Chapter 20: Internationalizing Labor Activism – Building Solidarity among Writers’ Guilds
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Across the world, trade unions have played a major role in efforts by workers to improve their conditions, defend their rights, and promote social justice in people’s working lives. Yet in the recent “turn to labor” in media and cultural studies, there has been little sustained consideration of unions.¹ The collective action and bargaining offered by unions are crucial in providing a means of limiting the problematic working conditions that, as a number of researchers have shown, are apparent in much media work, in spite of easy and flawed assumptions that the media industries provide high-quality or “easy” jobs.²
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20.1: Introduction
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Introduction to the goal of this chapter: to explore the efforts of professional/trade organizations to improve labor rights and conditions for writers in media, both within a country and internationally, using a case study of the Writers Guild of America.
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20.2: Problems Facing Organized Labor in the Media Industries
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Some of the problems facing organized labor in the media industries, including differences in precarity between union and non-union members of media industries and tension between the concept of craft unions/guilds versus general unions.
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20.3: The Writers Guild of America in the National Context
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Challenges faced by the WGA, including the tension between its status as a guild and the fact that it organizes union-like activities such as strikes and protests; the difficulty in collecting a group of individuals who normally work alone; and its need to jockey for concessions with other guilds and unions in the media industries.
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20.4: Going Global – Guilds in an Era of Internationalization
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Examining international connections between writers’ guilds, in the contexts of both professional solidarity and limiting potential outsourcing.
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20.5: Conclusion
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Summary of the tensions and contradictions involving writers’ guilds, including internationalization and competition between established, guild-member writers and aspirants.
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20.6: Notes
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