1.1: Precarious Creativity – Global Media, Local Labor
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- Michael Curtin & Kevin Sanson
- University of California Press
In most parts of the world, screen media workers—actors, directors, gaffers, and makeup artists—consider Hollywood to be glamorous and aspirational. If given the opportunity to work on a major studio lot, many would make the move, believing the standards of professionalism are high and the history of accomplishment is renowned. Moreover, as a global leader, Hollywood offers the chance to rub shoulders with talented counterparts and network with an elite labor force that earns top-tier pay and benefits. Yet despite this reputation, veterans say the view from inside isn’t so rosy, that working conditions have been deteriorating since the 1990s if not earlier. This grim outlook is supported by industry statistics that show the number of good jobs has been shrinking as studios outsource production to Atlanta, London, and Budapest, among others.
No longer is Hollywood the default setting for major film and television productions. California faces stiff competition from both domestic and international locations. New York, Georgia, and Louisiana have all emerged as major production centers, often jostling with Canada and the United Kingdom for the top spots on yearly production reports. In fact, the most recent study from FilmL.A. concludes (somewhat hastily): “While these jurisdictions may trade yearly rank positions for total project count, budget value and production spending, there are no jurisdictions immediately poised to dethrone them.” 1 Yet studio bosses and producers have made it clear that they intend to keep scouring the globe for lower labor rates and less regulated environs. Right-to-work states are especially attractive, as are overseas locations where unions have little or no clout. In many places, governments offer tax breaks and subsidies as further inducements, sending a message to rivals that no single production center enjoys uncontestable pre-eminence.
Consequently, producers have grown ever more fleet footed, playing off one place against another in a never-ending quest to secure the most favorable conditions for their bottom lines. Today’s increasingly mobile and globally dispersed mode of production thrives (indeed, depends) on interregional competition, driving down pay rates, benefits, and job satisfaction for media workers around the world. Producers say corporate financial imperatives compel them to contain costs, especially labor costs. Consequently, workdays are growing longer, productivity pressures are more intense, and creative autonomy is diminishing. Overall, this has put severe financial, physical, and emotional strain on workers and their families and further threatens the many independent businesses that service the major studios.
At the 2013 Academy Awards, evidence of this trend gained wider currency when the Oscar-winning visual effects team from Life of Pi used part of its acceptance speech to express solidarity with demonstrators outside the Dolby Theater who were protesting Hollywood’s “race to the bottom.” Like most studio features, the film earned widespread critical acclaim and more than $600 million at the global box office by relying heavily on visual effects. Yet the very artists who created those effects were outraged by the fact that their Oscar-winning company, Rhythm & Hues, had been driven into bankruptcy only days before the awards ceremony. The news sent ripples of outrage through the effects community, since it was seen as a telling indicator of the precarious conditions under which even the best companies and their employees currently operate. 2 Fierce global competition for studio contracts forces shops into an aggressive bidding process that ultimately undermines the welfare of employees. Throughout the VFX sector as a whole, workers suffer from low pay, long hours, and uncertain job security. Much of this is attributable to the fact that digital effects artists lack union representation, but unionized workers are also feeling the crunch.
In 2007, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the Hollywood studios to claim their share of the growing revenue stream from digital media, such as Blu-ray, Netflix, and Hulu. Although royalties and benefits were at the core of the dispute, writers also complained about growing pressure to produce ancillary content for websites and social media in addition to the work they put into film and television scripts. This unpaid “second shift” is part of a growing pattern of employers using worker concerns over job security to raise productivity. 3 Sometimes producers specifically demand additional off-the-clock labor. Other times these expectations are conveyed more subtly as logical extensions of, for example, a TV showrunner’s marketing and promotional obligations. Successful shows now require supplemental multiplatform publicity, such as personal tweets, blogs, and behind-the-scenes footage exclusively produced for online distribution. WGA members also expressed frustration about the encroachment of corporate sponsors into sacred spaces like the writers’ room. 4 These concerns fueled a bitter three-month showdown between the guild’s 12,000 members and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, representing the major studios. With support from other craft and talent unions, the WGA strike brought Hollywood to a standstill but in the end made only modest progress on key issues. Furthermore, in a cruel epilogue, writers now find studios using the (questionable) financial losses associated with the work stoppage as justification for offering less-thanfavorable compensation packages in the poststrike era. 5
Hollywood has a tradition of labor activism that stretches back to the 1930s, with unions and guilds today representing a wide spectrum of artistic, craft, and industrial employees. Although the history of labor representation has been fraught with tensions and controversies, screen workers have at times been capable of mounting campaigns to resist managerial pressures and agitate for better conditions. By comparison, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida—all now seen as viable locations for motion picture production—are right-to-work states where local laws undermine the prospect of unionization, making the workforce more pliable. Moreover, outside the United States, in cities like Prague, where there are no creative or craft unions, day rates for talent and crew are a small fraction of what U.S. and U.K. crew members earn. In other locations, such as Vancouver and London, unions have offered significant concessions to attract Hollywood productions, cutting wages and revising work rules to satisfy U.S. producers. And in China, the world’s second-largest theatrical market and therefore a desirable partner for coproductions like Transformers 4 , unions are an arm of the Communist Party, representing the interests of ruling elites rather than workers.
When Hollywood producers select a distant locale, they are often welcomed as a fresh source of skilled jobs in a glamorous industry, but the jobs they create tend to be temporary, and the workplace pressures are often more intense than in Southern California. Safety issues are perhaps indicative. On February 20, 2014, tragedy struck on a railroad bridge in rural Georgia where a film crew had set up a hospital bed in order to shoot a dream sequence for Midnight Rider , an independent, low-budget picture about the Allman Brothers rock band. Working outside the bounds of the regular production schedule and hoping to “steal” a memorable shot, the crew, which included Oscar-winning actor William Hurt, suddenly found itself in the path of a fast-moving freight train. As they frantically scattered, twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Jones, the second assistant camera operator and the youngest crew member, tenaciously adhered to the protocol of her craft by struggling to protect the equipment, a fatal misjudgment that cost her life. Her death sent shock waves through the industry. Web sites and social media lit up with expressions of outrage. T-shirts, umbrellas, and improvised signage on motion picture sets around the globe enunciated a sentiment widely shared in the world’s most glamorous industry: “We are all Sarah Jones.”
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, at least ten other on-set fatalities occurred in the United States during the decade leading up to Jones’s death. Although no reliable figures exist for accidents outside the States, workers were quick to recall fatalities during the filming of The Dark Knight Rises in the United Kingdom in 2008, 6 The Expendables 2 in Bulgaria in 2011, 7 and XXX in the Czech Republic in 2012. 8 Said one camera operator, “You can probably ask any film production technician who’s been on the job ten years, and they can probably give you half a dozen incidences where they should have been killed or injured, and just by the grace of God they weren’t.” 9 Another noted that most crew members, especially young and inexperienced ones, are afraid to speak up about safety concerns for fear of jeopardizing their chances at future jobs.
Mobile production outside the purview of strong union oversight isn’t the only factor inciting concern about the increasing personal risk. In 2006, Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler produced Who Needs Sleep? , a searing documentary inspired by the death of an assistant camera operator in a car crash after falling asleep at the wheel on his way home from an eighteen-hour workday. For Wexler, then in his early eighties, the tragedy was representative of a growing trend toward excessively long work shifts, which are often scheduled back-to-back with little turnaround time. The film documents personal and family stress engendered by early calls, late nights, and long weeks. As part of a broader movement called “12on12off,” the documentary advocates industry-wide reform to rein in such abuses. Although supported by a wide spectrum of craft workers, talent, and even producers, many were unwilling to speak on camera for fear of being quietly blacklisted in a town where jobs are growing ever more scarce. Even union leaders were skittish about the campaign, many of them afraid to antagonize studio bosses and spur the ongoing migration of production jobs out of California. With so many individuals resigned to suffering in silence, it undermines the potential for collective action and institutional reform.
And yet what is perhaps most remarkable about these precarious labor conditions is that the pattern repeats itself in many parts of the world. In October 2008, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees, an alliance of twenty-two unions representing below-the-line workers ranging from dancers and extras to editors and carpenters, called a citywide strike in Mumbai, the entertainment capital of South Asia. More than 147,000 workers participated in the labor action, and topline talent, including Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan, walked out in sympathy, shutting down film and TV production on the eve of a busy holiday season.
