20.1: Introduction

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 The labor precariousness that is the subject of this collection would be much less likely to prevail in a situation where strong unions were able to negotiate collectively on behalf of workers. In addition, the best trade unions strive to counter inequalities and exclusions based on gender, class, ethnicity, and other dimensions of social power, and these too are real problems in the media industries. Yet many media workers feel uncertain about the value of trade unions, or anxious that affiliation or identification with them will lead to the loss of work. This chapter concerns efforts by professional and trade organizations to defend and improve the rights and conditions of writers as a community of workers in the media industries, both within particular nations and internationally. It explores these issues via a case study of the Writers Guild of America (WGA).

However, our concerns are not confined to the borders of the United States. We begin by discussing various obstacles and tensions facing organized labor in the media industries. Although here we focus on the United States and the United Kingdom, many of these issues can be found internationally. We then discuss some of the ways these issues have played out historically in the specific example of the WGA, before turning to a recent significant development that raises crucial questions about media labor in an era of internationalization or, as some would have it, “globalization”: increasing efforts by the WGA to work with other writers’ labor organizations abroad, not only to prevent outsourcing of work to cheaper locations (of course a problem in many industries, media and otherwise, in the global era), but also to build solidarity. Yet some of the same problems regarding tensions between solidarity and exclusion, fairness and privilege, can be found in the context of international media labor organization, though with intriguing new dynamics that we explore below. Those new dynamics can be properly understood only when explained in the context of problems facing organized labor in the media industries, and we begin this chapter with a historical perspective on these issues.