Chris Pizzello/AP Photo
A poster advocating union solidarity hangs from a Costume Designers Guild office building, October 4, 2021, in Burbank, California. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike for the first time in its 128-year history.
On Monday, the roughly 60,000 workers who build sets, apply makeup, hold cameras, and hole up in editing rooms to make America’s movies, TV shows, and streaming videos voted to authorize a strike against the production studios. Fully 90 percent of those 60,000 workers actually sent in their ballots, and fully 99 percent of that 90 percent voted to authorize the strike. For the first time since 1945, studios are facing a shutdown from their indispensable, if invisible-to-the-public, workforce.
Those 60,000 workers are members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, aka IATSE. In 1945, however, IATSE—then controlled by the Chicago Mafia—wasn’t the union that walked off the job. Indeed, it was a sometimes violent opponent to the non-mobbed-up and small-d democratic Conference of Studio Unions, which actually represented more behind-the-camera workers, and was the group of unions that struck. IATSE, not surprisingly, was the studio moguls’ favorite. Indeed, the studio heads paid off IATSE leaders in return for those leaders’ guarantee that no strikes or sizable raises for their members would crimp the studios’ bottom lines.
When the CSU went on strike in 1945, IATSE members crossed picket lines. Despite that, production was crippled, and the moguls thought more forceful action was required. One morning on the sidewalks outside the Warner Bros. studio, company guards joined by then-as-now thuggish L.A. County sheriffs attacked the picketers, sending more than a few to nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital.
A number of prominent stars, including Gene Kelly and John Garfield, refused to cross the CSU picket lines. While the L.A. left, which then included a relatively sizable Communist Party, avidly supported the strikers, the CSU itself was hardly left: It was an affiliate of the Carpenters Union, long a bastion of anti-radicalism in all its forms. (To be sure, some on the left thought somewhat woozily about how to respond to violence from management. Forty years after the strike, Ben Dobbs, who’d been the deputy leader of the local Communists until the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia compelled him to leave the party and later become a DSA member, recalled to me one CP regular asking him in the wake of the Warners attack if it was time for armed struggle. “I said no,” Ben told me, shaking his head at some of his comrades’ strategic acuity.)
In the 15 years following World War II, when unions had more power under the law and employers had less, the nation averaged around 300 major strikes every year.
In time, the CSU was compelled to succumb to the studio-IATSE alliance, and to the Red Scare politics which was in equal measure mistargeted at the CSU and nonetheless devastating. But also in time, IATSE cleaned itself up, and for decades has been a corruption-free and increasingly progressive political force. (A significant number of San Fernando Valley and Burbank precinct walkers for liberal candidates and causes come from IATSE.)
The worksite causes for which IATSE is poised to walk out are many, though not varied. They include higher rates of payment when the productions on which they work are streamed, and longer rest periods. Members are responding to the massive changes that have overtaken Hollywood in recent years: the ballooning of production as streaming has transformed the industry, the increasing number of short-season TV and streaming shows (the 35 or so episodes of a TV show that were common 20 years ago are now more commonly ten or fewer), and the increasing presence of such new-economy and anti-union giants as Apple, Amazon, and Netflix.
The advent of streaming was the proximate cause of the last major Hollywood strike: 2007’s 100-day Writers Guild walkout, which closed down production of both films and television. The issue then was what writers would be paid not just when the work was rerun on TV, but whether they’d be paid at all when it was streamed on laptops and iPhones. (Streaming was then new enough that I felt obliged to lay out the particulars in a Washington Post column I wrote at the time, noting that I didn’t think Lawrence of Arabia would come off very well on my phone “even if my mother didn’t call during the attack on Aqaba.”)
Perhaps an even more vexing development is the growing weight of corporate megaliths in the ranks of employers. One reason there have been no production-worker strikes since 1945–1946 is that once IATSE got cleaned up and once the founding generation of disproportionately Republican studio moguls retired, labor relations settled into a relatively peaceable routine for 30 years. The key figure in this transformation was Universal Pictures studio head Lew Wasserman, who was just old enough to have lived through the days of the mogul/union boss/Mafia triumvirate, just liberal enough not to be dead set against unions (he was Hollywood’s go-to money guy for Democrats extending from Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton), and, as the first super-agent before he became a studio head, a wily and accomplished negotiator. For decades, all the studios let Wasserman handle their labor relations, and for decades, Wasserman crafted agreements with all the Hollywood unions.
