the folks who actually make it.
“And first up is the writers,” he continued. “We do not have scripts without writers. And up next is the directors. We do not have filmed stories without directors, and the actors are coming up as well. So there is going to have to be some sit-down. And for the common good of the arts and sciences, and the business of show, like minds are going to have to come down and be equitable, and believe it or not, some type of win-win situation.”
I don’t even know what that looks like. One hopes that the resolution with the Directors Guild serves as a model for the others rather than as a wedge between competing interests.
With publicly traded companies, “owners” are investors who care only about the financial balance sheet and stock market performance. And management (at least in the large companies) are evaluated and rewarded on how much gross revenue they can keep out of the hands of the actual people creating or manufacturing. I’m not complaining, that’s the way it is and it is the way it’s going to be. But the way for labor to get their share is to unionize and then fight for every dollar. I’ve come across truly terrible union situations (UAW, whoever repped the NYTimes pressmen in the early 2000’s, whoever reps Caterpillar employees) but still remain strongly pro-union. Investors add nothing (once the IPO is over, trading yields no benefit to the company). Management are just rent seeking bookkeepers, for the most part. And private equity companies are parasites. If the people who actually produce things are going to get a share, they have to fight for it as hard as anyone else in the mix.
The people who actually produce things could go out, get investors and make a product then they would have the profits. Instead, they want someone else to put up the money and take the risk of no return while they get a steady paycheck. The investors provide their “old labor”, i.e., capital, to those who create opportunities for writers, directors, actors to exchange their productive talent for money, i.e. wages. Now maybe there should be more opportunity for the latter to forego guaranteed wages for a slice of the net profits.
Basically the difference between the WGA and DGA negotiations was that the DGA’s disagreements were just haggling over the percentages on everything, like “how to weight overseas subscribers for streaming vs. domestic subscribers for purposes of residuals”, but the WGA’s problems are much more fundamental in terms of how shows are developed, greenlit, written, produced, etc., which in turn was caused by streaming having different needs from a broadcast/cable channel. This was because the streaming services needed tons of content to draw in viewers, while meanwhile networks often only had a slot or two each year for a new “prestige” series.
This directly affects me. I haven’t drawn a paycheck since my series ended on Jan. 25th, as most new productions were shut down in anticipation of the strike. I expect the strike to last well into September, if not Thanksgiving. I doubt I’ll be seeing any paychecks until October or November at the earliest.
I support the WGA’s strike action, but only to a point. I believe a deal would be done today if the WGA moved off of their position on “Mandatory Minimum” staffing on television series. That’s the big one that’s never going to fly, and as long as that is a deal point the WGA sticks to, the strike will not end. I believe the AMPTP will move up on compensation, residuals, and will agree to a framework to deal with AI as it becomes more prevalent. But mandatory minimum staffing will not fly, nor should it.
Professor Scott Galloway had a great piece in his blog, explaining the structural issues facing Hollywood today, and film and TV writers specifically.
https://www.profgalloway.com/struck/
Writers are complaining about shortened seasons, where series have 6-10 episodes rather than the former standard of 13-24 episodes. The days of the 24 episode series order are over, except for a few franchises (Law and Order, Chicago Fire/Med/etc, CSI, etc). Those days aren’t coming back.
The reality is that viewing entertainment is changing in ways the gatekeepers cannot control. The average 20. year old watches almost zero network television. They stream only what they want, when they want, and they watch most of their content on You Tube, Tik-Tok, and Instagram. They don’t give a shit what CBS, NBC, or the CW has to offer in real time. The most viewed television events are sporting events, not comedies or dramas. Even “hit” shows don’t get near the audience of a medium level You-Tube star. People are creating their own content, and their veiwership dwarfs “television”. In the last 9 days, someone named “Mr. Beast”, has accumulated 107 million views of his latest You Tube video. HBO was happy on Sunday night with 980,000 viewers for it’s big new show “The Idol” (of which there will be a total of six episodes, season 1). The WGA has to come to grips with a changing entertainment landscape. Some of the asks will not fly because the larger business can no longer support it.
I hope it ends sooner rather than later, but I expect it won’t. I’d love to be wrong.
@JKB:
You have no freaking idea how entertainment production works, so, please, STFU or get yourself educated before you spout nonsense. And what you wrote shows a complete ignorance of film and television finance and production.
So stop it.
@EddieInCA:
I agree. This is a dumb ask. If you’re doing 8 episodes you don’t need a dozen writers. But writers should be getting a bump when a series succeeds, there has to be some sense of investment. That at a minimum would require streamers to start providing real data. Even in the far more free lance world of publishing you get royalties (and more-or-less-honest statements) and performance bonuses.
@JKB:
This just doesn’t reflect the reality of 99% of the large publicly traded companies. Sure, at some point in the murky past a visionary entrepreneur convinced investors to take a gamble on a new business, but for IBM or even Intel, those people are dead and buried. The current shareholders are not that type of investor and if they buy stock the company doesn’t receive one dime of additional investment. And the people who run the companies aren’t visionary entrepreneurs looking to create the next big thing, they are employees who are paid to maximize profits and/or share price and the easiest way to do that is by rent seeking and cutting wages and squeezing vendors, not by chasing the next revolution. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this, but to talk about, say Hewlett Packard’s current shareholders or management team as if they were the same as the initial venture capitalists who funded David Packard and Bill Hewlett out of their garage is ludicrous.
Wow. Someone really did a number on you to make you think that way. They did the same number on a lot of people, making them think “oh, I’m white collar, unions are for blue collar people”
Meanwhile, teachers unions exist. And police unions. Writers unions…
I’m not quite going to say that if you have a boss you should have a union, but that’s closer to true than not.
You — yes, you — have basically no negotiating power with your employer in almost every industry. There’s a tiny bit around the edges of pay, but vacation time, working conditions, mandatory overtime even though you are salaried… no real negotiating power as an individual, all of that is presented as “take it or leave it” parts of the job.
Rant time!
When I was working for Amazon, they would shove software engineers into “high density seating” where desks are in long lines, directly touching on both sides (and those desks were smaller). Just finding a free bathroom stall was a nightmare because of overcrowding.
They would require engineers to be on-call for services, providing 24/7 support, at an interval determined by team size with no additional pay if they are on-call every other week because people leave.
There were other things. So many. No individual employee can change those policies.
They needed a union. They never got one, because everyone there thinks the same way you do, and nearly everyone thinks they negotiate salary and stock better than average.
A union could have gotten more bathrooms and a minimum square footage per engineer. And a reasonable amount of vacation. Pay for on-call hours (which is mandated in Europe, by the way)
You might think that Amazon does pretty well by the employees to get so many to come there, any the stock is/was doing great, but the average engineer leaves after 18 months because of the conditions, and the stock vesting schedule is back heavy, so they get literally 5% of their grant. Every new hire thinks that they will be better than most, and that they’re tougher… morons.
Meanwhile, the entire Seattle tech sector is made up of former Amazon employees, brought to Seattle from across the country and world — Amazon burned through the local engineers long ago. Other big tech companies set up offices here to hire the former Amazons, and there are lots of startups, and a major housing crisis… all because Amazon cannot hold onto engineers for more than 18 months.
The lack of a union there has impacted the entire local economy and hurt basically every worker in every industry. I have no idea how people are supposed to buy a home now, or even rent on the median income in Seattle.
Ok, rant done. Time to get coffee and go to my PT appointment.
@Gustopher:
Good point and just to add on: … baseball player unions, football, basketball, airline pilots, etc.
@Gustopher:
Teacher and police unions seem to be quite effective. If by writers, though, you mean book writers, there is no union of which I’m aware other than PEN or the Authors Guild, which do what they can, but won’t get writers in general a bigger advance. Your best bet is still a powerhouse agent working on your behalf.
@EddieInCA:
Thanks for the inside-baseball explanation, very useful.
@Gustopher:
This is historically how it works, and much of labor law is still stuck in the 1930’s as far as who can join a union and who can’t. Modern workplaces have blurred the once brighter line between “workers” and “management.”
IMO there’s a fundamental difference between protecting workers from the vagaries of capitalism and the right to fight for a share of profits vs. extracting rents from the taxpaying public while also promoting a lack of accountability for civil servants.
@JKB:
Because, as we all know, there are no barriers to entry or economies of scale in doing these things…
Exactly what risk do you think management is taking here?
