Nothing
scrambles the conventional wisdom on contemporary class politics in the
US like a white-collar strike. In our neoliberal era, we’re told that
unions might have once been appropriate for the soot-faced and burly
proletarians of the 1930s. But since most of those workers have long
since disappeared, labor unions — the logic follows — are also no longer
necessary.
But not all skilled (and deeply exploited) laborers go
to work with a hardhat and a lunch pail. And just like their union
brothers and sisters in warehouses and factory floors across the
country, the struggle for real union representation is every bit as
radicalizing.
Eliza Skinner has spent the past year writing jokes
for the E! television show Fashion Police. Skinner pens about 200 jokes
per episode (almost a full work week’s as far as ‘hours worked’),
pitching them at a weekly meeting with the host, Joan Rivers, and the
show’s producers. For this, she is paid roughly $500 a week.
What
is unique about this arrangement, in comparison with Hollywood norms, is
the intensity of the work (the 30-40 hours of work are usually
compressed into 3 days), and the meagerness of the compensation. Fashion
Police writers’ paychecks say: “Hours worked: 8” every week, regardless
of the actual time spent on crafting their contributions to the show.
This exploitation is especially galling because the tempo of TV
production often requires marathon stretches on the writer’s part: as
long as 17 hours in a row, in the case of awards specials. “8 hours.
$500,” Skinner marvels. “To write a hit TV show–– one of the top rated
shows on the network.”
So on April 13, Skinner and her fellow writers at Fashion Police went on strike.
Events
like this as well as the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007 and
2008 remind us also how unreliable is the usual equation of “skilled
worked = complacent business unionist; industrial unskilled worker =
revolutionary radical.” As the work of labor historian David Montgomery
has emphasized, skilled workers frequently have more direct control over
the production process than their unskilled counterparts, and more to
lose as managers attempted to increase productivity by taking away
control of the production process.
In
the case of skilled workers in the culture industries — writers,
musicians, photographers, dancers, actors, directors, and many varieties
of teachers — there’s been a marked tendency towards more radical forms
of resistance, as in the neo-Luddism of musicians and newspaper workers
who launched long, media-blackout-inducing strikes and wrote redundant
“make-work” clauses into their contracts in the face of “technological
unemployment.”
Thus, the walkout by the Fashion Police writers is
of greater significance — as both a product of a long legacy of
struggle, and as an exception to conventional wisdom — than might
initially seem to be the case. In a moment marked by staggeringly low
rates of union density and
declining militancy, the push by the Fashion Police writers for union recognition and industry-standard contracts is even more impressive.
Twelve Fashion Police writers are seeking over
$1 million in back wages from the show’s producers and Joan Rivers’s Rugby Productions. The Writers Guild of America-West’s
statement alleges
that the show “ignores the California laws that require an employer to
pay hourly employees their regular wage rate for all time worked in an
eight-hour period” and flouts the law requiring payment of overtime “for
employment beyond eight hours in any workday or more than 40 hours in
any workweek.”
Fundamentally, the Fashion Police writers are seeking to gain a union shop. The WGA-West
has framed the
strike as revolving around the question of E!’s open shop skullduggery:
“There are two possible endings to this conflict. Either E! will agree
to cover the writers under a Guild contract, or it will no longer
benefit from the writing talents of the current staff of Guild members.”
“Unions,”
Skinner stresses, “are often our only hope for health insurance or
retirement benefits.” She brings up the example of a Fashion Police
writer who is a world-famous drag queen, who nevertheless had to raise
money himself for a double hip replacement. As he put it, “there is no
drag queen union.”
Similarly, there is also no stand-up comic
union. Another “Fashion Police” writer “has been on more USO tours than
anyone but Bob Hope, but he can’t afford to get off the road to spend
time with his daughter if he also wants to pay for his rent and her
health insurance.” Finally securing a day job writing for a hit TV show,
which traditionally would have guaranteed access to minimal security,
instead delivered only 8 hours of pay per week.
In 2002, comedian
Ted Alexandro (a great stand-up who was also integrally involved with
Occupy Wall Street) wrote a petition asking New York’s comedy clubs for a
pay raise, the first since 1985. With the signatures of 85 follow
comedians in-hand, Alexandro won the pay raise, an astonishing labor
victory in a sector known for Darwinian competition and managerial
sleaze. In 2007, Alexandro helped organize a second comedians’ campaign
for greater remuneration, forming the NY Comedians Coalition with Russ
Meneve, Tom Shillue, and Buddy Bolton.
