Solidarity

When I was in college I had to work to support myself, part-time during the academic year and full-time during summer. That meant that I had to take whatever job I could find. From September to May I worked on the college's theater crew, building, cleaning, organizing, helping to run shows and special events. I was paid $35 a week and was glad to get it since it enabled me at least to buy food and pay for the off-campus room I shared with another student. From May to September, I worked as a houseman at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, Philadelphia's largest, which, alas, is no longer with us. It was a dirty, demeaning job, and as I recall, I was one of only two white workers in the entire Housekeeping department. Since I was the most junior houseman, and since I showed a willingness to work, I was heaped with the jobs that the older and wiser men were eager to avoid. 

In order to work at the hotel, I was compelled to join the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. It was my first experience of unions, and it left a lasting impression on me. The local was, to put it bluntly, run by the Mafia. Its officers were gangsters and thugs who raked every penny they could off the workers, and who cared not a whit for their welfare, their earnings or the conditions in which they labored. And for the "benefits" of belonging to this union, I was required to pay dues out of my $80 a week salary. Yes, that's right: We housemen were paid 80 dollars a week (before taxes) for a full 40-hour week and frequent overtime, for which we were not paid. 

I happened to be working at the hotel one sweltering July when the union contract came up for renewal. Through three summers I had seen how badly the employees were treated - black  maids on their feet eight hours a day, trying to raise children and in some cases grandchildren on the slave wages they received; elderly black men who were held in open contempt by the white managers and given the most menial jobs to do. A half-hour unpaid lunch in an attic locker room where the temperature often exceeded 100 degrees, and no prospect of promotion or a raise. 

I did some research on the local and our contract and learned that every year no demands were made on behalf of the workers. Instead, the union accepted what was called a sweetheart contract in return for generous bribes to the officials. Being young and idealistic, I started a campaign among the workers to demand real negotiations for real benefits. I even went so far as to write on the chalkboard in the lunchroom a denunciation of the sweetheart contract. As a result, I was summoned to the office of the local boss, who made it clear in vivid language that if I persisted in being a troublemaker both my legs would be broken. I chose not to persist: a summer job at 80 dollars a week was not worth losing the ability to walk. 

Now, I mention all this by way of explaining that, after my experience at the Ben Franklin, I promised myself I would never again join a union. And I never did - until I came to Hollywood. Here, the first thing I learned was that in order to earn a living as a screenwriter, I would have to join the Writers Guild. I am not suggesting that the Guild is analogous to the Hotel Workers local, except in one regard: the demand for absolute, unquestioning adherence to the principle of solidarity. To borrow a phrase: "My union right or wrong, my union!" 

Today, four months into what I see as a very ill-advised action against the talent agents, I hear the call for solidarity almost every day. I learned the danger of this blind obedience during the last strike, but I did not let the lesson sink in. Dutifully, I joined the picket line at Disney Studios, where I was the only feature writer in a queue of TV scribes. Their talk of writers rooms and sponsors' diktats chilled me and made me realize how little I had in common with them. Bad as the studios' interference in the feature writing process was, I knew I would never have stood for the kind of aesthetic molestation the TV writers described. 

I remember one prominent writer, a member of the elite, urging us "to walk in circles forever" without question if the Guild ordered us to. I found the idea revolting, a violation of the spirit of the writer as I knew and cherished it. Writers do not march in lockstep on orders from above. Our job is to challenge the dictates of institutions when they seem unreasonable, and to question every form of authority, even our own union. Somerset Maugham said that the writer is the only truly free man. The solidarity that was being demanded of us by the union was slavish. 

The other realization I had was that the strike was called for the benefit of the television writers. There was nothing in it for me or my feature colleagues. Indeed, after a 100-day walkout, the union managed to obtain concessions which the Directors Guild had achieved in a few weeks of quiet negotiation. The strike was called simply as a show of muscle, but proved, in my mind, to be a show of hubris and ineptitude. I recall attending the post-strike meeting, where it took the chief negotiator nearly fifteen minutes to explain what we had won - a lot of minutiae having to do with alternative media and the length of TV seasons and foreign TV residuals. To me it was all esoteric and irrelevant. What was neither was the damage the strike had done to my finances. 

I had also attended the mass meeting of members called to declare the strike. At that disgraceful conclave, which reminded me of Bolshevik rallies of the early 20th century, I heard dissenting voices shouted down in the most vulgar terms, with no objection from the Guild leadership. The climax came when one young writer questioned the Guild's negotiating tactics, and a board member hollered at him to "Shut the fuck up!" The leadership said nothing, did not denounce their colleague, did not call for civility. Instead, there was widespread applause. That was when I and a few other members walked out.

