COVID has given labor an opportunity. We’ve seen workers organizing, we’ve seen them marching, we’ve seen them threatening to strike. Occasionally, we’ve seen them actually strike. Between 2021 and 2022, strikes and work-stoppages increased by 50% across the U.S. Empire. The pandemic has not been the same for all parts of the population. Bosses, managers, and investors were relatively unharmed by the spread of the disease; they could isolate themselves in their suburban palaces or their California mansions and do whatever modicum of work they needed to contribute by remote viewing. These many wizards of Oz had no need to step, personally, into the viral fray.
But workers have been dying — this is no secret. We “essential workers,” the workers without-whom-which there is no production, there is no profit, and there is no society, could not do our work by crystal ball. We had to go to the workplaces, teeming with danger, and watch as our colleagues, our customers, and our companions were cut down by COVID. The danger, the death, faced by workers, has made us that much more precious, that much more valuable. We’ve all seen the unstable rollercoaster of the U.S. stock markets — with their investments at such enormous risk (Who will buy the products being produced when everyone is dying? Who can afford to leave their houses and spend money on entertainment?), the capitalists are weaker now than they have been at any time in the past century. The mere whiff of work-stoppage can drive a rout on the market and force Senators and Congresspeople into emergency session to protect their money and the money of the ruling class.
So labor is at a crossroads. Workers have a more advantageous position in this country today than we’ve had since we were fighting the Coal Wars or throughout the strikes and Unemployment Councils of the early 1930s. Over a third of the work stoppages in 2022 were in the hospital subsector. Hit hard by COVID and without relief, this included Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. and the 15,000 nurses of Twin Cities Hospital Group in Minnesota. A quarter of the strikes occurred in public education; 1,000 teachers at Brookline Public Schools in Boston and 4,500 teachers and professionals in Columbus City Schools in Ohio, and the 48,000 workers at the University of California. But labor laws don’t protect all striking workers equally, and those they do protect are only protected from some things, at some times.
Earlier this year, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents all film, television, radio, and online media writers, entered into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — which is, in essence, a “producers union,” a collective bargaining association that represents 350 U.S. film and T.V. companies in bargaining with the WGA, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the Directors Guild of America, and the American Federation of Musicians. These negotiations led up to the expiration of the WGA’s Minimum Basic Agreement on May 1, 2023.
The WGA had several basic propositions on the table: an agreement that “artificial intelligence” tools like ChatGPT would never be used to produce entire screenplays or replacing writing work, minimum staffing requirements to ensure that writers are granted healthcare benefits, and, perhaps most importantly, an agreement that writers should be paid when their work is streamed online.
At 12:01 a.m. PDT on May 2, 2023, the WGA went on strike, taking the work of more than 11,000 writers with them.
On June 30, 2023, the agreement between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP expires. In advance of that date, the actor’s guild has voted, by an overwhelming 98% to 2%, to authorize a strike.
Writer Bill Lawrence, showrunner of the Apple+ show Shrinking, claims that “this will become a business that you can only do if your parents are well-off enough to help pay your rent and support you while you get to a point that you can support yourself.” That is increasingly already the case. Jonah J. Lalas, a WGA-employed lawyer and former SIEU organizer, wrote that “If the studios win, only the rich, white, and the privileged will be able to tell [] stories [on television].”
But this is already by and large how the industry operates. “Anyone who knows with confidence they can eat and sleep for years to come without having to generate income to cover it has a lot more freedom (time and energy) to write and learn and network,” commented an anonymous Redditor in 2021. The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms that a “college degree in English, communications, or journalism is generally required for a salaried position as a writer.” The average earnings of a WGA writer each year was $260,000 in 2021. The guild minimum was $6,967 per week in 2019-20, or $83,609 each year. For someone from a poor or working class family to become a WGA writer is not the usual course of business, and those who do are compensated at a rate far above the median wage of workers in the U.S., which is a mere $56,420.
Although the writers have very legitimate points of contention around their labor expectations and the increasing unreliability of their employment, and have every right to bargain for better conditions, every worker should have the right to bargain as well. But the relative ease of the WGA strike so far is not the norm. In addition to their relatively high incomes, the writers face less repressive force preventing them from organizing.
Writers are allowed to strike. Healthcare workers are sometimes allowed to strike. Dock workers are allowed to strike. We should, of course, stand with striking workers in whatever productive fields they occupy; only those whose work materially furthers the oppression of our siblings across the globe — the Raytheon missile artisans, CIA intelligence goons, rabid-dog police agencies, and so forth — deserve our scorn. Everyone else deserves our solidarity.
Yet, not every industry is treated the same. Writers deserve and expect our solidarity when they strike. They must also give their solidarity to us when we fight for the improvement of our working conditions. They must stand up and say no, they must use their cultural cache and power, their economic power, everything they have at their command, and decry the treatment of their sibling-laborers. Who is not permitted to strike?
