20.2: Problems Facing Organized Labor in the Media Industries
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- Miranda Banks & David Hesmondhalgh
- University of California Press
In many countries, media industries have been fairly highly unionized for many years. In The Cultural Front , Michael Denning tells the story of how culture came to be a major ground for leftist activism in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, 3 and he shows how this led to the American working class making its mark on dominant cultural institutions for the first time, but also how it led to the formation of organized labor institutions in the sphere of culture. For Andrew Ross, 4 Denning’s perspective is a useful reminder that the industrialization of culture in the twentieth century was an opportunity for creative labor more than a threat. Industrialization made culture an object of mass production, and unlike workers in other industries, media workers could exert an influence on the shape and nature of the product. By contrast, Ross points out, “the non-commercial arts have long been a domain of insecurity, underpayment, and disposability.” 5 In other countries too, the rise of media industries was accompanied by significant levels of unionization. For example, the networks that traditionally dominated British broadcasting (the BBC and ITV) were unionized from their formation in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, 6 and so was U.K. journalism (the National Union of Journalists [NUJ] was founded in 1907). The U.K. Musicians Union was formed in 1921 and by the end of the 1990s had over 31,000 members. 7
Across the world in the early twenty-first century, however, media trade unions of all kinds are facing significant challenges. Attacks on trade unions in general, launched with renewed vigor starting in the 1970s and 1980s, have continued to the present day across the globe, and in many countries union membership is in steep decline. 8 This, combined with the marketization of media industries enabled by government deregulation programs, has led to a real reduction in the influence of media labor unions. The power of trade unions in the media industries has almost uniformly diminished, professionally, economically, culturally, and politically. Examples can be seen in television, journalism, and music. 9 Rates of unionization are extremely low in the independent television production companies that have come to occupy a key place in the European television market. Journalists’ unions have been significantly reduced in number and power, not only because of the technological “advances” of digitalization, but also because of changing employment laws and journalists’ embrace of notions of “professionalism,” which has drawn entrants to the occupation away from unions. 10
Musicians’ unions illustrate some of the problems facing collective worker organization in the new media landscape in a way that suggests the dangers of precariousness for screen workers. Few workers are employed permanently as musicians, and musical labor more often than not is carried out on a freelance basis, and therefore difficult to unionize. Musicians’ unions play an important role in campaigning around various issues—for example, the regulation of live performance. But the collective bargaining over pay and conditions that is at the heart of modern trade unionism is elusive in the case of musicians outside live entertainment and orchestral work. What’s more, some of the issues that musicians’ unions take up on behalf of their members can have detrimental effects on musicians outside the union. For example, those who have already attained the status of authorship, and who are therefore more likely to gain fuller compensation through rights, are more likely to be members of a union (among other reasons, because they are more likely to feel that it is worthwhile to pay their dues). Income from “rights” of various kinds provides an important supplement to other income for many musicians and other precarious creative workers—though few workers can actually make a living from rights alone. It is perfectly understandable that unions and other associations of workers work to increase such income for their members by campaigning for stricter enforcement of intellectual property. Yet this can have the effect of stifling public culture and making content creation more expensive for workers who do not have the protection of a big company. This illustrates the potential tensions between goals that unions pursue on behalf of their members (payment via rights) and other potentially legitimate goals that might favor nonmember media workers (more open access to culture). Such tensions between solidarity and exclusion recur constantly and internationally.
The fight for improved conditions for media workers faces other challenges even within the organized labor movement. The coexistence of the terms union and guild indicates some of the tricky issues regarding different kinds of workers, and different approaches to how they might best be protected by worker organizations. There are tensions in the media and communication industries between “craft unions,” on the one hand, and those oriented toward general worker solidarity, on the other. There are also tensions between those organizations that represent above-the-line or “creative talent” workers, such as writers, actors, and directors, and those representing below-the-line “craftspeople,” technical or support workers.
Worker organization in the media industries is divided between, on the one hand, craft unions and guilds, who often aim primarily to protect the pay and conditions of existing members who have gained entry to a limited field; and on the other, general unions that adhere to inclusive goals of solidarity and equality, and see themselves much more as defending workers as a whole. This in turn relates to a fundamental problem underlying all modern trade unionism: the tension between the pressure to act as a “businesslike service organization” or as an “expression and vehicle of the historical movement of the submerged laboring masses.” 11 As Alan Paul and Archie Kleingarter have shown in the most important study of the topic, the unions or guilds representing “creative” above-the-line talent in the U.S. film and television sectors managed to expand membership and bargain powerfully for their members in the late twentieth century, in spite of regulatory and technological changes that might have harmed their effectiveness. 12 Some analysts have responded to the unfortunate connotations of above-the-line and below-the-line , terms derived from Hollywood accounting practices and seeming to suggest a hierarchy of labor, by treating above-the-line workers as somehow inherently privileged or more “creative” compared with technical and other workers. But in the media industries some technical workers enjoy very good pay and conditions, and many above-the-line workers suffer hardship.
Craft unions have some ambivalent features, as Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher have shown in a valuable account of labor organization in media and communication industries. Craft solidarity, they write, has “at times worked against the push toward mass unions, and at other times has encouraged it.” 13 The International Typographical Union (ITU), which represented printers in the U.S. newspaper industry until 1986, for example, encouraged workers to identify with their union and to see it “as the institution that would provide them with a good living.” 14 But Mosco and McKercher also recognize that craft solidarity can be destructive, and that the ITU, for example, tried the patience of workers as it grew into a more bureaucratic and professional bargaining institution concerned with “jurisdiction over the tools of the trade” to the exclusion of protection and promotion of the craft itself.
What is needed is strong union representation ensuring good working conditions and rights across all types of media work, nationally and internationally. Yet social and cultural changes have negatively affected trade unions in general, including media unions. One way of understanding this is via the concept of individualization , whereby workers tend to see organizations, and jobs, as opportunities for self-development rather than sources of commitment. For the most widely cited advocate of this concept, Ulrich Beck, individualization offers some new freedoms in that people become independent of restrictive traditional ties, but it also leads to competitiveness and isolation. 15 In the eyes of some commentators, this leads to “an individualistic and self-centered culture of contentment that sees no virtue in forms of collective association and solidarity.” 16 Such developments perhaps help to explain how, in the contemporary media industries, in Susan Christopherson’s words, “personal networks are recognized as the central mechanism both for individual career advancement and risk reduction.” 17
Organizations representing creative workers face all these challenges. They also face a challenge concerning how they are perceived more widely. In a fine analysis of changes in the U.S. film and television industries, Christopherson shows how middling budget productions are being eroded both by the huge demand for cheap programming in the era of multichannel television and by the blockbuster syndrome in movies, and how this has led to a strengthening of “defensive exclusionary networks” 18 that dominate access to the best jobs. Are guilds of creative workers examples of such exclusionary networks, reinforcing the privilege of the well educated and successful? This question of privilege cannot be separated from dynamics of inequality related to class, race, ethnicity, and gender. In the remainder of this chapter, we explore these issues by examining efforts by writers of film, television, and streaming media to defend—or better procure—their rights as employees within the major media industries, first by looking at some of the obstacles faced by U.S. writers in their own national context and then turning to their efforts to establish strong global connections among writers’ organizations.