At the time, the average filmworker was making $9.75 a day, and the average television employee a little more than $8 a day. Unions representing craft workers and service employees began agitating for higher wages around 2005, pointing to the burgeoning prosperity of Bollywood, which was then generating over $3 billion a year in revenues and paying its marquee talent more than a million dollars for each film. In 2007, unions and producers signed a memorandum of understanding that would raise wages by as much as 15 percent. Eighteen months later, workers walked out after extended haggling about broken promises, claiming more than $10 million in unpaid wages, with many workers saying they hadn’t seen a paycheck in months. In addition to wages, the strike raised concerns about long work hours that in some cases involved thirty-hour shifts. On-the-job safety and meal breaks were other points of contention.
Facing a massive labor action that drew public support from Bollywood’s biggest stars, producers quickly relented, agreeing to raise wages in line with the original memorandum, arbitrate claims for unpaid wages, and establish a twelve-hour cap on work shifts. 10 Despite this quick victory, union leaders expressed deeper concerns about what they say are concerted attempts to undermine organized labor by hiring nonunion workers and relocating production outside of Mumbai, especially to overseas locations like Scotland and Australia. Closer to home, officials criticized a system of subcontracting that helps producers circumvent union agreements. Most notoriously, some subcontractors delayed paychecks for months or even refused to pay at all. Union leaders have complained that workers are more vulnerable than ever and that hard-earned gains from the past are being challenged at every turn.
The Bombay motion picture industry was until recently renowned as a familial system of employment that was at turns discreetly exploitative and touchingly paternalistic. Since the 1990s, the commercialization of television and the corporatization of the movie business have transformed a national media economy into a multimedia global juggernaut with skyrocketing revenues and blockbuster production budgets. Consequently, the relations of production have grown more formal and contractual. They have also been transformed by management logics that are remarkably reminiscent of those being practiced by the major Hollywood media conglomerates.
Of course very significant differences remain, and as we will see in the chapters that follow, similarities in labor trends around the world are marked by enduring and profound differences as well. Chapters about the radical alterity of the Nigerian videofilm industry and tumultuous conditions of creativity in the Arab world make this point only too well. Yet our essays converge around the issue of precarity, a term that points to a broader set of concerns about relations of production and the quality of social life worldwide. Andrew Ross drew these connections in Nice Work If You Can Get It , arguing that “no one, not even those in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of their lifetime, and they are under more and more pressure to anticipate, and prepare for, a future in which they still will be able to compete in a changing marketplace.” 11 Ross characterizes precariousness as a common condition for workers all over the world, from the low-end service sector in developing nations to white-collar elites in centers of capital. No longer can individual workers expect a single career; instead they must ready themselves for iterative change and persistent contingency as standard employment and its associated entitlements become artifacts of a bygone industrial era. Precarious livelihoods are indicative of a new world order of social and economic instability.
Although film and television workers are often characterized as highly trained industrial elites, they share similar concerns, which have been fueled by the growth of media conglomerates and the globalization of production. Beginning in the 1980s, deregulation and privatization rippled around the world, transforming national economies and profoundly affecting media industries. Pressed by commercial interests, most governments relinquished long-standing public service policies, opening the door to transnational investment and unleashing a torrent of technological innovation that spurred the development of new media delivery services through satellite, cable, Internet, and mobile communication channels.
Some effects have been positive, but others have proven quite troubling. Today, both private and public media systems around the world are driven by market imperatives that foster intense competition between transnational services and local providers. Media sovereignty, previously a foundational principle of national regulation, has been trumped by discourses of consumer sovereignty and market competition. With national borders eroding and services multiplying, media companies have responded by merging into vast multiplatform global conglomerates, including Hollywood’s Time Warner, Bollywood’s Reliance Media, Brazil’s Grupo Globo, and the pan-Arab Rotana Group.
Leading media companies today are larger and more complicated than ever before. They are also more closely attuned to financial imperatives than they are to the subtleties of creative endeavor or the nuances of audience taste. Media CEOs spend most of their time wooing investors and crafting quarterly reports rather than thinking about content or creativity. This in turn insulates corporate decision makers from creative practice, privileging content that is relentlessly market-tested at all stages of production, resulting in a creative process that begins and ends with competitive positioning. In the fields of narrative film and television, this has encouraged a fixation on marquee talent and presold brands that can be parlayed into blockbuster media franchises. In the minds of many executives, marketable content is king, which means they are willing to bid astronomical sums for the services of Shah Rukh Khan or the rights to Harry Potter.