You are aware that most wealth is inherited, not earned, right?
Sheesh. I could write a better reflexive robber baron chatbot app than JKB is. Complete with von Mises quotations.
@Andy:
FWIW I see a big difference between teachers’ unions and police unions here. It’s hard to find instances of police unions fighting genuinely abusive work conditions or standing up for equal treatment of employees. They truly are purely anti-accountability. Teachers’ unions, while they sometimes end up promoting lack of accountability, are at least doing it from a legitimate objection to arbitrary, biased, and counterproductive performance measures, gender bias, and absurdly low pay* and crappy working conditions given the alleged importance of the work. It’s not just filthy capitalists who abuse their workforce.
*Look at the median, not the average. Seniority-based compensation is where most publicly funded jobs end up, to the detriment of all, but it’s the natural end state of trying to stamp out favoritism and bias in an underfunded environment.
@DrDaveT:
I see teachers vs police union as the same dog with different fleas. Like FDR, I’m generally opposed to public employee unions.
@Andy:
MERS and the common cold are both respiratory viruses. Degree matters.
It might be useful, in this case, to figure out exactly why teachers’ unions have not been as utterly toxic as police unions, despite their common “employees of local governments” nature. If we could make police unions merely as bad as the NEA and its local equivalents, that would be a huge win.
(As for the blanket “I’m generally opposed to public employee unions”, I mostly hear that from people who have never been public employees and who explicitly don’t trust government. Which is bizarre; what alternative mechanism for employee protection do you propose? Or do you believe that public employees should have no protections and no rights?)
If it’s odd for white collar, skilled workers to form a union for purposes of collective bargaining, how degree of weird is it then for the owners and upper management of movie and TV studios to form the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers?
@Kathy:
Efficiency. Back in the day, the unions would have to negotiate a contract with each individual company, setting up wildly disparate deals. Small, lower level companies didn’t have the cash or cache’ that Warner Bros, or Paramount, or Disney had, so they would negotiate their own deals, at a smaller price. And those films or TV series that were independently financed had to negotiate their own deals as well. To this day, this is still the case with some companies. HBO, for example, has their own term deal with the IA (IATSE), which means all their out of town shows are filmed under the HBO/Cinemax contract, which, surprisingly, pays less than some of the regular out of town ASA (Area Standards Agreement) rates for crew.
While the AMPTP was originally formed in 1924, the current iteration was created in 1982 and has handled negotiations with the guilds since then.
Sure, but also the province of million-dollar ball players. Also the province of anyone in a situation where there is an asymmetric power balance between a worker and management.
@DrDaveT: police unions fight for wages, vacation, benefits, working conditions and favorable disciplinary proceedings. Like every other union.
The problem is that when both labor and management want to hide problems, you end up perverting accountability with respect to performance (at least with respect to the “try not to commit too much violence” aspect of performance)
There’s also the complication that some police performance problems are literally crimes (assault, murder, etc)
@Andy: FDR was wrong about public sector unions — with the exception of police unions, they have never shown a level of influence to corrupt the political process.
Police unions and “tough on crime” politicians end up too closely aligned. And a slowdown or work-stoppage of police will often have a very oversized impact on the politicians. And, they provide a needed counterbalance to empower the workers.
Police unions are at least a bit out of whack, so I would favor reform there. I think reform on the areas where performance problems intersect with illegal behavior is an are that needs to be rethought.
If the reforms work great, then we can talk about applying them to teachers unions.
But, most public sector unions — teachers, firefighters, nurses, etc — work just fine, and don’t corrode the political process. At least, right now.
@DrDaveT:
I spent most of my working life working for the federal government, first in the military directly and then later as a civil servant. Intelligence personnel aren’t allowed to unionize. I never really understood the complicated reasons why some in the civil service could unionize while others couldn’t.
Secondly, the lack of unionization among most federal employees does not mean they have “no protections and no rights.” Only about 10% of US workforce is currently unionized, does that mean 90% of workers have no protections or rights? Clearly not.
On the contrary, I think they do corrode the political process, and for reasons that FDR saw back in the 1930’s.
