2024/09/01 by Shannan Clark · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Cultural Industries and Urban Development
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11202784
On August 22, 2023, thousands of unionists and supporters across the United States joined in a day of solidarity with striking members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). The demonstration in New York, outside the offices of HBO, swelled to occupy two lanes of Tenth Avenue as a broad cross section of the city's labor movement turned out to back the writers and actors’ demands for fair contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Teamsters were well represented, reflecting their substantial membership within the industry, and a brass ensemble from American Federation of Musicians Local 802 strained to be heard over the throngs of chanting picketers and the background din of Midtown traffic. But large numbers came from outside the entertainment industry, with sizable contingents present from the United Auto Workers, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, the Communications Workers of America, the Hotel Trades Council, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) of the City University of New York, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3, Laborers’ Union Local 79, and the New York State Nurses Association.The location of the picket symbolically magnified the confrontation between the assembly of workers united to support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikers and the forces of capital arrayed against them. High above the crowd on Tenth Avenue loomed the recently constructed towers of Hudson Yards, embodying in glass, steel, and concrete the intensifying concentration of private wealth over the last several decades. Devoid of style, the new development's bland post-postmodern appearance, like that of the new super-tall, money-laundering condominium spires that have sprouted along the southern edge of Central Park, mars the city's iconic skyline. For today's capitalist masters, these buildings, along with the movies and series produced through the creative labor of writers and actors, represent just another form of “content.” The strikers faced not only the sheer economic power of the handful of massive corporations that now dominate the media but also a pernicious ideology that devalues writers and performers’ labor precisely because it devalues nearly all forms of culture and knowledge.The militant organizing by WGA and SAG-AFTRA members to sustain their overlapping strikes over many months, along with the labor movement solidarity evident on August 22 and throughout the disputes, finally enabled the unions to negotiate contract settlements with the producers. After 148 days on the picket lines, the WGA reached its tentative agreement with the AMPTP on September 24, 2023, which members subsequently ratified by a near-unanimous 99 percent margin.1 The actors’ walkout, which began more than two months into the writers’ strike, continued after the WGA settlement, with SAG-AFTRA concluding its agreement with the producers on November 8. Although members had engaged in many months of intensive strike activity to secure a new contract, only 38 percent of eligible performers participated in the ratification vote, resulting in a 78 percent margin for approval.2 Leaders of both unions along with much of the press heralded the agreements as victories, and workers throughout the industry were relieved that production could resume. Although many writers and actors experienced immediate economic gains from the new contracts, the settlements failed to address some of the most pressing structural problems that affect not only motion picture and television production but nearly every current activity that creates culture and knowledge.The unions’ conflict with the AMPTP stemmed both from industry trends over the past fifteen years that depressed writers and actors’ incomes as well as from emerging threats to the very existence of their jobs. The rise of online streaming as a means of distribution induced an expansion in the total volume of production, but due to the shortcomings of the 2008 WGA settlement and the pattern it established throughout the industry, the residual payments (for repeat broadcasts and screenings) that once accounted for a substantial portion of members’ earnings declined precipitously. In recent years, members have sometimes received residual disbursements for literally just pennies, much like musicians whose songs are streamed by Spotify or Pandora. Negotiators for both unions consequently demanded a more favorable formula for calculating residuals along with alternative means for sharing revenue. They also sought new employment terms to compensate for the duration and variability of hiatuses between seasons of streaming series, which do not conform to the traditional television production calendar. In addition, they advanced more standard economic demands for increases in base rates of pay to offset the inflationary surge of the last three years, especially the skyrocketing cost of housing in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and other cities where WGA and SAG-AFTRA members are concentrated.Union negotiators also took a firm line over the possible introduction of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) applications into the industry. Without new contract provisions for comprehensive and enforceable regulations to prohibit or stringently limit the use of AI, producers could exploit the new technology to simulate actors’ appearance or voice in future media content, or to generate scenarios and dialogue. The unionists rightly perceived that the unrestricted implementation of AI desired by the AMPTP had the potential to eliminate a huge proportion of the industry's workforce, and to degrade terribly the terms and conditions of labor for those who remain. The producers’ interest in deploying AI has paralleled that of executives in other areas of the economy. It is driven by the tech sector's latest hype cycle following the bursting of the crypto bubble, the fizzling of virtual reality endeavors like the Metaverse, and the diminishing profitability expectations for gig-labor platforms such