Firstly, those workers who haven’t unionized can’t avail themselves of the right to strike. Although U.S. law “recognizes” a right to strike even in un-unionized workplaces, there is almost no way to enforce that right. If an un-unionized workforce attempts to strike, those workers will find, the following morning, that they have all been fired and replaced. Any attempt to form a picket line will be physically dispersed by the police. Of all the workers in the U.S. Empire, only 10.1% are unionized. That means 90% of workers cannot strike. To prevent its workforce from becoming unionized and being able to effectively make use of the “right” to strike, corporations will do just about anything, including bribing government officials (for instance, Amazon bribed the town of Bessemer to place a post office box in front of the warehouse so unionizing workers would have to file their union cards in full sight of the bosses), harassing employees and union organizers, filing fake lawsuits, denying healthcare benefits, and firing people for no reason to deprive them of access to the job site.
Of those unions, there are several sectors who are not permitted, by law, to strike. Public sector (employed by the federal government) workers are not permitted to strike. Importantly, as was forcibly demonstrated earlier this year, rail workers can be prevented from striking by use of the 1926 Railway Labor Act. Air traffic controllers are not permitted to strike — when they did, in 1981, President Reagan fired all 11,000 striking workers. Looking at the data, we can identify two general rules of thumb about who is not allowed to strike.
- Workplaces which are “fundamental” to the economy generally have strict rules about when, how, and if they are allowed to strike. One of the federal government’s primary tasks (one of the primary tasks of any bourgeois capitalist state) is to ensure the economy continues to function; that profit continually flows to the capitalists. After all, it is for their benefit that the government exists in the first place; they choose all the candidates for office, pay for the campaigns of and then elect all the politicians, and themselves generally either serve in government or have direct contact with those who do. That means any worker whose job is too important, for whom a strike would be “too powerful” — that is, threaten the very fabric of capitalist society, threaten to establish a more equal society — are prohibited from striking.
- Workplaces with historically high class-consciousness, high awareness of the power of withholding labor, have also been legislated out of the right to strike. The railway workers fall into both of these categories; not only are the transport networks of the railroads vital to the functioning of the economy, railway workers have known this since at least 1871, and successive railway strikes threatened to overthrow the entire U.S. government and capitalist system repeatedly at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
The reason that the WGA writers are not subject to much of this same opposition is that they occupy a privileged place in the U.S. productive system. They are the heart of cultural production and reproduction. They help determine what blares from every theater and television screen in the country. Mass media has been, since the foundation of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the modern CIA, a tool of the ruling class in the U.S. Empire. Psychological warfare was developed in its modern form by the OSS; pirate radio became Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese propaganda stations. The OSS continued after the war, deploying its psychological operations both at home and abroad, reincarnated as the various intelligence agencies of the empire. Today, intelligence, primarily in the form of the Department of Defense and CIA, maintains observers and “advisors” that interpenetrate the mediasphere and help shape what we see, hear, and read.
We live in the shadow of Hearst and the newspaper trusts, of the domineering “Studio System” that controlled the production of films for so long — and still does control it, though the old monopolistic system has relaxed its grip, it is only to permit a sort of neo-monopoly to take its place, in which studios exercise just as much influence, but through back-door channels, shell corporations, and the cautious funding of “indie” film. There is a reason that writers in the WGA make much more than the average worker in the U.S. Empire, and it’s not because they’re doing that much more work, or that writing requires that much more training — although, we must recognize that writing is a trade skill that needs honing, like any other. Although the WGA writers themselves are not wholly responsible for the complex web of capital-driven propaganda, their position in such a crucial sector nevertheless affords them relative privilege and protection from repression.
There are many groups of workers in the U.S. who have been given more than their siblings, who are exploited less; that doesn’t make them our enemies, but it does mean that they must open their eyes to this bribery. When they fight for their advancement, they must not forget that they advance or retreat farther and faster only when they have their sibling workers at their side. The strength of the WGA is illusory — although it has garnered concessions, it will be subject to the next wave of repressive anti-union legislation that is sure to follow in the wake of COVID. Without a firm footing among the rest of the working classes, the WGA workers will be swept away by that reactionary tide, and find themselves alone in a sea of enemies, or be winnowed down to the handful of privileged ultra-wealthy guild masters who agree to work with the imperial ideologists. We must, must advance together. This is the ethos that capitalist production teaches every worker; it is this very socialization of labor by which Capital digs its own grave. My well-being is dependent on yours; yours on mine; and both of ours on taking back from the owners, the investors, the capitalists, what they stole.
Here, in the U.S., we have a venomous tradition of “I’ll look out for me; I’ve got mine.” This has infected union organizing, and cabined off unions from one another, broken solidarity, and as a result wrecked any chance the unions have of fighting the real enemy — the capitalists — on their home turf. This has not happened accidentally; the capitalists have always been trying to break up worker solidarity, to cabin us off into separate “sectors,” to play one union off another, or to break unions altogether.
We cannot allow that to happen. The organization of a union, even the victory of the union to secure better conditions for its membership, is the beginning, not the end. The union is a workshop, or better yet a training ground, where the working class can prepare for conflict against its enemy: the exploiters.
Should we support the WGA strike? Unequivocally! But the WGA cannot stop at residuals. It must continue to push, and only through its membership can it do that. We workers have had enough of the slothful, reformist union leadership — we are tired of the comfortable political agents of the unions. It is the hour for war-chariots, not clown cars; we must carry fire and brimstone at the head of our movement, at the head of our class. Most of all, we must be immune to bribes and blandishments, must turn up our noses at “above average” salaries. We are not to be bought off with the paltry spoils of the capitalist-imperialists or their political lackeys. Yes, you can strike! Make your strike count — strike true.