There is a huge difference in the motives of managers of private, for-profit firms and the managers of government employees who have no profit motive and instead exist to operationalize and implement the policies of the people’s elected representatives.
What, exactly, is the threat that public sector unions are protecting their members against? The vagaries of the voting public? The taxpayer?
In the private sector, a strike punishes the firm’s ability to make money and run the business and it’s intended to prevent the exploitation of workers to generate more profits for management and the firm.
In the public sector, a strike punishes the people – crime victims for police and children and their parents for teachers. Profit doesn’t enter into it.
IMO, public employee unions can still exist but should not be allowed to strike over pay and benefits or policy. Public unions have no authority to wrest money from the taxpayer, therefore, their advocacy for additional pay and benefits comes at the expense of other areas of government spending and especially future spending via deferred compensation. And as long as government services are a de facto monopoly, those services should be decided by the representatives of the people and not be tied to collective bargaining demands, which are inherently undemocratic.
The latter few years have been a good illustration of this for both police and teacher’s unions.
Anyway, I think one of the problems with unionization generally in the US is that it’s still stuck in the early 20th-century paradigm of “workers” vs “management.” That binary paradigm doesn’t work very well a hundred years later, but it still is the fundamental underpinning of existing law that is entrenched and extremely difficult to change.
@Andy: “IMO there’s a fundamental difference between protecting workers from the vagaries of capitalism and the right to fight for a share of profits vs. extracting rents from the taxpaying public while also promoting a lack of accountability for civil servants.”
When you guys go after police unions, I will believe you.
@JKB: “The people who actually produce things could go out, get investors and make a product then they would have the profits. Instead, they want someone else to put up the money”
Isn’t “getting investors” exactly the same as having “someone else put up the money”?
The WGA was founded in the 1930s. Maybe you could find some book written back then to explain it to you.
@EddieInCA: ” I believe the AMPTP will move up on compensation, residuals, and will agree to a framework to deal with AI as it becomes more prevalent.”
Disagree entirely. The studios are not budging on AI, because it’s of a piece with slashing employment. The goal is to have first drafts written by AI, and then hire a writer on a gig basis to do a “polish.”
The minimum staffing thing isn’t featherbedding, it’s existential. Wonder if you would have felt differently if the studios were insisting that the duties of UPM, ADs, and PAs were all to be done by one person.
@Michael Reynolds: “This is a dumb ask. ”
With all due respect, Michael, you don’t know what you’re talking about here. Writers don’t actually just write — we are the producers who run the show. And that means you need writers in the room, writers on the set, writers in casting, writers in post-production. What the studios are trying to do here is fundamentally change the way TV shows are run, taking away all the control from writers and then keeping it for themselves.
It’s really okay that you don’t know this — you have yet to work on a TV show and your own writing is a solitary act. But please don’t use that ignorance as an excuse to parrot corporate talking points.
@Andy: “Like FDR, I’m generally opposed to public employee unions.”
Just wondering, how are teachers supposed to improve their pay or working conditions? Or because the taxpayer foots the bill, they should all get whatever scraps local government chooses to toss them?
@Andy: “Only about 10% of US workforce is currently unionized, does that mean 90% of workers have no protections or rights? Clearly not.”
Seriously? Literally any non-union worker can be fired at any time for any or no reason. They can be scheduled any way management wants, they can be forced to sign ludicrous non-compete clauses to keep them from leaving their jobs. Yes, it is technically true that they completely lack protections or rights — they can’t be required to supply their daughters as sexual partners for the bosses, for instance. But except in such absurd extremes, the only protections are the whims of the owners.
@Andy: “Public unions have no authority to wrest money from the taxpayer, therefore, their advocacy for additional pay and benefits comes at the expense of other areas of government spending and especially future spending via deferred compensation.”
So basically teachers should be forced to accept whatever scraps we choose to throw them. Of course, that’s going to lead to qualified teachers leaving the profession and only those who are otherwise unemployable teaching your kids — as is happening in Florida right now.
But better we destroy education than let those parasites get a raise, right?
@EddieInCA:
In fairness, that is his general MO on most (all?) topics.
