Jul 14, 2023 8 min read

writers/actors strike & the seanchaí

i'm a teacher and a writer, but only one of those things pays me enough to eat consistently. i'm in a place where that's changing, but because of this tension i think a lot about the ways we value (or don't) art and human creativity. most of us have watched this change in drastic ways in our lifetime. remember when you used to go to the store to buy a record/tape/cd if you loved an artist? remember when you could either watch what was on tv or go rent something from blockbuster? remember when bringing a book was the best way to pass the time in a waiting room?

i'm of the Octavia Butler school of thought regarding change, so i can recognize the ways that the advent of the internet and the streaming and sharing it has facilitated have positive and negative consequences. i can also recognize the ways that we need to shape this change, that doing so is actually long overdue.

this newsletter will start with a meditation on valuing art before giving a brief overview of what's going on, naming some key dynamics, and offering some thoughts on what it means for us as humans/consumers of art.

the seanchaí & valuing art

my mother, like her mother before her, always likes to remind me that i'm a strong irish woman (actual genealogical percentages be damned, it's the only heritage we've passed down). i've been spending more time learning what that means, and in my researching/reading/reflecting, i was lucky enough to come across Diane Beresford-Kroeger's work and especially this tidbit.

"That esteem, which was heaped in equal measure on even the smallest tidbits, stories, songs, and poems is a crucial component of Celtic culture. And there was a constant reminder of it in every farmhouse...the bed kept for the seanchaí. The seanchaí was a wandering storyteller, a man with a prodigious memory and a compelling delivery...In the colder months, roughly from harvest to planting, he would travel from place to place sharing his stories with people....The leaba was capable of seating two or three people or sleeping one with a cushion under them for comfort. The seanchaí had a right to that bed in every house he entered." — From "To Speak for the Trees" by Diane Beresford-Kroeger

Beresford-Kroeger goes on to tell of her experience listening to the seanchaí's stories in a warm kitchen surrounded by people from all over the area who listened to him all night and into the morning before he moved on to the next community where his needs would be provided for in exchange for the magic of his stories.

who's striking now?

yesterday the u.s.'s biggest and most powerful actors union went on strike joining the writer's union who have been on strike for almost three months.

The leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, announced the strike after negotiations with studios over a new contract collapsed, with streaming services and artificial intelligence at the center of the standoff. On Friday, the actors will join screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, on picket lines in New York, Los Angeles and the dozens of other American cities where scripted shows and movies are made.

Actors and screenwriters had not been on strike at the same time since 1960,

“I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us!” Fran Drescher, the president of SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ union is known, said at a news conference on Thursday in Los Angeles. “How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s. It is disgusting. Shame on them!”

(the link to the story that contains these and the following quotes is below)

solidarity & lack thereof

i have the privilege of being a union member after an organizing campaign my colleagues and i led this school year, and one of my favorite things about unionizing is the solidarity it builds among workers.

a union doesn't just happen, a union is the result of workers talking to each other about what they need and joining together to make sure it happens. it's a evolving, ongoing process, one of the few remaining examples of democracy within the united states.

every union that forms, every contract we win is a reaffirmation of our collective power. a reminder that when we fight, we win—and we are winning, from teachers unions to Amazon and more, working class people are unionizing all over this country whether traditional news outlets are covering it or not.

U.S. union workers are finding more solid footing during contract negotiations with employers as a tight labor market allows employees to flex more bargaining power. Airline pilots, railroad employees, dockworkers, and others have pushed for higher pay and better benefits, rebuffing offers from companies that in some contracts appeared significant.

the actor's guild, SAG-AFTRA, going on strike and joining the writer's guild, WGA, builds tremendous collective power among creators and artists.

The actors’ walkout will provide an immediate boon to the striking writers, who have been walking picket lines for more than 70 days; the Writers Guild has yet to return to bargaining with the studios. Now those picket lines are likely to be raucous and star-studded spectacles — struggling thespians still trying to get a foothold next to A-listers with bodyguards who are paid $20 million or more per movie role.

notable: the Director's Guide signed a contract earlier this year. funny how the people who already make the most on sets are the least interested in negotiating for change, and by funny I mean wack. there will always be folks willing to sell us all out because it benefits them.

rich people believe they aren't rich enough

the bosses will always tell you there isn't enough money while their wallets are fat. the entertainment industry, like so many others, is beholden to rich people who invested their surplus wealth in hopes of making even more money from projects they do absolutely no work on.

The strikes are the latest monumental blow to an entertainment industry that has been rocked in recent years by the pandemic and sweeping technological shifts. The Hollywood studios have watched their share prices nose-dive and their profit margins shrink as viewership for cable and network television — as well as box office returns — has collapsed in the wake of the explosive growth of streaming entertainment. Many companies have resorted to layoffs, as well as purging series from their streaming services, all in the name of trying to increase profit margins and satisfy recalcitrant investors.

these negotiations and the strikes they've necessitated are a crystal clear reminder of why it's fuck rich people forever. these executives and their share holders would rather ruin people's lives than give up some of their unbelievable surplus of money.

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.”

this is exactly when you unionize

in addition to the classic "it's the union's fault we can't make a deal, they're being unreasonable" song and dance, the bosses are always going to say the timing is wrong. classic.

In an interview on CNBC on Thursday morning, Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, said that given all the “disruptive forces” in the business, “this is worst time in the world to add to that disruption.” Barry Diller, the veteran media executive, said in an interview that the recent upheaval in the industry had caused distress for both sides. “You have a complete change in the underlying economics of the entertainment business that it previously held for certainly the last 50 years, if not the last 100 years,” he said. “Everything was basically in balance under the hegemony of five major studios, and then, oh, my God, along come the tech companies in Netflix, Amazon and Apple and the fast, transformative things that came out of Covid. The result of which is you have a business that’s just completely upended.”

i don't know much about the balance Barry Diller, a man worth 4.1 billion dollars according to Forbes, is describing, but his use of the word hegemony leads me to believe it wasn't a balance that was particularly friendly to workers.

disruption is exactly the point of unionizing and disruption is not a bad thing. disrupting a system that is extractive is necessary and important. people who benefit from this imbalance will always try to speak to the conservative part of each of us that is scared of change, even when we know it's needed.

right now, as the entire entertainment industry continues to shift, is EXACTLY the time that writers, actors, and all creators and workers who actually make the entertainment we consume need to have a seat at the bargaining table. new ways of making entertainment are here. being afraid of them or lamenting the loss of simpler times will not change that. unions allow the people who create both the art and the profits it produces to decide how this new entertainment industry will work. if the entertainment industry can't pay creatives fairly, it should cease to exist in it's current form and make way for something better.

we need our storytellers

"To the Celts, story is everything, both an act and a piece of creation. The seanchaí had the ability to spin whole worlds out of nothing, and people would travel miles to crowd in around him and the kitchen fire." — From "To Speak for the Trees" by Diane Beresford-Kroeger

together, writers and actors and all the workers on sets collaborate to create art that inspires us, makes us laugh, makes us feel seen, makes us think, or even just distracts us. as a species, humans need stories, and we've been using them as a foundation of our cultures for seemingly as long as we've been around. we need our storytellers, and in an age where their stories are more profitable than ever, we've got to do right by them, cuz this is not it:

Post by @kendrick38

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as always, i hope this was helpful. if it was and you'd like to support a writer directly and/or are curious about abolition, i've got a summer special for 50% the regular subscription price.

with hope,

katie wills evans