Pressed by the rising costs of franchise rights and top talent, conglomerates seek to contain production expenses by trimming budgets in other areas, especially below-the-line labor. As suggested above, this logic is manifested in new power plays aimed at increasing productivity and diminishing the wages of craft and service workers. Moreover, producers and executives outsource jobs to independent contractors, resist input from union officials, and undermine the creative authority of skilled artisans. New technologies have furthermore allowed employers to knit together transnational production teams so that workers often find themselves collaborating or competing with lower-paid counterparts in such places as Hengdian and Hyderabad. This respatialization of media labor exerts persistent pressure on workers and labor organizations, offering employers novel forms of leverage.
Yet the shifting geographies of media production have also opened the door to opportunities for screen media workers. Government policymakers in many parts of the world initially expressed reservations about deregulation and globalization, but they ultimately welcomed the chance to collaborate with transnational media conglomerates, embracing a set of commercial practices that have increasingly become the norm. During the 1990s, policymakers began to position their countries as hotspots of the “creative economy,” reasoning that intellectual and cultural output had become distinguishing features of the world’s wealthiest societies. Sophisticated financial services and biotech research are emblematic of this global postindustrial hierarchy, but the most charismatic sector is popular culture, which many believe is the signature component of creative economies. An oft-repeated anecdote of the era pointed to a 1994 presidential advisory report in South Korea that compared the total revenues from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park to the export earnings from 1.5 million Hyundai automobiles. This striking comparison instigated a greater allocation of government resources to the media sector, contributing to the renowned “Korean Wave” of pop cultural exports that subsequently swept across East Asia. 12
The policy discourse on creative economies has fueled competition among such cities as London, Vancouver, Beijing, and Dubai, all aspiring to become media capitals renowned for their talented workforces. Many governments offer subsidized facilities, tax incentives, and labor concessions that are designed to nurture local capacity and lure producers away from other locales, especially Hollywood, where real estate and labor costs are substantially higher. Yet these cities now face competition as well, fueling a race to the bottom as conglomerates hopscotch the globe, playing each place against the others, in large part by exacting concessions from workers.
Arresting this race to the bottom will require greater awareness by all parties. Public policy research has explored ways to nurture a creative economy, but little has been written about the declining labor conditions within those economies. Much has been made of the challenges posed by media conglomeration, but little of it addresses the impact on creative employees and workplace practices. And while researchers have detailed the causes and effects of “runaway production,” little of this work is framed by a global perspective, nor does it examine possibilities for building transnational labor alliances or regulatory frameworks that will be essential if conditions are to improve.
Shortcomings in current research are largely caused by institutional constraints. Executives generally focus on market research and cost containment strategies that have the potential to improve their quarterly reports. 13 Government leaders seek policy recommendations that will help them grow their economies. 14 University administrators privilege media management studies to further embed their institutions within prevailing funding structures. And labor organizations support research that has immediate relevance to their existing members. 15 No organization has the motivation to build a balanced and comprehensive portrayal of the trends, conditions, and concerns of screen media workers during an era of unprecedented challenges and opportunities.
