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It’s the summer of strikes. On May 2, 2023, the Writers Guild of America voted nearly unanimously to authorize a strike after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down. Among the key issues of contention between the California-based union and the studios are declining residuals throttled in the era of streaming and the use of A.I. in the industry — the WGA wants strict regulations in place preventing generative programs from taking the place of scriptwriters. As of today (July 27), the WGA has been on strike for 86 days. It was already one of the most significant labor actions in decades — the WGA last voted to strike in 2007 — before SAG-AFTRA, another huge labor union consisting of actors, performers, and other creatives, launched a strike of their own on July 14. The first joint walkout since the ’60s, it’s effectively shut down Hollywood, one of the biggest economies in the United States.
There’s a growing sense of worker empowerment and outrage beyond the movie lots as well. For weeks, it appeared likely that UPS and its 300,000 full and part-time workers would go on strike in protest of low wages and unsafe work conditions (the vans many workers spend their days in can register temperatures as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit). On July 26, a deal was announced that secured pay raises for every worker, extra vacation, and air-conditioned vans. Teamsters President Sean M. O’Brien called it “the best contract in the history of UPS.” All that without even stepping foot on a picket line.
While it might be inspiring to see these big groups band together to improve their lives, it can be difficult to see how that same spirit can be applied to our own. Hamilton Nolan, a labor reporter for In These Times and How Things Work, understands this deeply.
In 2016, Nolan was an employee at Gawker. He remembers how he and his co-workers would complain about their jobs, something almost every single other employee in the U.S.A. can relate to. Then, Nolan and the rest of Gawker’s editorial staff came together to form a union. “It really changed people,” Nolan told me over the phone. “It gave people an understanding of your own agency and your own power, if you grab it.”
While the Hollywood strikes can seem as far from our reality as any movie, the truth is that its lessons and motivations can be utilized by millions of people across the country. Here, Nolan breaks down how.
The FADER: Let’s say you’re speaking directly to your average non-union worker who has seen the strikes in the news. What would you want them to understand most about the strikes themselves?
Hamilton Nolan: People who don't have any connection to Hollywood do have the personal experience of what it's like to work in this country. What you're seeing with the Hollywood strikes right now is, fundamentally, people protesting something that's not that different from what's happening in a ton of other industries. Over time, industries are evolving to minimize the amount of money that goes to the working people and maximize the amount of money that goes to the owners, and the investors, and the management.
The only thing that really makes Hollywood unique in this case is the fact that Hollywood is an industry that is heavily unionized. What you're seeing right now is what happens when you do have an industry where unions exist and are able to give a lot of power to working people and provide working people with a mechanism to fight back against this same trend that's affecting a lot of industries. So I tell people, even if you don't give a shit about Hollywood, these people who are on strike right now are fighting to turn around something that's hurting all types of different working people in America.
So let's say that this hypothetical person now says, "I'm on board with this." What should that person do next to apply what they're seeing to their own lives?
Everybody deserves a union, and everybody would benefit from a union. If you're a working person and you don't have a union, you're leaving money on the table. There is an amount of money that your boss has taken out of your pockets that you're not getting because you don't have the ability to bargain collectively. So as long as you are a full-time employee, you are legally allowed to have a union in America.
So what they should do is, A: They should just talk to some of their coworkers, first of all, about why they're thinking about this, what issues people have in the workplace, what problems do people have, what would they like to see change, what would they like to improve, what are the good things they might like to preserve?
Usually when you start talking to your coworkers, you find that a lot of people have the same issues and the same problems within the workplace. So open up those lines of communication. You can go on the website of the AFL-CIO, and they can help you get in touch with the union organizer. Or, there's a great group called the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. That’s a volunteer group of organizers that you can reach out to and contact online and they'll get back to you and they'll help you get in touch with an organizer.
What are some of the biggest hurdles that people who are organizing or considering organizing can expect when going through this process?
One of the biggest hurdles is fear. People are afraid that if they organize, they will get fired. And to that, I would say, again, "Organizing your work is a legally protected activity in America. It's against the law for your boss to retaliate against you. And everybody should know that they have that right."
But the other biggest stumbling block is really ignorance. Not in a pejorative sense, but most people just don't know how the process works. They don't really know what goes into it. They're not quite sure what their rights are. There was a time when 1 in 3 workers in America were union members. Now it's 1 in 10. A lot of people have just never really had any contact with unions. So of course they don't know how it all works necessarily, but that is the type of thing that a union organizer can help take you through. The process is really pretty straightforward, and it involves a lot of talking to the people that you work with, and getting on the same page, and then having a vote. It's a democratic process.
If a full-time worker is classified as an independent contractor, that severely limits their ability to organize as a union. What recourse do they have?
Legally speaking, you cannot legally unionize as independent contractors. And that is why so many businesses in this country, from everything from colleges and universities, to Uber and DoorDash, every business tries to push full-time employees off the books and replace them with "independent contractors." Everybody should understand that, for as much as businesses talk about freedom and flexibility and all that, businesses do it because they don't want to pay people benefits and they don't want people to have the right to organize. But that said, what can they do?
You still see labor groups like Los Deliveristas in New York. That is a group made up of delivery workers who are all independent contractors who've come together to organize as a labor group. Even though you can't formally unionize the same way that full-time employees can, you can still absolutely talk to your coworkers, form a group of the people who are doing the same job as you, and talk about how you can work together to improve your situation. So it's definitely not hopeless. And you've also seen a lot of organizing among Uber drivers and things like that, and there are groups that have won things like minimum wages for Uber and Lyft drivers and stuff like that gets won by, partly by organizing those workers together so they can organize and take political action, even though they can't be a union per se.
One of the biggest roadblocks that I see when it comes to just about any of the existential crises that we're facing is the sense of despair among many. The sense that power is too entrenched and it's just too big of an adversary to even contemplate serious action against it. How does one respond to this?
To me, one of the greatest things about the labor movement is that you could be a regular ass working person at the most regular ass job in the middle of nowhere in America, and you can organize with your coworkers who are all just people like you. Nobody would've said to somebody working at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, "Hey, you are important, you're powerful."
But those people organized, they got attention from the entire national media because of what they were doing. And even though they lost, they plugged into the entire political power structure of America. They had United States senators watching them, they had the President of the United States talking about them. That is how important the labor movement is, and that's the level of power that it offers to everybody. You know you don't have to be somewhere special. You don't have to be somebody special, you don't have to be rich and famous. Every working person can plug into that. And so I really believe in it as an antidote to that kind of sense of hopelessness.
