Removed by mod
The Writers Strike Ruined my life
Removed by modI am legit penniless and moving after a full decade in the industry, because the bougiest union thought they deserved to be upper class rather than middle class. I actually hate these people and their status driven desires to own homes in the nicest neighborhoods of NY and CA. To have their kids in private school with the producers kids. O it’s hard in Cobble Hill?
The writers strike ruined the industry and moved so much work to Canada, England, and Korea. I have no skills outside film production and I am going from middle class to homeless for the worst people who write Blue Bloods and Jimmy Fallon jokes. I fucking hate writers and they are all pieces of shit.
Craft unionism is not bringing about socialism, it’s bringing about different hierarchies and desires between jobs. The Wobblies were right about everything. I fucking hate you writers. You are closer to the producers than just about anyone on set. You are fucking country club shits. I hope you all get stuck writing cop shows forever you fucking trash
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sorry mate this ain't it
why on earth would you think that writers aren't getting fucked by the same people/processes that are fucking you?
your enemy isn't the writers, it's capital. nothing happened as a result of this strike that capital wasn't going to do anyway
nothing happened as a result of this strike that capital wasn't going to do anyway
That's not really true, think about it. Differences in wages and workers' rights cause capital flight all the time. Capital wouldn't have chosen to offshore all the film industry this decade had it not been for the particular economic circumstances that arose from the strike. That's cause and effect, there was not much other reason for Hollywood to break down this way. You could at best argue that the writers were only one of many things that potentially could've caused the same chain of events.
oh come on, if it hadn't been the writers it would have been the next union that stood up for itself
this is "it's the union's fault when management moves the plant to Mexico" thinking and I am shocked to see it so upbeared here
But those differences were there before the strikes? Production was already moving overseas. Yes, it was accelerated by the strikes, but the wage differentials were already there. The strikes didn’t make anything happen that wasn’t going to happen anyways
Feeling someone deserves more and having a shit fucking plan to solve it are two different things. We don’t need to be romantic about this
The writers pushing for the strike were the ones who could make bank on residual payment on streaming, not the ones struggling to find work.
2021 and 2022 were peak years in the industry. Cutbacks happened to time out exactly with the WGA pushing to strike. Scripts were saved and shelved to be produced somewhere else, because writers have no control over the industry.
If the writers have no control over the industry, they definitely didn’t off-shore production
The writers strike was never going to work when they failed (did not even bother) to expand it to an industry-wide strike. They got screwed and ended up in a worse position than they started.
This is why labor activism without Marxist theory is fighting a steep uphill battle. Without understanding how capitalism works, there is no strategy. It’s like trying to treat a disease without medical knowledge - it’s all based on luck and no better than flipping a coin.
The 2007-2008 writers strike worked because the interest rate was starting to come down amidst a looming recession by early 2008. The 2023 writers strike happened while the rich people were still getting free interest income from the government despite the industry downturn (the Fed rate hike allowed the bourgeoisie to shelter the storm while indebted working class gets screwed with ever higher penalty rate from high interest) - it was never going to work unless they managed to expand it to the rest of the Hollywood adjacent industries.
The workers did collective bargaining and the bourgeois class found a way to fuck up the industry a new way. That is not the fault of writers, they are fellow proles, however well paid they are or aren't.
Blame the victims if you like, but the only alternative is bootlicking.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but blaming writers for striking is just not it. You're right that craft unionism isn't about socialism, but it is a form of class struggle, and writers are proletarian. I also very much doubt that writing, as an industry, is as stable and well paid as you're portraying it as.
And to anyone that says blame the producers. No, the Writers are morons. They do not control any industry, capital, or production, they do not even control their scripts. They essentially are America putting sanctions on Russia, and Russia just moving its economy towards Asia.
WGA are not longshoreman, they write fucking jokes and parts of scripts collaboratively in a room that are then owned by the production company. The moment they pulled out of doing this, producers just moved to other countries, or used old scripts and kept chugging along.
