The Writers Guild of America on Strike

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is now on the front lines of an ongoing economic war in the United States. The battle lines are economic fairness and opportunity for all versus the concentration of wealth to CEOs, executives, and Wall Street. They have been joined in this battle by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). The media executives are represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

The war between workers and management has a long and bloody history worldwide. Investors, executives, and management generate greater profit by keeping wages, employee benefit costs, and labor costs as low as possible. This is why executive pay ratios (executive compensation versus average worker pay) is a very telling metric regarding whether a company should be perceived as a good or bad company. The average CEO pay in 2022 was $32 million dollars.

The concept of employees working together as a union to negotiate decent wages and benefits is a very important part of any economic system. Without unions there would not be "weekends", overtime pay, paid vacation, and paid time off due to illness. 

As CEOs, executives, and Wall Street look for ways to increase profit they have a simple equation. They can focus on increasing revenues and/or reducing costs. Any strategy they implement is to address the equation Revenue - Costs = Profit. They can employ tax strategies, debt/equity strategies, all kinds of complex finance -but the equation is fundamentally the same. For example, while the business model of television has shifted from broadcast to streaming, profits are up by 39% while average writer salary has decreased by 4% (unadjusted for inflation). The average CEO pay in 2022 was $32 million dollars. According to an article in CNBC, the average compensation for media CEOs has increased 53% since 2018.

From 1980-1985 there was a significant decline in U.S.-based manufacturing jobs. 4.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost (almost 1/4 of the U.S. manufacturing workforce). To generate more profit, stock equity growth, executive bonuses/compensation, and investor dividends companies shifted manufacturing operations to other countries where wages were very low, worker protections were few (if any), and Unions were either weak or non-existent. This shift of labor, plus factory automation in manufacturing accelerated significant economic declines in what has become known as the "Rust Belt". This started a loss of population in rust-belt cities like Flint, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; Erie, Pennsylvania; Rockford, Illinois; Jackson, Mississippi; Toledo, Ohio; and Hartford, Connecticut to name a few.

The first self-service checkout counter was introduced in 1986 and now self-service checkstands are part of many major stores -which helps them reduce the number of workers and labor costs.

Banks deployed ATMs to cut costs and boost profits by eliminating tellers.

Now, unwittingly, the WGA is on the front lines of a new battle intended to eliminate thousands of well-paying jobs across the United States. The inherent danger in the dawn of Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is not that a runaway bot will determine that climate change is real; humans are causing climate change due to our unquenchable thirst for oil and coal, and therefore eliminating humans will save the planet (certainly Orca whales have already arrived at such an understanding). The imminent danger of the deployment of AI is in a rapid loss of well-paying middle-class careers in management, accounting, finance, law, and many other traditionally non-Union jobs. Absent government policy regarding AI, and any adequate worker protections, the reduction of the workforce will not only accelerate the concentration of wealth in the United States (which is completely antithetical to any healthy/meaningful attempt at democracy) it is likely to lead to a severe prolonged recession, massive strikes, and societal chaos. The entire system must be redesigned to accommodate a significant loss of human labor demand as people are replaced by algorithms. 

This is part of why the Writers Guild of America is on the front line of a new battle being waged against them by the forces of greed to concentrate extreme wealth and to perpetuate control of all three branches of U.S. government by the obscenely wealthy. It is a battle that will be joined by millions in the United States over the next several years -and any meaningful form of democracy is at stake.