Hollywood strike puts spotlight on other labour unrest

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In the opening days of the screen actors’ strike this month, Jane Fonda laid out the stakes. “Income inequality has never been greater since the Gilded Age in the Twenties. And that’s why unions are so important,” she told The Wrap on a picket line outside Netflix headquarters in California.

The parallel strikes of actors and writers have darkened the silver screen, populating picket lines with the most recognizable faces in entertainment. Some of their demands are unique to the rarefied space they occupy, such as protection against the use of a human likeness by artificial intelligence.

But no one commands a crowd like an A-list celebrity, and those on strike have sought to make the case that their fight is not for Hollywood alone. “It’s really for all the workers in all the sectors,” Ms. Fonda said.

There is reason to think she might be right.

“They’re really fighting for what everyday workers in Canada are fighting for. They’re fighting against corporate greed and against CEOs who prioritize profits over workers and their families,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.

And having stars make that case “does make people sit up and listen in a different way.”

What’s not yet clear is whether a celebrity work stoppage will help other workers – or hurt them.

Not for decades have labour issues been as heated as they are today. Last year saw a 60-per-cent increase in the number of people involved in U.S. work stoppages. The first five months of 2023 saw nearly twice the number of workers on strike compared with 2022, and that was before the so-called “summer of strike.” High inflation and low unemployment have shifted bargaining power in the direction of unions, which have seen a resurgence in activism after many years of withering power.

“We’ve changed the game,” Teamsters general president Sean M. O’Brien said last week, after negotiating landmark increases to wages and benefits for UPS workers.

The Hollywood workers have, so far, shown no such success.

From actors to dockworkers: This summer of strikes is actually good for the economy

But their strike has achieved a profile unlike any other labour action in recent years. Snoop Dogg cancelled a Los Angeles show in solidarity; U.S. President Joe Biden has skipped the city in recent fundraising tours. The Major League Baseball Players Association and National Hockey League Players’ Association have both spoken in support.

“Actors are no different than any other worker, or athletes or anybody like that,” NHLPA executive director Marty Walsh said in an interview.

He likens the Hollywood strike to other high-profile standoffs between corporations and their employees, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Starbucks Corp. Workers at both have joined unions, but collective bargaining has yet to yield any results. In June, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Amazon to “bargain in good faith” with the Amazon Labor Union. Similarly, talks between actors and studios are at a standstill.

Mr. Walsh, who served as U.S. secretary of labour from 2021 until earlier this year, believes a “day of reckoning will come where they will have to negotiate.”

But the resolve shown by Amazon and Starbucks has slowed some of the momentum shown by a labour movement that, a year ago, seemed on the precipice of ending a long period of increasing marginalization. The private-sector unionization rate in the U.S. has fallen to just six per cent, half of where it stood as recently as 1990.

The pandemic era has delivered conditions that are “as good as it gets from the underlying economic conditions perspective for organized labour,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. But unions have failed to make widespread gains, underscoring that “without something fundamental in labour law reform, it’s really an impossible goal,” he said.

That doesn’t render the Hollywood strike irrelevant. For workers who have already organized, the results of a high-profile job action can matter.

“We know from past research that successful strikes prove contagious,” said Prof. Rosenfeld, the author of What Unions No Longer Do. “Strikes tend to occur in bursts, as unionized workers look around and see what their compatriots are doing in other industries.”

But the opposite is also true. Unsuccessful strikes tend to produce a dampening effect on other labour actions, and few strikes have been more closely watched than the one currently under way.

Emmy Awards postponed due to strike by Hollywood actors and writers

Even so, there are other reasons the Hollywood strike stands to have an outsized influence. The issues they have promoted, for example, have resonance.

“If you look at both the writers and the actors, a lot of them say their pay, benefits and conditions of work have really been degraded over the past 10 to 15 years because of technology and because of the changing business model of the industry,” said John Logan, a labour scholar at San Francisco State University.

Millions of workers can relate.

“The labour movement has historically not been very good at communicating why people should care about the right to organize or the right to strike,” he said. It has proven difficult to overcome the ability of deep-pocketed organizations to control narratives.

But “people are more likely to hear it from Hollywood actors.”

Perhaps that might even provide some help toward those seeking labour reform in the U.S. Under the Barack Obama presidency, Congress failed to pass an Employee Free Choice Act that would have removed current impediments to forming unions and completing collective agreements.

Part of the reason is that, at the time, there was little groundswell of union support. That has been changing, and the publicity created by Hollywood stars on picket lines doesn’t hurt.

“We’re still a long way from getting any kind of stronger labour laws in the United States,” Prof. Logan said. “But at least the environment has changed in a way that makes it less impossible-seeming now than it was during the Obama administration.”