If IATSE, or Teamsters went on strike, production would actually come to a full stop. WGA just made things slowdown and allowed the AMPTP to plan out how they were gonna fuck all the other unions long term and cut cost. Penguin, Hpuse of Dragon, Dune, all got made during the strike. The money makers for the studios. These stupid fucks just got romantic and lib about what unions can do.
Say whatever you want, but these people are not my class, these people are not thinking about the proletariat, these people do not understand where there is actually power in a union. They are worthless
I think the clearest indication of how weak the left is in the US is the incredibly superficial understanding of the labor movement in this country and the contradictions within it. Just total ignorance of how the big unions constantly fight each other, fuck each other over, and screw over the broader working class, oftentimes for the pettiest nonsense. They're all more than happy to sell out the most vulnerable and isolated workers if it means a slightly quicker deal with bosses and the collection of dues money.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that a lot of these unions are full of white collar workers that we would probably condemn individually as social fascists but then they go on strike and we celebrate it for some reason.
I'm sorry you got screwed by this. I hope you can find decent work somewhere soon.
So what you’re saying is that writers are the waiters of the film industry…
Hotd was British, they couldn’t shut down production. I agree with you on the waivers, but they are your class, whether you like them or not
No, the Writers are morons. They do not control any industry, capital, or production, they do not even control their scripts.
Doesn’t this make the production-side argument stronger rather than weaker?
With respect, the strikes didn’t move production, the producers did. You know this was happening before because even pre 23, union wages and benefits cost them miles more than Romanian or English or Costa Rican prod would. If your only skills are film production, then your life was ruined before then, you just didn’t know it
as a hopeful writer in England, I am interested in seeing where this thread goes
I'm not too familiar with what happened in America other than that Imagine Dragons did a concert on the picket line.
they did that concert knowing the writers would want to end the strike and go home
Craft unionism is not bringing about socialism, it’s bringing about different hierarchies and desires between jobs. The Wobblies were right about everything.
that's facts though
I'm honestly almost at the point where I think all labor activism in the core is reactionary. Better pay for Amazon workers is probably just gonna compel their suppliers to accelerate exploitation in the periphery. Why organize my work place when an extra dollar an hour here just means some 14 year old in a sweatshop in Bangladesh is probably gonna have to start pulling 16 hour shifts.
Fuck it, I'm happy when labor aristocrats feel the squeeze.
Hollywood has been extensively financialized over the past few decades. Just like the other industries, once finance capital is finished with hollowing out the core and stripping everything down to the bones, they simply jump ship and latch on to the next industry to parasitize. No incentives to keep an industry well developed and sustained. It’s all pump and dump to make quite profits and for the line to go up.
Boeing, Intel, Cisco and many other once world leading American corporations all went through this, and Hollywood is no exception.
This is the price America has to pay for its ability extract vast amount of surplus value from the Global South simply through printing money - its own deindustrialization. But it’s the working class that gets screwed, never the wealthy class.
Op would be a labor aristocrat here fyi, I’m down for a single standard of fuck all workers in the imperial core, but not “those workers are bad and I’m good”
A couple years ago Hexbears lambasted me for not being angry about the railroad strike. I said from my experience in my union we were barely an institution let alone a left wing institution. Most of my brothers were fucking fascists who were slowly taking control of the executive board seat at a time.
side question, could the death of Hollywood mean more independent producing? So far, that hasn't reaaaally been the case. So far, it seems that only guaranteed cash cows get made at all.
Wobblies wanted one big union so everyone could negotiate together, and strike together. Craft unions, like on a film set, lead to separate contract negotiations between different departments every year. In 2021 my union was pushed to not strike by other unions for the “guilt” of stopping work. 2 years later the WGA and SAG decided stopping work was fine.
It's pretty clearly a divide and conquer strategy from what you're describing. The writers are working class, but if you can get them to believe they're special and not like the other workers, the allure of elitism plays right into the hands of capital. Americans still seeing themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Idk where this idea of elite writers came from, just like the actors, you have a handful of rich assholes and a legion of invisible people who are just unionized film workers. If it was a purely strategic criticism, sure, but the moral angle feels strange