Beginning in the late ’60s, however, bigger companies began scooping up some of the studios, conglomerates like Sony and Seagram and Vivendi. In time, Wasserman lost control of Universal, and today, some of the moguls’ masters include such libertarian union-phobes as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook. The founding generation of moguls may not have liked unions, but their ideologies ran less to libertarianism and more toward narcissism. Bezos manages to combine the two, which is why he’s a more dangerous adversary.
It is well that IATSE is so united and that the other Hollywood guilds, including actors, directors, and writers, back them. The threat, and if need be, the reality of shutting down production is really the only way to bring a Bezos around. Would that more American workers had that option.
Or do they?
THE STRIKE, THE ULTIMATE WEAPON of workers, has been out of favor for the past four decades. When Ronald Reagan fired the nation’s air traffic controllers in 1981, he gave carte blanche to corporations to follow his lead. In short order, companies with long histories of coexistence with their unions began locking out workers, or provoking strikes so that they could hire replacements at a lower pay rate or compel their unions to accept steadily diminishing pay and benefits.
In the 15 years following World War II, when unions had more power under the law and employers had less, the nation averaged around 300 major strikes every year. Not coincidentally, this was the only time in American history when median pay rose at the same rate as productivity. Then, due in part to a series of court rulings, the playing field began to tilt in employers’ favor, and following 1981, that tilt became much steeper. In this century, the number of annual major strikes is often in the single digits.
Today, that appears to be changing. Not only is IATSE a credible threat to shut down production, but workers in other industries are rebelling as well. Recently, workers at five Nabisco factories across the nation went on strike to protest their long hours and low pay, returning only when those problems had been addressed. Around 24,000 nurses at Kaiser Permanente in California are voting on a strike authorization, and other Kaiser workers in California and Oregon are threatening the same. Ten thousand John Deere workers voted to strike last month. A thousand coal miners at Warrior Met in Alabama have been on strike for six months. And there are several other possible strikes under way.
But even with these actions, how is it even possible to have a strike wave when less than 7 percent of the country’s private-sector workers are unionized? The answer to that question is all around us, in the refusal of millions of American workers to return to the low-paying, no-benefit jobs that our economy has created in the tens of millions. In consequence, two of our largest shit-job employers—Amazon and Walmart—have been compelled to raise their wages; Amazon to an hourly minimum of $15, Walmart to $12. The millions of individual decisions by workers burned out by working through the pandemic have had the cumulative effect of a successful strike, and we haven’t seen the end of what their decisions to tell their boss to take that job and shove it will lead to.
In one sense, this shouldn’t be surprising. The two years that saw the greatest strike waves in American history—1919 and 1946—followed immediately on the conclusions of World Wars I and II and the demobilizations of millions of uprooted workers, many of whom had been through hell in those conflicts and were hailed as heroes on their return. That plainly had a marked effect on their dispositions toward work: They had paid their dues, sacrificed for their country, and didn’t want to return to underpaid drudgery.
The upheavals of 1919, including a nationwide strike of steel workers and a work stoppage of the Boston police (put down by future president Calvin Coolidge), didn’t yield any long-term victories, because the legal scaffolding to protect workers’ rights didn’t exist yet. The upheavals of 1946, by contrast, followed upon the rights labor had won during the New Deal, and helped create an economy in which an unprecedented share of workers enjoyed decent wages and benefits until the 1980s.
May I gently suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic has had the same effect? Once again, frontline workers have endured a harrowing time and life-threatening conditions. However briefly, they saw themselves and their work honored by millions of more fortunate Americans who’d previously ignored their very existence. And, like their forebears of 1919 and 1946, large numbers of them are disinclined to return to the same levels of low pay and high stress they’d endured.
So IATSE’s strike threat is actually part of a much larger movement, even if most of that movement can’t take the form of a strike as the term is commonly understood. Whether individually or collectively, workers are striving to create better conditions for themselves and our nation. May they continue, and prevail.
