Hollywood's Workers and Peasants

by Jeffrey Tucker

11/03/07

Display Full Article/Printer Friendly | Send to a Friend   The workers and peasants of Hollywood, formed in solidarity against evil capitalistic sitcom producers, and organizing under the form of the Writers Guild of America, are threatening to withhold their astonishing talents pending an end to exploitation at the hands of their masters.   So goes the conventional story, which is inherently implausible in more ways than we can count. A guild for writers? I'm a writer. You probably are too. My kids are writers. In fact, I don't know anyone who isn't a writer. We think of guilds as a group of medieval craftsmen that had odd skills like glassblowing or horseshoe-making, and they formed as a way of extracting their just desserts against feudal masters.   None of these conditions apply today. The companies we work for hire and fire us freely, and we workers and peasants hire and fire them freely, too, by changing jobs whenever we want and negotiating our own terms. Blessed liberty!   No doubt that some people are better suited to writing funny and entertaining stuff for television than others. How can the producers find out who they are? The same way that most all employers seek employees in a free society: They make it known that labor services are needed. People make an application. They settle on terms, including what is expected in exchange for wages, salaries, and benefits.   Not so in the few industries left that remain anachronistically dominated by labor unions. These people earn high salaries -- though, for the life of me, I haven't been able to find data on precisely what WGA members make. You think that would be an important consideration for the public to know.   As best I can tell, the WGA is threatening a strike because the industry pulled in $4 billion for the summer, and now the unions see a chance -- without considering that one of the reasons for the high profits is precisely the margin of low costs that they are seeking to eliminate. It's like this: There's a guy with deep pockets, who also happens to employ us. Let's rob him!   Let's just forget all this talk about guilds. These are unions, and modern unions aren't built of a small band of skilled craftsmen seeking to protect themselves from overlords. They are large groups of workers seeking to cartelize themselves against competition from other workers. Exclusion is their goal. And it is pursued at the expense of other writers and consumers in particular. This is why they push, at a national level, laws like the minimum wage and restrictions against full-time work before the age of 18; they want a system in which the few profit at the expense of the many.   But, oddly, union members themselves are also victims of the union because, contrary to the principle of the freedom of association, they are not permitted to break the strike. If the bosses say strike, they are not permitted to work, and woe to the writer who dares think for himself. This collective action of the strike is called solidarity, but this is just another name for coercion.   If you doubt it, look at the strike rules: "There are Rules related to picket lines and other strike support activity, including: honoring all Guild picket lines; performing assigned strike support duties; and informing the Guild of strike breaking activity."   This sounds more like a mini-police state than a freedom-loving union proposing to fight the power. The power to rough up fellow union members is critical, however, to its coercive power. In fact, one of the demands of the Guild is to forbid production companies from using any methods of reprisal against people who strike. Now, imagine that: A company is forbidden from looking askance at employees who seek to harm the company!  Prev - Next >> Page 1 2