  

What I ought to have learned from all this is that the Writers Guild is first and foremost a union in the old-fashioned sense, and not an association of artists. The tactics used by the Guild in its organization and negotiations are those of the unions of stevedores and auto workers of the fifties, which do not reflect the character of its members today. The mentality is entirely adversarial: If you are not one of us, you are the enemy. This attitude is reflected in the Guild's rhetoric at this very time. Producers and agents, instead of being regarded as partners in a creative enterprise, are denounced as criminals and merchants of evil. In the current labor action, the Guild has simply refused to negotiate with the agents collectively (which I would have thought inherent in the concept of collective bargaining) and has adopted instead a piecemeal approach which has been nearly barren of results. Additionally, though the Guild did not inform us in advance of the tactic, it has filed lawsuits against the four major agencies, the real targets of this action, provoking a series of countersuits which threaten to cost a fortune and drag on for years. 

As the current labor action wears on with no apparent endgame and no negotiations, the Guild leadership has become more deeply entrenched in its strong-arm tactics. In April it ordered all members to fire their agents, which can be construed as a violation of its constitution which requires the Guild to facilitate our ability to work with our agents to earn a living. The order was accompanied by thinly veiled threats of retaliation, including expulsion, which the leadership has since tried lamely to deny. However, when the first member arose to challenge the leadership's tactics and declare himself a candidate for president, members of the board immediately called for an investigation into his behavior, a rather bald form of intimidation aimed at anyone who might dare to dissent. 

A slate of opposition candidates has emerged, and I have seen them denounced in online forums in the most scurrilous terms. While it is true that no one has threatened to break their legs, they are being called traitors, scabs and other less discreet names. Lurking behind it all, of course, is the threat of reprisals. The Guild does provide a very good health and pension program, and no writer working today can afford to lose those benefits. So, in the face of opposition, the Guild's leadership is falling back on the very sort of implicit punishment which the hotel local used against its members. One result of this is that many writers are unwilling to speak out, fearful of both the labels and the reprisals. 

(Now the Guild leadership has announced the formation of a committee to enforce the order that we fire our agents. This unmasks the intent they had had from the beginning and have tried to deny - there will be investigations and reprisals. The intimidation has become an open threat. We are on notice: Solidarity is no longer an ideal, it is a mandate.) 

In forcing us to fire our agents, the Guild leadership has made it difficult, and, in the case of younger writers, impossible to find work. Though the stated goal is to reverse the slide in members' earnings, the Guild recently reported record earnings. And though the action is described as an effort to bring the talent agency business into line with writers' needs, it is in fact directed at the four major agencies, multi-national enterprises which can easily outlast this action. 

(It should be noted that these mega-agencies have engaged in the practices of packaging and affiliation, to which the Guild objects, for some 45 years, and these practices represent a revenue source of hundreds of millions of dollars. In brief, packaging means assembling talent from an agency's ranks to staff a project, for which service the agency receives a fee. Some writers actually benefit from packaging both in the form of reduced agency commissions and projects that are more likely to be set up. Affiliation refers to the growing trend of agencies to align with production companies, thus becoming producers in their own right, and sharing in the profits of production. Of course this means, as the Guild argues, that our agents also become our employers, which represents a clear conflict of interest. In demanding an end to these twin practices, the Guild is attempting nothing less than to change the business model of the agencies and production companies, and to alter the fiscal culture of Hollywood.) 

And so, while the working writer (as opposed to the elite) scrambles to pay the bills, the Guild offers makeshift mechanisms for TV writers to contact producers directly, reducing the possibility of anyone finding a job to the handful of established writers already known to the producers. In the meantime, younger writers, stripped of representation, are losing their earnings to the point where they cannot qualify for health insurance benefits. In response, the Guild recently offered them the opportunity to attend a seminar on stress management. 

I have gone on much longer than I intended. What I am trying to say, in sum, is really quite simple: The Guild needs not only a change in leadership, it needs a change in culture. We have to replace the archaic adversarial mentality with a collegial one. In an era when the entertainment business is convulsing with change, when parts of it are shrinking and others exploding, we must drop the rigidity of the past and adopt a more flexible attitude. Our partners in the entertainment industry may not be our friends - it is after all a business - but they must not be our enemies. In any given dispute it ought to be possible, in a spirit of shared interests, to find common ground. If the other side proves intransigent, if they refuse to compromise, then we retain the option of labor action. But only as a last resort, and only for a cause that can be readily explained and easily understood. Clearly defined, realistic goals and strategies (absent in the present action) are much more likely of success than mean-spirited and adversarial tactics. If solidarity is desired, this is the way to achieve it - not coercion, not threats of reprisals, not demands for blind obedience from professionals whose ethic is, or ought to be, enlightenment, not blindness.