As for scholarly research, media globalization has garnered significant attention, but there remains a relative paucity of research on labor issues. 16 A notable exception is Global Hollywood, which provides a critical framework for understanding the play of power between major media conglomerates and their increasingly globalized workforce. 17 Like many political economies of media, the authors argue that Hollywood uses both commercial and political strategies to ensure its cultural dominance around the world. 18 Uniquely, however, the authors also analyze the changing conditions of creative labor in the film and television industries, contending that studio operations have become increasingly mobile, allowing producers to pursue cost advantages and government subsidies worldwide. Moreover, by threatening to move their operations to the most amenable location, studios exploit the advantages of a global labor market and exact concessions from Hollywood unions at home. In a groundbreaking argument, the authors show how the New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL) is driving down wages and working conditions globally. Yet the analysis operates largely at the level of metatheory and talks little about conditions on the ground or the specific middle-range dynamics of this race to the bottom. 19 Susan Christopherson offers a similarly expansive perspective on runaway production in the film and television industries, noting that government incentive programs and flexible modes of production have made it easier for transnational media firms to outsource labor. 20
Among the forces driving these changes are local and national economic development policies that are informed by the work of scholars such as Richard Florida, who contends that globalization has unleashed a growing competition among cities to attract creative talent in order to enhance their service and information industries, which he considers the most prosperous sectors of the global economy. 21 Likewise, John Howkins suggests that mature industrialized countries must invest in the “creative economy” if they are to cope with challenges posed by the flight of manufacturing overseas. Howkins contends that deindustrialization can best be addressed by enhancing the human capital that a country has to offer. This approach has been embraced by policymakers in many parts of the world as a justification for subsidies, infrastructural investments, and training programs in media, computer, and design industries, among others. 22 Although these policies are often controversial, 23 some scholars have nevertheless embraced them, realizing that failure to take action could doom the prospects of local media institutions and further strengthen Hollywood’s global grip. At the same time, though, they are attentive to the challenges and compromises that such policies entail. 24
Interestingly both the political economy and economic development approaches tend to gloss over localized effects of globalization on the actual labor practices at cultural and creative work sites. By comparison, researchers in the sociology of work tradition offer empirically rich inquiries into the personal and professional lives of creative workers in advertising, fashion, design, music, new media, and the arts. 25 Their work reveals recurrent concerns about a largely flexible, itinerant workforce. Hired on a contractual basis, these workers suffer intensifying productivity demands that intrude on their personal and family lives. They furthermore confront creative and compensatory risks that make them vulnerable to swings in demand and in turn make them willing to accept less than desirable assignments. This scholarship also examines gender, racial, and global inequalities. Such issues resonate with many of our own preoccupations with the quality of screen media labor, especially in an era when digital technologies are reshaping the contours of work and industry organization. Yet we worry that literature on the sociology of work tends to find latent creative potential anywhere, in anyone, and from anything. This diffuse conception of cultural work does not do justice to the specificities of screen media’s industrial mode of production and pays scant attention to the particular qualities of its highly specialized and detailed division of labor.
A more nuanced and richly textured approach can be found in the work of John Caldwell and his colleagues, who explore both the stylistic implications of screen media labor routines and the ways workers understand, represent, and theorize their labor. 26 Inspired by ethnographic and discourse analysis, “production studies” use specific instances to analyze broader trends and relations of power, but they tend to stop short of linking their analysis to a global political economy, preferring instead to offer specific claims about the internal dynamics of media industries and workplaces. They also tend to be suspicious of totalizing frameworks, preferring to see power as multivalent and capillary rather than centrally anchored by the logic of capital. Again, this scholarship is path-breaking and highly innovative, but it rarely—with the exception of Mayer 27 —extends its frame of analysis to account for global dynamics.
The approaches outlined above are sometimes pitted against each other, but recent developments suggest the necessity of adopting an integrative approach to address the relentless and pervasive class warfare being waged against creative workers around the world. We are deeply concerned by the rapid transformation of screen media, noting the growing convergence of visual and narrative styles, the ascendancy of commercial values at all levels of practice, and the increasing interconnection of media institutions within a global regime of accumulation. We do not see these trends as indicative of a “once-and-for-all victory” by a capitalist cabal but rather as specific aspects of an ongoing war of position distinguished at once by adversity and opportunity for the labor movement. In fact, this tension—between adversity and opportunity, between gains and losses, between hope and despair—remains a structuring concern across the collection as a whole. In what follows, we invited contributors from around the world to offer insight into the changing nature of film, television, and digital media work in diverse locations: Hyderabad, Lagos, Prague, New Orleans, Miami, the Middle East, and of course, Hollywood. Case studies address the growing pressures on creative workers in these cities and regions as well as the opportunities made available by the increasingly global nature of media production. Debates also touch on issues of advocacy and negotiation—identifying what resources are (or are not) available to address some of the challenges that confront workers in the screen media industries. The collection therefore maps out what we see as a significant terrain of scholarly inquiry into the multiple and specific ways that local labor practices engage with and contest processes of media globalization.