as Uber. Tech entrepreneurs and boosters are looking to tap into new sources of profit by selling media executives on the possibility of “disrupting” the creation of movies and series with generative AI, much as they hope to extract value by insinuating AI into all levels of the educational system, or by convincing the owners of news outlets to supplant human journalists with bots. Employers have a perennial yearning to use the threat of replacement by labor-saving technologies to discipline the workforce, but in the recent labor market, where workers have modestly more leverage than they have enjoyed in decades, the appeal of AI is especially strong. Furthermore, the producers’ initial proposals for the practically unfettered use of AI betrayed a complete disregard for the actual quality of computer-generated output, or any sense that movies and television shows, like other forms of culture, are compelling because they are expressions of human creativity. Critics of the modern culture industries have long lamented the commodification of artistic production and experience, but the stance taken by media executives revealed a profound, dangerous, and unprecedented nihilism.Despite the enormous profits of corporate media giants like Disney, Viacom, and NBC-Universal, AMPTP negotiators adopted an intransigent bargaining stance, refusing to advance any serious counteroffers to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA proposals for many months. Once management relented and began to make concessions to the WGA, the smaller of the two unions, a new minimum basic agreement (MBA) was arrived at rather quickly. For all that the writers sacrificed, the WGA estimated the net value of the new MBA at 233 million per year, compared to 429 million per year for the union's May 1 proposal, and just a miserly 86 million per year for the AMPTP May 1 counteroffer. The writers won increases in minimum rates of pay that were essentially midway between their last prestrike proposal and the counteroffer that the AMPTP had stubbornly adhered to throughout the summer. They made more impressive gains with regard to residuals for programs distributed via streaming as well as with maintaining staffing levels for episodic television. Yet perhaps the most-remarked-on aspect of the WGA settlement was the language concerning AI. According to the union's summary, the new contract states that “AI-generated written material is not considered literary material, source material or assigned material” and, more significantly, that “AI is not a writer under the MBA.” In addition, employers “cannot require [a] writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services,” while the union also reserves the right “to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.”3 Activists in the News Guild and in the academic labor movement instantly hailed the WGA language as a model to emulate in their own respective fields. With employers throughout the media and educational sectors moving aggressively to implement AI in ways that will eliminate jobs and worsen working conditions, securing protections at least as strong as those in the WGA agreement has become a collective bargaining imperative.After the WGA and the AMPTP had settled, most observers expected that an eventual SAG-AFTRA deal would follow the contours of the new writers’ contract. While the actors’ agreement ultimately included a slightly larger increase in base rates of pay in the first year than the writers had wrested from management, it was the discrepancies in the contract provisions regarding AI that garnered the most attention. Reflecting the greater phenomenological complexity of performance relative to writing, along with the inherent difficulty in covering all the ways that AI could be used to simulate a person's appearance or voice, either now or in the future, the SAG-AFTRA agreement includes language that is both more elaborate and less stringent than what the WGA negotiated. It does establish important definitions for an “employment-based digital replica” and for an “independently created digital replica,” and it articulates clear procedures by which performers provide consent to their initial generation and their specific future uses. But in the contract's intricacies the SAG-AFTRA negotiators conceded more leeway for the introduction of AI than the writers did.4 In addition, some union members have expressed concerns that the unequal power dynamics inherent in the employment relationship might make many performers feel pressured into furnishing consent and that it will be difficult to penalize producers who make unauthorized use of AI in violation of the contract.Given the high stakes, the strikes constituted the gravest challenge that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have faced since the 1930s and 1940s, when these unions’ precursors first formed and took root. Moreover, the union members’ perseverance in their struggles demonstrated a militancy that harkened back to the radical vision that initially enabled and sustained the emergence of unionism within the creative class. Although the development of activities such as writing and performing within US consumer capitalism had been predicated on a professional ethos of individualistic expression and meritocratic achievement, the shock of the Great Depression and the tumult of World War II led many who earned a living in the media and entertainment fields to reassess their labor. They instead came, often hesitantly, to see the benefit of collective action not only as a means of winning improvements in pay and conditions that they could not obtain on their own but also as the only way to secure any degree of meaningful creative autonomy. Groups that frequently began as especially strident professional associations evolved over time into more conventional labor organizations under the terms of the Wagner Act. This was the path taken by the Screen Writers Guild and the Radio Writers Guild—the two main forerunners of today's WGA—as well as by unions that joined the CIO, including the American Newspaper Guild (now the News Guild) and some of the smaller groups of culture workers, such as the New York–based Book and Magazine Guild and Screen Publicists Guild, that affiliated with the CIO's United Office and Professional Workers of America. The proponents of unionism in the culture industries not only embraced the principle of solidarity for themselves; they also frequently acted in support of workers in manufacturing, processing, services, and other sectors. The most radical among them envisioned a broad Popular Front uniting all of labor in support of a democratic socialist program that built on the innovations of the New Deal.5The domestic Cold War suppressed the solidarities of the Popular Front along with the expansive class consciousness of its white-collar partisans. