There’s a famous story from 1933 about how Hollywood got its unions.

The industry was in a Great Depression-sized crisis. MGM head Louis B. Mayer called all his writers, actors, directors to the executive studio projection room and told everyone they needed to agree to a 50% pay cut. Befitting Hollywood, a scene of high melodrama unfolded, as recounted in Miranda J. Banks’ excellent “The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild” (2015):

May Robson, an Australian-born actress who began her career as a Vitagraph star in 1916, rose from her chair and declared with great aplomb, “As the oldest person in the room, I will take the cut.” As if working from a script, eight-year-old child star Freddie Bartholomew took his cue and piped up, “As the youngest person in the room, I’ll take the cut.” It was then, when Mayer had the full attention of his audience, that he called for a vote to show a declaration of allegiance and a willingness to accept the salary reduction. Frances Goodrich, screenwriter for The Thin Man, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Father of the Bride, remembered, “Everyone got pious and scared.” The vote was cast with tears of solidarity, and the employees agreed to accept the loss in pay. Mayer promised that he would personally see to it that every penny was reimbursed someday. The tone was solemn as the room was rocked by the new reality of Hollywood economics. But walking back across the iron bridge to the front office buildings, Samuel Marx overheard Mayer gloating to his right-hand man and talent expert Benny Thau, “So! How did I do?” Albert Hackett, Goodrich’s husband and writing partner, said of the meeting, “Oh, that L. B. Mayer, he created more Communists that day than Karl Marx.”

When the smoke cleared, MGM survived, but the actors and writers never got reimbursed for their lost pay. They looked around and realized they’d been had:

What became apparent to the creative workers over the ensuing weeks was that two groups of personnel were never asked to cut back: the studio executives and the below-the-line (craft) employees who were covered under the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union contract. That the studio executives did not dock their own salaries came as little surprise; but the durability of the IATSE’s contract, even in the face of budget cuts, provided insight and inspiration to embryonic creative talent unions. Only a few weeks before the MGM meeting, IATSE workers, angered at the possibility of pay cuts, considered a strike across the studios and flatly refused the reductions.

And so the writers and actors unions were born.

Fast forward almost a century, and Hollywood has entered another belt-tightening period. The pivot to streaming didn’t turn out as profitably as hoped, and short-form video was continuing its consumer-side death march over the creative and knowledge industries. It was certainly not lost on Hollywood writers and actors that their working conditions were already deteriorating despite an initial boom in streaming production. Now their bosses were being tempted by the cost-saving potential of AI.

Cue last year’s Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA dual strikes.

One of the things that’s unique about Hollywood unions is that their collective bargaining is effectively sectoral. The studios that employ the writers and the actors and everybody else band together as the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to hash out a minimum basic agreement with each of the unions at the table.

But having an AMPTP doesn’t mean the studios actually get along. It just means that the employers have at least one shared interest, which is to avoid undercutting each other in keeping increases to production costs and losses of management rights to an absolute minimum. It’s a kind of employer anti-solidarity, but it’s a thin one. As the writers and actors strikes stretched on for months longer than they needed to, there’s a Seth Rogen quote from an interview he gave to Sky News on the picket line about the chaos of Hollywood’s employer-side interests that I think about all the time:

@skynews#SethRogen tells #SkyNews #film #studios and #streaming giants are unable to get on the same page because they “hate each other” as the #Hollywood #writersstrike enters its 100th day with no hint of an agreement 🎭🎬📑🪧 🔗 Tap the link in bio for more on the writers’ strikes

“Not only does it seem as though the writers and actors have a great distance to go when it comes to the studios, I think the studios have a great distance to go, probably a greater one, when it goes to them getting on the same page. These are people who hate each other, people who are in direct competition with one another. When this strike ends, they go back to being enemies. When this strike ends for us, we go back to being coworkers. And so my fear is they are unable to get themselves on a page that is presentable to anybody because their drastically different motivations and models for their businesses. You know, to think that Universal has the same priorities as Netflix is insane. That’s what concerns me, honestly, is that they will be completely unable to bring forth a coherent and unified proposal because of their own infighting and divergent priorities.”

Journalists experience their own similarly damaging version of Hollywood’s fractiousness. The owners, managers, experts and scholars debating the direction of the news industry can barely agree with each other on what the basic problems of journalism even are. Everybody knows we’ve been going broke. But is it because of bad editorial decisions? Stuffy adherence to view-from-nowhere reporting? Journalists got too lefty or woke or whatever? Catered to fascists? Was it an under-reliance on subscription models? Over-reliance on paywalls? The future of news should be philanthropically funded / no it won’t? There are vivid arguments and titantic egos attached to each of these positions, and they make for some interesting conference panels. But what workers can see is that the incoherence of their own bosses drives a powerful collective inertia on matters of industrial policy when intervention becomes necessary at the bargaining table or the legislature. And when that happens, it’s workers who get hurt first and worst.

For the past two years, we lived through a version of this basic industry paradigm failure as California considered Assembly Bill 886, known as the California Journalism Preservation Act, loosely based on “bargaining code” bills that had previously passed in Canada and Australia. The argument this kind of legislation advances is that journalism has a monopoly problem in the form of Google et al and that Big Tech is getting far more out of journalism than it’s giving back. The bills create legal cudgels to make the monopolies give back some of their monopoly profits to newsrooms.

This makes perfect sense to the journalists whose jobs have gotten eaten by Pivots to Video and social media degradation over the past decade, while watching oceans of our own work get digitally exploited for little gain. The rank-and-file journalists of my own Guild, who can barely agree on anything (we’re a journalism union after all), unanimously voted to support advocacy on the issue.

This is ambitious policy that inevitably provoked some utterly chaotic philosophical and empirical argumentation in the journalism world. It makes sense that it’s hard to have coherent antimonopoly arguments with people who have no interest in antitrust policy whatsoever. If you’re guided by a bodily science of the humours, you’re not going to notice the presence of lethal bacteria in the wound.

But a lot of argumentation, particularly behind the scenes, was nakedly self-interested — from people already getting their cut from Google who magically realigned their criticisms to wherever the monopoly stood that week, or from publishers arguing that the best journalism policy is the one that eliminates their own potential competitors from benefiting. As AB 886 collapsed in the waning weeks of the California legislative session, it turned out the only thing the journalism industry’s leadership class could agree on after two years of division is that dollars are green. (And that the broadcast industry and public media shouldn’t get any.)

I’ll have more to say soon about the paltry proposed settlement that emerged from backroom negotiations with Google, which have been roundly denounced by California’s journalist membership organizations as the publishers who initially celebrated the deal with classic announcement puffery have notably retreated from view. Some basic “what is this and what the hell just happened?” matters of fact still haven’t been read into the public record, so it’s more responsible to wait before trying to get too weedsy here on things that might not even be real yet.

But what I can say for this Labor Day is that politics can be a Hobbesian business of all versus all. Journalists, at least in the form of our unions or membership organizations, shouldn’t engage in the burgeoning world of journalism policy unless we’re ready and willing to stand together to stop the news industry’s leadership class from trying to eat each other out of basically corrupt motives. From this, we can learn from our kin in Hollywood about the need to stick together when picking the biggest fights. (Hollywood and journalism also have some similar AI and monopoly problems.) To paraphrase Seth Rogen, our bosses might be enemies, but journalists everywhere are just coworkers. We have far more in common than we don’t.