Sleepycatz

WGA Thoughts

I have to admit it: I have a warm spot in my heart for unions –not for union leadership, nor for union politics, but for the unions themselves. I have been a member of a few unions in my lifetime, and like all members have complained and bitched about the dues, the corruption, etc. But when push came to shove the union was there to back up my brothers and I. There is an ineffable power to being in a union: I felt it when the Teamsters refused to cross our UAW line when we voted to strike against Phillips in the mid-80s; I felt it again ten years later when we in the IBEW refused to cross the line of our brothers in the Bricklayers and Mason’s Union. It is a sense of a shared struggle –a struggle to make everyone’s life better.

This is the primary reason conservatives despise unions as much as they do. Unions represent a shared burden and a shared goal. It is far more profitable to pit one worker’s salary and benefits against another then it is to deal equally and justly with all workers. It is easier to mistreat people if you can convince them that they are alone and isolated then if they stand together as a group. While conservatives love to proclaim that we all share a moral agency as Americans, to support the troops or support the president, or as Christians, to control women’s bodies, or discriminate against gays and lesbians, they loudly deny that we share any economic bonds. The ‘market’ they say should determine if you work 5 or 7 days a week; they market will decide if children should mine coal or not; the market will weed out unsafe workplaces, etc. The truth, of course, is that as a country, as a people, our shared economic interests far outweigh any trumped up culture war. It does matter if I buy tubesocks made in a sweatshop China versus those made in a union shop in South Carolina. One may be cheaper, but the other helps feed my neighbors, funds their schools, and pays their taxes.

A couple of months ago the Writer’s Guild of America (West) voted to strike over residuals for new media payments. Frankly, like many of my friends, I assumed the Guild would fold in less then 60 days –after all, we’d all watched as unions have broken over the past years, and had little hope for the WGA. But something unexpected happened: the writers fought back using the Internet, and they came to see themselves as a union of workers, linked with other workers. The issues surrounding the WGA strike are issues of basic fairness and pay, both StrikeTV, and United Hollywood, lay out the issues involved. The success of the WGA strike effects all of us — not simply because it save us from yet another tedious award show. The WGA is fighting for issues which will effect the future of media in this country; they are fighting for a living wage for their members; they are fighting for all of us, because we are all in this together.

FDL has a petition up where you can contact executives in charge of your favorite show and inform them of your support for the WGA. I urge you to sign it.

This entry was posted by steve on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Misc. Ramblings, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.