‘WHAT WOULD LARRY DAVID DO?’

WGA rally in 2007 / Jengod on Wikimedia Commons CC

Once I asked an aunt how often her husband had gone on strike with the United Auto Workers when he worked at the Caterpillar tractor plant in Peoria, Illinois.

“Every time there was a contract negotiation,” she said, looking surprised that I would even ask.

My uncle’s time on picket lines must have taken a toll on a single-income, working-class family with two children. But because the UAW pension plan had benefits for surviving spouses, my aunt had an easier old age than she would have had without those strikes for better contracts.

My maternal grandfather also worked for Caterpillar, and I became a third-generation union member when I took a job at a Cleveland newspaper that was a “closed shop,” a place where certain types of employees had to join the union.

I spent more than a decade in Local №1 of the Newspaper Guild, which received its number because American journalism unions began in its city. During those years, I saw firsthand how unions help all of us.

Best sign of the WGA strike so far / Victor LaValle via @WGAEast on Twitter

It’s easy to sentimentalize the labor movement, which has been dying for decades in the United States. And it’s easy to forget that — along with working-class heroes — it’s had the kind of corrupt union bosses Marlon Brando fought as a longshoreman in “On the Waterfront.”

But the benefits of my membership in Local 1 were real, and they emerged quickly. I had a secretary, whom I’ll call Lillian, and when a contract negotiation neared, she mentioned casually that she’d been classified for years as “clerk” instead of a “secretary.”

This news was shocking. Clerks had less complex responsibilities — and a lower pay grade — than secretaries. Lillian sat next to the door to my office, and countless people, including managers, stopped by daily and could see her at work. How could management have let this go on?

I walked over to the desk of the president of Local 1— which, conveniently, was just across the newsroom — and asked if he would try to get Lillian reclassified during the upcoming contract negotiations.

“Lillian’s not classified as a secretary?” he asked, looking as confused as my aunt had when I’d asked about the UAW strikes. “I thought she was.”

The union president agreed to bring up the issue, and the inexplicable error turned out to be so clear to both labor and management that — however sticky the contract negotiations were on other issues — Lillian’s reclassification sailed through. Her higher pay grade would make a difference not just to her salary but to her pension in retirement.

Stephen Colbert shows his support for the strike / @WGAEast on Twitter

My union had a different focus than does the Writers Guild of America, which has gone on strike after failing to resolve its differences with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over pay, job security, and other issues.

Members of the Newspaper Guild, now called the NewsGuild-CWA, traditionally have been journalists and other professionals employed by media organizations. The WGA represents freelancers for movies, television, radio, and streaming services.

Yet the labor disputes of both groups increasingly have involved the same issue: the profound disruptions in their industries caused by technology.

At newspapers, the apocalypse began when the “hot type” of Linotype machines gave way to photo-offset and digital printing techniques.

Linotype machine / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons CC

A similar upheaval has come to Hollywood as streaming has proliferated.

Streaming services use smaller staffs for shorter periods of time than do movies and TV shows, which makes it harder for writers to earn a dependable living. The lack of a regular seasonal calendar in streaming has further eroded writers’ incomes, a recent WGA report said. The annual pay boosts aren’t keeping pace with inflation.

Everyone is feeling the effects as “the industry shifts from the 22-episodes-a-year world of network television to the eight-episodes-every-18-months-if-you’re-lucky model embraced by streaming companies,” wrote Zack Stentz, the screenwriter for “Thor” and “Agent Cody Banks.”

You may find it hard to sympathize with the striking writers given how astronomical some of their wages sounded in an AP story:

“The weekly minimum for a staff writer on a television series in the 2019–2020 season was $4,546, according to industry trade outlet Variety. They work an average of 29 weeks on a network show for $131,834 annually, or an average of 20 weeks on a streaming show for $90,920. For a writer-producer, the figure is $6,967 per week.”

I never earned close to those numbers at my newspaper, and I had a job considered a plum: writing a column. I’m fairly certain my uncle didn’t earn them, either, when he was a machinist in the UAW.

But unions have benefits for societies that go far beyond their effects on any member’s wages.

A protest by people earning less than the top 1 percent / Wikimedia Commons

Income inequality has increased drastically in the United States since the 1980s. Families in the top one percent of earners now own one third of all the wealth in the U.S., according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Inequality is a problem worldwide, but it’s grown more here than in other well-off countries, the Pew Research Center has found. The middle class is shrinking.

Several factors are driving the growing inequality. They include wage stagnation, lower savings rates, and capital gains on financial and other assets, according to a report released by the business school at Imperial College in London in 2023.

What’s driving the depressed wages? Economists point to factors like globalization, changing technology, and America’s failure to raise the minimum wage in 14 years.

Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn / APB Speakers’ Bureau

Another powerful driver of income inequality — the long, slow demise of unions — has emerged in books ranging from academic treatises to Tightrope, journalist Nick Kristof’s memoir of the decline of his hometown of Yakima, Oregon, written with Sheryl WuDunn.

Worse, the decline of unions — and the income inequality it helps to fuel — has effects that go beyond the bank account of any American.

Less equal societies have less stable economies, the recent Imperial College Business School report noted. Income inequality also fosters political and social instability. A wide gap between the rich and the poor contributes to higher rates of violent and property crimes and lower math, reading, and science stores, the British charity Equality Trust has found.

You might argue that it’s a stretch to connect a Tinseltown strike for better pay to, say, lower test scores. But think about it: If you’re a writer whose income has plunged because of streaming and you have to reduce your expenses, who are you going to stop paying first: the doctor or electric company or the math tutor your child needs?

The official strike logo / @WGAWest on Twitter

The larger issue behind the strike — Americans’ growing inability to earn a decent living — isn’t just a problem in Hollywood. It’s a problem everywhere.

I wish I could fight it by supporting my old union the next time it goes on strike. But I can’t. Decades of union-busting efforts by the paper’s corporate owners had their desired effect in 2020.

A tweet from Local 1 of the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild announced that my old paper’s last four reporters would be laid off and offered jobs at its non-union sister site, Cleveland.com.

The irony wasn’t lost on the journalism website NiemanLab:

“It’s a boom time for union organizing of journalists, as newsrooms in dozens of online news organizations, magazines, and newspapers decide collective representation is important in what has become a wildly insecure industry.”

Meanwhile, in the Ohio city where newsroom organizing began, the union was dead.

Hollywood writers might seem to have nothing in common with my former co-workers in an old, rundown building in a scruffy part of Cleveland. But they do: Like my old colleagues, they believe that all workers deserve to be paid fairly, and I salute them for it.

is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book critic for the Plain Dealer, the book columnist for Glamour, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has appeared in major print and online media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon. She has taught writing at two major universities and now teaches and coaches writers privately.

You might like another of my stories on writers’ incomes: