McGraw-Hill
HR Management
Hollywood Labor
Unions: Building Relationships
The kind of issues that really
concern talent — that is, performers, in some ways they’re very
similar to the issues that
concern Americans in every walk of life, you know, do I have enough
money to pay my bills, is my work
being fairly compensated, am I being treated with respect and
dignity, am I — am I being
treated fairly, do I have healthcare for my family? These are all
really similar, and that’s why
we're so much like the rest of Americans no matter what People
magazine or Entertainment
Tonight may say.
America is a free country, but
how would you like to live in a nation where you're forced to work
12 or more hours for only a
dollar or so every day of the week? How would you like to work in
unsanitary conditions without
restrooms or even clean drinking water, where complaining about
any of these things will not only
cost you your job but could get you blacklisted from working
anywhere? Well, that was the
reality for many Americans during the Industrial Revolution, but
brave laborers have been
organizing since our first states united in order to ease those conditions.
The 40-hour workweek, the
eight-hour workday, weekends, lunch breaks, minimum wage and
minimum safety conditions, as
well as a host of other job site improvements, were all won by
ordinary people uniting for
bargaining leverage supported by government legislation. Such
battles were often hard won, with
both labor and business sometimes clashing violently, as in the
Haymarket Square riot of 1886,
but all in all the relationship between industry and organized
labor has grown into one of
mutual respect, and one industry where that’s particularly important
is the entertainment industry,
where hundreds of millions of dollars can ride on the quality of
labor provided to a project and
where the intimacies of labor relations are on public display,
oftentimes in the very products
produced.
HR Management: Clip 16
McGraw-Hill — Page 2
They can be very intimate, but
sometimes, just like a marriage, they can explode, as we
witnessed with Tom Cruise and
Sumner Redstone, and also as an actor working in this business,
you know, I've had the
opportunity to talk to a lot of high-profile actors, and I’m always gratified
when they understand what the
union does for them and how the union offers them protections
that even in the best of times
the relationships with the studios don’t offer them.
Like many industries, the
entertainment industry was once dominated by flamboyant moguls
who controlled the production
with an iron fist. As emerging media, like motion pictures, radio
and television, began to define
themselves, only great talents like Charlie Chaplin or Jack Benny
commanded instant respect. For
most workers, early technological entertainment media were
heartbreaking affairs.
One of the earliest forms of
entertainment on radio, which became very popular very quickly,
was dramatic and comedic radio. A
lot of these professional performers were used to working
under Actors’ Equity contracts on
Broadway and some of the big theaters around the country,
and they were working in radio,
which was a novelty at first, and then eventually they recognized
that they were working for what
used to be called a dollar a holler, where, you know, you could
do a whole show and they’d give
you a buck.
Organized labor was already
making major inroads in America in the early twentieth century,
when motion pictures and radio were
in their golden age. The American Federation of Labor
was already protecting craft
labor, but its sister union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations,
had not yet been formed.
The AFL-CIO is not really a
traditional union. The AFL-CIO is an umbrella organization,
basically, that represents a lot
of labor unions.
In 1925, the Masquers Club was
formed by film industry workers fed up with grueling working
conditions in Hollywood. By 1933,
they would evolve into the Screen Actors Guild of America.
HR Management: Clip 16
McGraw-Hill — Page 3
About the same time, ten writers
organized the Writers Guild of America to replace its failing
predecessor, the Screen Writers
Guild.
These days mostly involve new
media, new technologies. This is a quickly evolving industry as
new technologies turn the
traditional push media environment, which refers to three networks, a
few cable channels and whatever
is playing in your local theater as being your choices for media,
to a pull environment, where you
have now five networks, an enormous number of cable
channels and the ability to go to
a video store, to download, to buy DVDs. Your entertainment
choices are much broader than
they used to be not only at any given time, but because of devices
like TiVo, whenever you choose to
watch what’s on TV, you can watch it, and programming has
become an irrelevant concept for
a lot of people.
In 1937, the American Federation
of Radio Artists was formed to support radio talent like
comedian and singer Eddie Cantor,
the union’s first president. In the 1950s, a similar union of
television labor was created and
soon merged with them.
AFTRA has extremely close
relations with both the other unions in our industrial sector, the
media industries through the
AFL-CIO, which we are very proud to be part of, and through the
AFL-CIO we are building a new
form of unity in the media industry unions, called an Industry
Coordinating Committee. What
that’s designed to do is to coordinate the activity of ten or
twelve major unions across the
media industries both in live theater and also electronic media.