@wr:
A. We will have to agree to disagree. I’ve done several low budget series where I was Line Producer and UPM. On those shows, the crew is so small, there was no need for a UPM, so I did both jobs. On one show, I also could have done the 1st AD job as well, but was precluded from doing that by the DGA, because no matter how small the shows were, I (and the studio I worked for), insisted they be full union productions. We could have done the series non-union easily, but chose not to because I do believe in the union model. I think certain the DGA minimum staffing requirements are asinine as well, forcing companies to hire people they don’t need on a particular show.
@Barry:
Who is “you guys” exactly? I thought I made it perfectly clear, but let me spell it out for you – I am not a fan of police unions either and don’t make an exception for my opposition to public sector unions for police or any other group.
@wr:
The same as any other non-unionized group of employees. Teachers can form an association, advocate for the voters, and lobby like other interest groups.
There are protections built into the law. You may not think the protections are sufficient, and that’s a political debate we can have, but they are there.
And public employees generally have much greater protections. Again, the absence of a profit motive matters here. In my federal civil service job (not unionized), I could not be fired or laid off for cause, and even then, there is a bureaucracy that gives employees lots of chances to oppose negative actions.
I may have told this story before, but there was a woman in the finance section who kept coming into work drunk. The only way they eventually got her fired was having the policed on standby to get her for a DUI on federal property when she was sent home for being drunk. Again, not unionized.
Also, as I pointed out earlier, I do not oppose private-sector unions, although I think the law and rules for private sector unions need serious reform for the reasons mentioned earlier.
You make a wrong assumption that teachers, somehow uniquely, will be screwed and given “scraps” if they don’t have a union. Considering that non-unionized public employees do not get screwed, I think your supposition is incorrect.
As noted earlier, I would probably not get rid of public employee unions entirely but would limit their ability to strike. For teacher’s unions specifically, as long as universal education remains largely a public-funded monopoly, then the government has an obligation to ensure that service is consistently provided and not held hostage by strikes or threats of strikes. The same thing goes for policing – law enforcement is a government monopoly and an essential service for all the people that should not be held hostage by union actions.
@EddieInCA: “We will have to agree to disagree.”
Until the moment you and I are asked to sit down and work out a strike settlement, I’m okay with that.
@Andy: “In my federal civil service job (not unionized), I could not be fired or laid off for cause”
That would be fine if teachers were employed by the federal government under the civil service statutes. But they’re not. They’re employed by local schoolboards that have often recently been taken over by insane MAGA freaks and states often run by governments that pass laws to jail them if they teach anything that, say, Ron DeSantis doesn’t feel helps his campaign.
Oh, and by the way, Trump and several other Republican presidential candidates have vowed to wipe out civil service protections if they get into office.
But you go on trusting that Republican governments will look out for their workers. Let me know how that works out for you.
@wr:
I trust the democratic process. I do not believe that process should be held hostage to public employees, no matter how noble their claims appear to be. In other words, if you want to give me a binary choice between union interests and democratic accountability, I’ll pick the latter every time.
Well, labor unions historically were initially the province of relatively skilled workers (not lawyers or engineers, but also not unskilled factory workers – it was more professions like watchmakers or weavers, the skilled manual workers), the “craft unionism” thing; the mass/industrial unionism, supported more by the unskilled workers, is a more recent thing.
@Andy:
I read the entire rest of the comments before responding, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. The idea that federal and local governments are equivalent for purposes of this discussion is laughable.
To a first approximation, all the same ones as private sector unions. Which of those do you think employees of local governments don’t need, just because they are employed by the local government?
@Andy:
If collective bargaining is an act of terrorism for public employees, why isn’t it also for private employees? You seem to see a sharp distinction here, but from the employee side it’s invisible. Can you elucidate this alleged difference?
@Miguel Madeira:
I don’t think that’s right. What’s your source for this?
Are you thinking of guilds rather than unions?
@James Joyner:
I think that in USA the AFL organized basically skilled workers and was created before the IWW and the CIO (who organized more unskilled workers)
And the article “Trade Union” in Encyclopedia Britannica says:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/trade-union
@Miguel Madeira: That’s useful. I see this more as an attempt at forming a cartel to keep prices up rather than as what I think of as a labor union, but maybe I misunderstand the history. I think of a union as workers banding together against a specific employer or a small group of common employers (e.g., the United Auto Workers).