While it was not formally a
union, Alexandro notes, it was nevertheless a “collective voice,” one
that proved to be effective. “With the help of experienced union
representatives from AFTRA,” Alexandro recalls, “we were able to once
again get a second pay raise.”
The political economy of the
entertainment industry preys on this systemic insecurity. “Since we
don’t know where the next paycheck will come from,” Skinner observes,
“we are often willing to take whatever we can get––so producers will
only offer the bare minimum.” Comedy writers are “reminded constantly of
how many people would be happy to step in and take our jobs.”
Performers hear constantly that they should consider it an honor to
appear on this talking-head pop-culture show, for free, that it would be
great for their visibility to create content for this website, for
free, and that the rewards of establishing big-name contacts by working
for a famous person, for free, would necessarily outweigh any monetary
compensation.
The logic, as with so much of the casualized work of
the contemporary precariate, is that comedians work a variety of
part-time jobs and thereby cobble together a living. “Most of the jobs
we have are short,” Skinner says, “pilots, web series, movies, etc. So
there is very, very little job security. Even if you are successful and
doing well, you often don’t know where you’ll be working next month.”
Skinner
emphasizes that most people “have no idea how much time and skill goes
into writing comedy.” Being funny for a living, she suggests, isn’t just
about having a humorous outlook or a quick wit. “It starts with a
natural talent that is developed by years of training and practice,”
Skinner emphasizes. “Once we reach the level of a professional writer,
we deserve to be properly compensated for it.”
The WGA-West has
also issued stern reminders to its members that they are prohibited from
scabbing at Fashion Police under the Guild’s “Working Rule 8,” and
members of the comedy community have been spreading the word to
newcomers and the politically unaffiliated that what might look like a
foot in the door––a chance to write for Joan Rivers––would actually be a
career killer.
As the unionization push proceeded over the winter
months, work at Fashion Police became increasingly difficult.
Management attempted to squeeze the writers, no doubt hoping they would
quit. Instead, the writers gamely continued to do their jobs, showing up
to work in WGA T-shirts and keeping track of hours of unpaid work.
Rivers remained steadfastly unwilling to talk to the writers, refusing
to take any calls about the matter, even when WGA representatives
contacted her to appeal to her as a longstanding WGA member.
With
both Rivers and E! stonewalling, the writers decided to prepare a final
batch of work, email the producers, and declare that the writing would
not be made available until a union contract was in hand. Thus began the
Fashion Police walkout.
For those familiar with the history
of talent guilds in Hollywood, the Fashion Police writers’ militancy
does not come entirely as a surprise. As Gerald Horne demonstrates in
The Class Struggle in Hollywood, the Screen Writers Guild (the
forerunner of today’s WGA) — formed in the early 1930s under the
leadership of the radical writer John Howard Lawson — was among the
reddest of all of the New Deal-era unions.
The expansive royalties
and attribution rights enjoyed by writers in film and TV today can be
traced back to Lawson and the SWG’s early agitation. That agitation was
also a key source of animus on the part of the Hollywood studios (20th
Century Fox head Daryl F. Zanuck famously said that in the event of a
writers’ strike he would mount a machine gun on the studio’s roof and
mow the writers down), and drove, in large part, the persecution of
writers like Lawson by anticommunists in the 1940s, the imprisonment of
the Hollywood Ten, and the infamous blacklists and greylists.
The
legacy of the SWG and militants like Lawson led, over the decades, to
the corporate imperative to create an entity like E! in the first place.
Scripted network television requires a unionized workforce of writers,
and under such conditions, both financial and ideological control of the
production process remains elusive. That was not such a big problem
during the “Golden Age of Hollywood” — the years when the major New York
banks owned the Hollywood studios. As C.L.R. James argued in American
Civilization, so long as the profits were steady, capital could tolerate
Hollywood’s consistent liberalism and even the occasional foray into
leftism.
But as multinational corporations began to buy up the
entertainment industry in the 1970s, the old accord no longer held. In
the era of the blockbuster franchise, the corporate tie-in, and the
multiplex, culture industry CEOs saw no need to keep the old system in
place, and increasingly came to regard the unionized Hollywood writer as
a barrier to corporate hegemony.
