Stoking the Flames

Now that screen actors have joined the Writer’s Guild of America on strike, it seems fair to say that Hollywood has entered a historic (and likely prolonged) period of labor unrest. And they’re not the only workers on the picket line in Los Angeles. As the eminent labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein recently noted, “[a]bout half of the big strikes in the U.S. this year have taken place in California, with the most consequential centered in Los Angeles.” University of California graduate student workers and Los Angeles public school teachers have also walked off the job within the past year; hotel workers across Southern California launched a strike of their own just two weeks ago.

For all the recent talk of a “hot labor summer,” and for all the media attention focused on the Hollywood strikes in particular, much of the recent labor unrest in the United States has been fairly sporadic and localized. Preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that roughly 29,000 workers were engaged in work stoppages last month—not an especially high number when compared to the strike surge of 2018, let alone in a broader historical context.

Nevertheless, something big is definitely happening: WGA and SAG-AFTRA might be small unions compared to, say, SEIU, but their members still work the levers of a major American industry. And as far as that industry’s fate is concerned, the Hollywood strikes feel existential: at stake is nothing less than whether human artists will continue to have a significant role in the production of mass entertainment. If actors and writers lose this fight, then American film and television may simply be dead as a major art form.

While studios’ threat that they will replace artists with procedural content generators was a major impetus for the Hollywood strikes, the structural causes are a little more complex. They include a persistently tight labor market that has modestly boosted worker power; a rigged streaming economy that delivers pennies to even the actors on hit shows; a sort of burgeoning, reactionary class consciousness among the employers of white collar knowledge workers; and a housing crisis that has turned Los Angeles into America’s capital of unsheltered homelessness.

Characteristically, I’d like to dedicate the rest of this post to discussing the last issue: the housing crisis, particularly in Los Angeles. Actors, writers, hotel workers, graduate students, and teachers have all cited housing instability as a key reason for their respective work stoppages. Collective bargaining agreements are supposed to guarantee some basic standard of living, but housing cost inflation keeps gnawing away at workers’ salaries faster than unions can negotiate pay bumps.

The housing crisis is bad for employers as well as workers: in cities where wage hikes don’t keep up with rent inflation, companies struggle to retain their best employees and attract new talent. But in the current labor dispute, some studio executives apparently see high housing costs as something they can use to their advantage.

From a widely circulated Deadline piece:

Needless to say, this is psychopathic. But I want to emphasize that it’s also unbelievably stupid and short-sighted. High housing costs are part of what drove writers and actors to the picket lines in the first place; instead of disciplining labor, the housing crisis directly contributes to labor unrest.

That is no doubt a big part of the reason why many of the most significant strikes in the United States are currently taking place in and around Los Angeles. L.A. is where you have the confluence of a severe housing crisis, an unusually militant labor movement, and a group of workers who possess the leverage to shut down key sectors of the local economy. It’s hard to see how trying to dial up one of these forces — and publicly announcing your intention to do so — could do anything but antagonize strikers and drive them toward greater militancy.

What truly makes this a reckless strategy, though, is how it will effect the entertainment industry in the long run. However this strike ends, the housing crisis will continue to put pressure on industry wages. And because the labor market shows no signs of loosening — the Federal Reserve seems to have genuinely achieved the soft landing it was hoping for — this pressure will continually ratchet up the threat of more labor unrest for years to come.

The AMPTP — and whichever piece of shit described driving people into homelessness as a “cruel but necessary evil” — would probably respond that you won’t have any labor unrest if you get rid of all the labor. That appears to be management’s reach goal in their dispute with SAG-AFTRA and WGA: replace the writers with large language models and replace the actors with their own scanned likenesses. As I’ve written before (see below), this is a fantasy.

If Hollywood bosses “win” — that is to say, if they get actors and writers to consent to their own obsolescence — it will be at the expense of breaking America’s entertainment industry in the long run. But I don’t think they will win. While these strikes are likely to drag on for a long time, I think, and hope, that the bosses are on their way to a humiliating defeat. They’re the ones who decided to make these contract negotiations into a potential extinction-level event for writers and actors; people facing extinction generally don’t cave very easily.

If studio executives were genuinely interested in turning down the temperature on labor unrest and easing upward pressure on labor costs, they would see the housing crisis as a threat, not an asset. And instead of turning their substantial political power against their own workers, they would be using it to encourage homebuilding across Los Angeles. I’m not holding my breath for David Zaslav, Bob Iger and the rest to figure this out. But maybe once their burn-and-pillage approach fails, someone else on the management side will figure it out.

In the meantime, you can support the strikers by donating to the Entertainment Community Fund.