The words that set Hollywood on its ear earlier this month weren’t from a script. Instead, they came from unidentified studio executives, who clearly laid out their plan for dealing with the more than 11,000 striking members of the Writers Guild of America.
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” one executive told the news site Deadline. Added another, “It’s been agreed to for months, even before the WGA went out.” A third industry source called the tactic “a cruel but necessary evil.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers pushed back on the report, saying those quoted in the story “are not speaking on behalf of the AMPTP or member companies, who are committed to reaching a deal and getting our industry back to work.”
But with no negotiations even scheduled, it’s possible that those sources are speaking on behalf of someone: the corporate behemoths that now control so many of the studios. And corporate owners are now so large, and spread across so many industries, that they can very much afford to wait out a strike.
In that regard, the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ labor talks have something in common with those of workers in less glamorous industries. Elsewhere in Los Angeles, hotel workers are striking for better pay and working conditions, and labor actions are occurring across the country in industries that have nothing to do with the Hollywood dream factory.
Tech companies have pockets deep enough to weather many, many labor storms, and they’ve got the ability to farm out much of their entertainment content needs overseas.
The motion picture and television miniverse is only a more glittering version of the reality faced by just about all workers today. Decades of deregulated takeover and consolidation across major U.S. industries have struck a hard blow to labor power. Unions are often in the position of negotiating not with their direct employer, but rather with one facet of a much, much larger conglomerate — one with nearly limitless resources and a constant eye on stock price.
These corporations, often multinationals, can wait out almost any single labor situation. They may not always want to, but they can. That tips the balance of power, creates a new layer of anxiety for those with livelihoods on the line, and potentially makes negotiating brutally difficult.
Hollywood isn’t immune. Already primarily owned by major companies, the industry over the past decade saw Disney swallow up 21st Century Fox, while telecommunications giant Comcast took over the Universal movie studio as part of its purchase of NBCUniversal. These are massive corporations. The Walt Disney Company did $82.7 billion in revenue last year, a 23% increase over the year before; Comcast drove $121 billion across its many platforms.
In addition, tech companies like Amazon, Apple and Netflix have rewritten the way consumers receive and pay for their entertainment — and in the case of Amazon and Apple, being in the TV/movie trade is little more than high-profile diversification. Those companies have pockets deep enough to weather many, many labor storms, and they’ve got the ability to farm out much of their entertainment content needs overseas, either buying directly from foreign countries or producing shows and series there, away from picket lines and closed studios.
Members of the WGA were joined on strike last week by SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 actors. But early reports and industry sources suggest that the premium streaming services believe they have enough content stockpiled to go months and months before users begin to feel they’re running out of entertainment choices — even into next season.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who was formerly a labor and employment lawyer for several Hollywood studios, wrote recently that for these conglomerates, “The production of entertainment/content might be a sliver of their overall business. …If some banks are ‘too big to fail,’ these companies might be ‘too big to successfully strike.’”
That notion, chilling as it sounds, is only a theory. But the tactic employed by the studios — to grind the strikers down by essentially doing nothing for months — is the sort of hardball play that companies and industries have used for years, in disparate settings around the country.
“They have thousands of workers on standby to replace us if we go on strike. You can check some of the job listings and see that. So we need to have maximum flexibility.”~ Kurt Petersen, UNITE HERE co-president
It’s interesting to consider the contrast between two of the higher-profile labor actions going on in Los Angeles right now: entertainers and creators in one fight, many of the city’s vast number of hospitality and hotel workers in another. Both WGA and SAG-AFTRA voted overwhelmingly to walk off the job entirely. For UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents more than 15,000 hotel and hospitality workers in Southern California, a different strategy emerged.
Rather than walk off en masse from the more than 60 hotels involved in the negotiations, UNITE HERE has been conducting more targeted strikes. The first, lasting three days, included some of L.A.’s most prominent downtown hotel properties and drew national media coverage; the second was concentrated at multiple hotels near the Los Angeles International Airport. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
In both cases, union members from throughout the region, including the WGA and others, showed up to picket. But after a few days, the hotel workers returned to their jobs, leaving the hotels guessing as to what comes next and where it’ll happen.
“I think they’re totally different industries,” Kurt Petersen, UNITE HERE co-president, said this week in discussing Hollywood and the hotel workers. “In our world, we just think we’re more effective by having the ability to strike at any time.”
There’s another factor, though. Many of the hotels involved in the negotiations are owned either by their giant parent companies — Marriott, Sheraton, Hilton, Hyatt — or by equally massive private equity firms or real estate investment trusts. Their resources are vast, as would be their ability to withstand a job action that they see coming.
“They have thousands of workers on standby to replace us if we go on strike,” Petersen said. “You can check some of the job listings and see that. So we need to have maximum flexibility.”
That may seem a world away from Hollywood, whose writers and actors feel irreplaceable. But what joins these labor movements, in some respects, is the sheer size of their opponents. It is not a new story, but in a country whose corporate wealth is increasingly concentrated in a few monoliths, it is one that labor will be facing repeatedly in the years to come.