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the WGA, SAG, and AFTRA (the latter two only merged in 2012) endorsed liberal social causes, but like most other unions they generally pursued their own interests. Their recent disputes with the AMPTP, however, have been influenced by the more general upsurge in organizing throughout the US working class in the last several years. Quite a few writers and performers portrayed their strikes as part of this renewed militancy, and emphasized their common experiences, such as employment precarity or difficulties in obtaining affordable housing. Other workers immersed in their own ongoing organizing or contract fights reciprocated by asserting linkages between the various struggles. In southern California, this was particularly evident in the overlap with the bold wave of strikes that unite here Local 11 initiated in the region's hospitality industry.6 It may be a far cry from the mass activism of the 1930s and 1940s, but at least the trends are pointing in the right direction.Looking forward beyond the strikes, the viability of writing and acting as occupations may hinge on the reconsideration of a question that preoccupied these unionists’ radical forebears in the Popular Front: Is consumer capitalism actually capable of supporting the quantity and quality of culture and knowledge necessary to provide adequate employment for the creative class, let alone to sustain a truly democratic society? For many culture workers in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, the answer was clearly no. At the same time that they organized unions throughout commercial media and entertainment, they also established alternative sites of production with public, labor, or cooperative backing. The Works Progress Administration's cultural projects during the Great Depression were the most prolific and best-known of these experiments, and supporters of the Popular Front pressed hard for their continuation on a permanent basis. The postwar epoch of abundance seemingly rendered the radicals’ question moot, but as the more recent decades of austerity keep grinding away, it is regaining salience for many employed in the culture industries. For all that the writers and actors accomplished in 2023 by defiantly withholding their labor, they could not compel employers to demand substantially more of it. As was the case before the strikes, television and movie production simply do not generate enough work for all of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA members who want to be employed in the industry on a full-time basis. At an online workshop on career transitions for WGA East members that took place in December, presenters advised members to consider the possibilities of having “portfolio careers” that combined writing for movies and television with other occupations and sources of income. Many of the examples they offered, however, such as journalism or adjunct teaching, are in other creative fields similarly afflicted by employment precarity and economic insecurity.The US economy on the whole may have rebounded from the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is clear that within our contemporary iteration of capitalism, there is a general crisis affecting all types of culture and knowledge production that is worsening at an accelerating pace. The 2023 fight by WGA and SAG-AFTRA for fair contracts is the same one that journalists in dozens of News Guild units around the country are waging to save what remains of local reporting. It is the same one that unionizing workers employed by museums and book publishers are engaged in to raise standards so that their jobs can become sustainable careers. And it is the same fight that is taking place throughout higher education, whether in the 2023 strikes at Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, Temple University, and elsewhere to improve conditions, or in the mobilizations against layoffs and program eliminations at West Virginia University, the University of Connecticut, and the City University of New York, as well as at countless state comprehensive institutions (like mine) where the cuts get less attention.For many of us who earn a living by creating culture and knowledge in the United States, our future employment prospects will on a expansion of which is an the current the last several years, have organized through and through for a New for to for for at institutions on the of labor this would not only make higher in the United States a once but would also all academic workers to earn a on the model of the Writers of the to sustain journalism as a career path and to the news to our democratic television and motion picture production could a new of of the in production activity over the fifteen years to the COVID-19 had been part of a of streaming predicated on interest rates and online platforms to and in of future With these conditions the industry to in years. producers have over the last few months. They have to the resulting as a of the strikes and new contract but in so they have and since it was the economic that led the AMPTP to such a stance at the bargaining in the first WGA, and the other unions in the industry might want to consider organizing in of a bold proposal to establish new production and distribution outlets under democratic on the cultural what into the conventional a program would also provide an alternative to the state that have production of movies and television in recent years under conditions that have only and all these and the of in this country will require not only solidarity among the members of the creative class but more the of a all types of