"Speechless" 27-29 [Including Andy Warhol Homage]
Previously on "Speechless"
Win, lose or draw, Hollywood's
striking writers have smashed the myth
that in our creative, cyber-oriented world
new forms of work and enterprise
would put an end to the old conflicts
and controversies that once plagued industrial America
No one can foresee how the current writers strike will end
But one thing has been settled:
Regardless of the technology they manipulate,
the skills they have mastered,
or the global companies for which they work,
this 21st century brand of knowledge worker
can hardly escape the gritty economic tensions
that have faced every generation of men and women
who exchange their labor for their livelihood
And if such conflicts can still
arise in trend-setting Hollywood,
then no sector of America's
burgeoning knowledge economy is exempt
The US writers strike proves that the new 'knowledge
workers' of the 21st century still need to fight
old battles for a fair share of their output [original]
Win, lose or draw, Hollywood's striking writers have written finis to one long-running episode in American cultural and intellectual history.
For years the most sophisticated prognosticators writing about the global economy have assured us that in our creative, cyber-oriented world new forms of work and enterprise would put an end to the old conflicts and controversies that once plagued industrial America.
Contests over money, power and status, not to mention strikes, unions and hard-nosed bargaining sessions, were increasingly played out.
They were so rust-belt, certainly out of place in the hip and hyper-innovative world spawned by new media, iPod downloads and hyper-educated workers.
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first secretary of labour, forecast an America in which legions of newly minted "symbolic analysts" made the United States globally competitive once again, even as they transformed the old corporate hierarchies into a system that was "more collaborative, participatory, and egalitarian than is high-volume, standardized production."
Likewise, Peter Drucker, the celebrated founder of modern management theory, declared that in the 21st century the "most valuable asset" of the corporation "will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."
And the best-selling New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued that a world-wide communications revolution had made educated labour even more valuable. "There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with the knowledge and ideas to seize them."
If ever there was a group of men and women who fulfilled the expectations of Reich, Friedman and other hopeful pundits, the membership of the Writers Guild of America would seem to meet all the key criteria.
They have almost all gone to university, and they are all highly literate in English, the language that is far and away the most important in world commerce, science and entertainment.
They labour in an industry that has tripled its employment during the last quarter century and which is one of the few export powerhouses that can be clearly labeled "Made in America."
And most important, the products they create on their keypads and drawing boards, or in the furious banter that explodes around a conference table, are nothing less than that of the imagination itself.
But here we are in the third month of an increasingly bitter strike by 12,000 TV and film writers.
The issues at stake seem high tech and futuristic: the extent to which writers will earn royalties and residuals from the sale and distribution of creative product on the web and in other new media formats. But this kind of conflict is nothing new.
For centuries workers have sought to win a share of the money that came pouring forth when new forms of production or distribution transformed the old way of doing things.
Artisan weavers of early 19th century Britain have been forever denounced as "Luddites" because their machine-breaking rampages failed to win for them a share of the productivity and profits generated by the steam-powered looms then being deployed by a new class of textile magnates.
But a century later wagon-driving teamsters successfully bargained their way from horses to trucks, winning for a few 20th century decades a middle-class income and the security that a union contract can provide.
The same dynamic has been at work in Hollywood. In the early 1930s when the revenue stream generated by radio broadcasts and film production expanded rapidly, writers and actors sought to win their share.
A strike by radio script writers, mainly New York based, ended in failure, so they earned no residuals when Amos and Andy and The Lone Ranger proved so popular in the Depression decade and after.
But other "knowledge workers" of that era did a lot better. Taking their cue from the great organizing drives and strikes mounted by industrial workers in Detroit, Pittsburgh and Akron, a whole cohort of union-like "talent guilds" sprang to life for reporters, teachers, architects and engineers.
In Tinseltown itself writers, actors and directors like Frank Capra, John Howard Lawson, Eddie Cantor, Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery formed their own guilds, sometimes inspired by radical visions of a new society, but more often they merely sought to give to their careers some of the autonomy and remuneration that ambitious and creative people have always craved.
No one can foresee how the current writers strike will end. But one thing has been settled: regardless of the technology they manipulate, the skills they have mastered, or the global companies for which they work, this 21st century brand of knowledge worker can hardly escape the gritty economic tensions that have faced every generation of men and women who exchange their labor for their livelihood.
And if such conflicts can still arise in trend-setting Hollywood, then no sector of America's burgeoning knowledge economy is exempt.