This post of Megan's strikes me as quite weird. " My sense," she writes, "is that...unions are often the most aggressive right before they expire." Damn dude. Read about Walter Reuther. Back when unions were ascendant, the organizers were getting the shit beat out of them, even getting murdered. And they kept coming. Dignity means something. Indeed, on some level, it means almost everything.
Which is why Megan doesn't get the Writer's Strike. She surveys the scene, judges the industry in decline, decides there's a narrowing pool of profits from which workers can extract gains, and can't figure out why anyone bothers. Forgetting whether the economic analysis is correct (I don't think it is, and, in any case, don't imagine it relevant to the writer's demands, which are for a percentage of a new revenue stream), she's treating individuals too much like rational economic actors, and not enough like human beings. People care about fairness, too. About being paid appropriately for their work and being treated with respect and dignity. And when the bosses are transparently trying to fuck with them, they want to stand against it. When Megan thinks of unions, she thinks of corrupt labor bosses extracting the maximum dues. But that's not what unions are. Unions are this guy:
Till you understand him, you don't understand unions.