This process was more obvious in
the movie business than in TV, but with the rise of the videocassette,
time-shifted viewing, and cable in the 1980s, writers for television
became increasingly anxious that their union’s main achievement — a
solid contract with a mechanism for residuals as the shows they wrote
for went into syndication — would soon be on the chopping block. These
new technologies would inevitably lead to renegotiation of the
intellectual property-related clauses of the writers’ contracts, and
writers correctly worried that the studios would seize the initiative
for a broad counteroffensive.
While some controversy surrounds the
notion that the WGA strike of 1988 led directly to the invention of
“reality television,” there is no question that the rise of the
Kardashians has everything to do with the decades-long quest by the
major studios to rid themselves of their reliance on WGA members that
culminated in the labor-management clashes of the late 1980s.
And
with the rise of reality TV, the bosses more or less won. It is fitting
that Fashion Police, which debuted in September 2010, should be at the
center of the current labor struggle. Its star, Joan Rivers, is the
prototypical reality star, appearing alongside her daughter Melissa in a
1994 TV movie dramatization of the tragic events surrounding the death
of her husband and later became one of the most prominent faces on the
home shopping channel QVC.
One of Rivers’s costars, Kelly
Osbourne, gained fame on the pioneering MTV domestic reality show, “The
Osbournes.” Another, Giuliana Rancic, has appeared in virtually every
permutation of the reality TV form, and serves — especially as a
red-carpet interviewer––as a living embodiment of the tactless,
preening, empty narcissism that critics tend to associate with the
reality TV genre writ large.
At the same time, Fashion Police has
always struck me as a little more radical than most of the other fare on
E! Rivers is a comic genius, a feminist icon, and one of the last
living exemplars of the Popular Front-era Jewish refinement of morbid
irony; her one-liners are often brutally irreverent and lacerating in a
manner that can’t help but register as subversive. There is a pervasive
queer/camp sensibility to the show, missing from much of the rest of
reality TV.
On a channel as slavishly devoted as E! is to
sycophancy, nepotism, and vulgar success-worship, there is something
politically appealing about the anarchic misanthropy of Fashion Police.
Of course, the show’s relentless misogyny tends to recuperate all but a
few stray embers of radical affect. But those stray embers nonetheless
do sometimes escape. In a media landscape with so minimal a margin for
dissent, that might not be meaningless.
The question now — as in
the Fashion Police strike — is not whether writers will be able to keep
their hard-won guarantees to revenues from the shows they helped to
create. Rather, the question is a decidedly old-fashioned one: will the
writers even be allowed to join a union of their choosing in order to
secure a living wage, health benefits, and some retirement security?
At
the moment, the Fashion Police writers have an Unfair Labor Practice
complaint filed against management for intimidation and threatened
retaliation — the message received by the writers over the past weeks
was that they would lose their jobs if they sought union contracts. As
the legal process works its way through the system, Skinner urges her
fellow comedians to voice their support for the strikers, get in touch
with advertisers, and avoid watching the show. Most importantly, of
course, is the need to discourage any potential scabs from crossing the
picket lines.
Thus far, it seems that the “Fashion Police” writers
are succeeding in winning public support and disincentivizing scabbing.
With any luck, actions such as this might even lead to a radicalization
of the underpaid creatives who provide so much of the content of the
current media landscape.
For labor intellectuals who often reside
in the intemperate zone that Jodi Dean calls “left melancholia,” it is a
wonder to behold the resurgence of labor politics in a location that we
usually presume to be a hotbed of toxic individualism. “Unions,” as
Skinner stresses, “are our only hope for setting and maintaining
standards, so that we can live off of our work.”
Interestingly,
for a show with a mostly-female panel and overlap with the feminist
fashion gossip culture of sites like Jezebel.com, Skinner is the only
female writer for Fashion Police, aside from Rivers herself. (The
producers of Fashion Police, however, are all women). Skinner asserts
that gender politics have not played a big part in her experience of
bringing grievances to the table, and ultimately going on strike.
At
the same time, the standard “How dare you? We’re like a family” talk,
so often used to silence women in the workplace, has reared its head.
Skinner, however, fails to find it persuasive: “I’ve got a mom. She
lives in Virginia, not Malibu.”
Joan Rivers(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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