Today one of the most challenging
issues in labor is assuring workforce diversity. Increasing
roles for union members of all
races, genders and sexual orientations both in front of the curtain
and behind it have expanded the
support demands made of entertainment unions.
There are Spanish-speaking SAG
members across this country who do the same kind of work
that English-speaking actors do,
have as many people watching their work as watch Englishspeaking
actors work, and they work for a
fraction of what we make.
HR Management: Clip 16
McGraw-Hill — Page 4
Such challenges mean that unions
may find themselves playing greater roles in securing benefits
and services, such as onsite
childcare, for member talent, but one of the most difficult issues such
unions face given that
entertainment remains largely a meritocracy, is assuring equal work for
equal pay.
It is a bit of an old boy
network, and male stars are paid more than female stars are, Caucasian
actors for the most part are paid
more than actors of color, and that’s endemic in this society and
it’s one of the big problems that
we have in America that I’m constantly working on. Who
knows if it will ever go away.
Unions like the WGA, SAG and
AFTRA are all designed to protect average workers, but what
happens when a small player like
an independent filmmaker whose budget can’t support union
wages and benefits comes along?
Union flexibility in such circumstances is one of the key ways
that unions attract new members.
Our relation to those individuals
is once you get the job, come talk to us and we'll see if we can
— we can raise the bar for you so
that your next job is covered and you do get the benefits.
The most powerful tool that organized
labor possesses is the strike, a cessation of all work by the
union against an offending
company or industry. A strike can be a hardship for union members
and devastating to their
industries, but for labor negotiations to have teeth, strikes are sometimes
unavoidable.
There was a massive strike in
1919 in Broadway, where the chorus kids all walked off the
Broadway shows and staged a huge
march up Broadway, and all the — all the leading
performers joined them, and that
was the moment that Actors’ Equity turned from a struggling
organization that was trying to
get a foothold into the trade union which really represented all the
workers, and it took a big strike
to do it.
HR Management: Clip 16
McGraw-Hill — Page 5
Strikes must not only be
carefully coordinated within a union but may also involve other unions,
such as the Teamsters, whose
truck drivers deliver goods to studios, for example. Sometimes a
strike may affect several unions
at once, such as if wages are impacted for both talent and
writers. In such a case, one
union may be presented with an opportunity for settlement while a
sister union is still in
negotiations.
Truthfully, the only thing to be
done about that is that everybody needs to understand the rules
going in and you have to make a
solidarity pact and agreement that you're going to stick
together, that nobody settles
until everybody settles.
As various forms of media evolve,
entertainment unions find themselves more relevant but also
hard pressed to define the scope
of their influence. For example, when an actor like Keith David
or CCH Pounder appears as
voiceover talent for a computer game like Interplay’s Fallout series,
are they actors or radio talent?
Under which union’s jurisdiction does the job fall? Certainly all
involved can anticipate new and
hybrid media emerging in the future.
We have to make sure as a union,
and all the talent unions have to make sure, that those people
who break in through those
mechanisms know that when the time comes to put that show or that
movie on a big screen or release
it in a DVD or distribute it through a download mechanism
that’s owned by Time Warner or
Disney or News Corp, that they will need guild protection.
The forms of new media aren’t the
only challenges to today’s unions. With the makeup of the
U.S. population shifting to a
larger proportion of retirement-age citizens, unions, like business,
will find more demands for
retirement benefits supported by fewer frontline workers and
contributors.
In our particular industry, the
fact is is that it’s a growing industry yet again. It’s growing. It’s
bringing more and more people
into the industry. There's going to be more revenues flowing
through the industry, so our
demographic problem is going to actually solve itself because of the
HR Management: Clip 16
McGraw-Hill — Page 6
expansion of the industry, so
that’s kind of actually pretty exciting. Now, our job, of course, is
to get all those workers and artists into our
pension plans so that we can support each other.
Video: Hollywood Labor Unions:
Building Relationships: http://bevideos.mhhe.com/business/video_library/0077437187/mp4/Clip_16.mp4 (or read Script)
The Discussion topics are based on
the video presented below. Watch the video and read the video script provided.
Answer the questions below. (100 words)
Discussion Questions
1.
What are some of the main challenges
that Hollywood Labor Unions are facing today?
2.
What can labor unions do to ensure
their long term viability while ensuring both sets of union and company
interests are satisfied?
Support your response with
information from the textbook or other academic source.
Video: Hollywood Labor Unions
Building Relationships: McGraw Hill. Retrieved from http://bevideos.mhhe.com/business/video_library/0077437187/mp4/Clip_16.mp4
Need 75 words response for the following
|
|||||
|
Need 75 words response for the following
|
Carlos
|
||
|
No comments:
Post a Comment