Last week, the Sag-Aftra union president, Fran Drescher, became the newest workers’ hero when she shouted defiantly after announcing actors were going on strike: “We are labour and we stand tall! And we demand respect, and to be honoured for our contribution.”
It’s a call that workers here in Australia should be echoing. It might appear that the strike is just about actors and writers and can be ignored by others, but Drescher rightly situated it as affecting all workers.
While issues of internet and streaming services AI might be hard for other workers to relate to, the broader issue of the strike is very much one all workers share. Drescher’s conclusion made this clear when she spoke directly to the studios and demanded in a manner that all employees could repeat to their own employers: “You! Share the wealth! Because you cannot exist without us!”
Can I get an “amen”?
The strike comes at an interesting time for labour relations in the US.
Support for unions is higher now than it has been any time since the 1960s – effectively recapturing all the loss in support that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s when neoliberalism took hold:
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But that support has not translated to union membership. Much as has occurred in Australia over the past 30 years; union membership is now at lowest-ever levels:
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This is crucial, because as we have seen from the strikes by actors and writers, the membership and unity it brings matters. Writers and actors are united to not cross the picket line, and this is effective because they also have extremely high rates of unionism – including among those who are themselves producers such as George Clooney and Matt Damon.
It is destroying this unity and strength that has been at the heart of industrial relations policy over the past 40 years.
The efforts to reduce unionism is not some random policy exercise that occurred across the US, UK, Canada and Australia by some bizarre coincidence.
It may have been painted as being about “modern economies” and “productivity” and “growing the pie”, but there is only one reason that conservative governments, business groups and pro-business media are behind efforts to reduce unions – they want cheaper labour:
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Union members get better pay and better wage rises.
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But it is not just union membership that business groups and conservatives have been against.
While workers might look to the Sag strike and feel emboldened by what they see, the reality is that Australian industrial relations laws are extremely restrictive.
Since the 1993 Industrial Relations Reform Act, which introduced enterprise bargaining, the ability to strike has been ever more restricted right up until the changes in last year’s amendments to the Fair Work Act:
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Strikes are quite rare – about 90% fewer days are now lost due to industrial action than was the case 30 years ago.
This is generally regarded as a marvellous success, and strikes are now routinely criticised in the media as bad for the economy – even sometimes by media companies whose journalists themselves have gone on strike.
Thus it was not surprising when the New South Wales minister for housing and homelessness, Rose Jackson, tweeted support of the Sag-Aftrs strike, and Mark Speakman, the NSW leader of the opposition responded by tweeting: “Labor seems keen to cheer on strikes.”
Strikes, we are told, sap productivity. The latest Productivity Commission’s 5-year productivity inquiry report stated “stoppages reduce the output and productivity of the businesses affected and have flow-on effects through disrupted supply chains”.
However, since 1993 the relationship between productivity and strikes is slightly positive – more days lost to industrial action coincide with periods of higher productivity. This doesn’t mean strikes increase productivity, just that there is no real sense they cause lower productivity.
Since the introduction of WorkChoices in 2006 there has been essentially no relationship between industrial action and productivity:
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The real reason strikes are hated is given in the very same Productivity Commission report, which noted that “industrial action is the most important source of leverage for employee bargaining”.
The past decade of industrial action and wage growth shows exactly what they mean:
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Strikes are effective tools for gaining higher wages, and unions are the ones that organise those strikes.
Reduce union membership and then also reduce the ability to strike and you provide a double whammy to workers hoping to get better wages and a fairer share of income.
Hollywood actors know that strength comes from unity. The Hollywood studios hate it. And Australian employers will be hoping workers ignore it.
They shouldn’t.
• Greg Jericho is a Guardian columnist and policy director at the Centre for Future Work
