20.6: Notes

¹ Much of the recent critical research on media work has actually been addressed to “cultural work” or “creative labor,” and one reason for this choice of terms is the way work has been understood (or neglected) by policymakers and academics interested in the creative industries and the “creative economy.” See Mark Banks and David Hesmondhalgh, “Looking for Work in Creative Industries Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15.4 (2009): 1–16. For simplicity’s sake, and because of the topic of this book, we use the terms media work and media workers here. For a more detailed discussion of the relations among the concepts media industries, cultural industries, and creative industries, see Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 23. On the relations among the concepts of media work, cultural work, and creative labor, see Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (New York: Routledge, 2011), a source some of this chapter draws on.

² Among the notable contributions to the “turn to labor” in media and cultural studies discussing or providing evidence of such problematic conditions, see Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labour in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Angela McRobbie, “Clubs to Companies; Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds,” Cultural Studies 16 (2002); Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill, and Stephanie Taylor, eds., Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries (New York: Routledge, 2013). Important research on media labor has by no means been confined to media and cultural studies. A ground-breaking collection from industrial relations studies is Lois Gray and Ronald L. Seeber, eds., Under the Stars: Essays on Labor Relations in Arts and Entertainment (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1996); see also Alan McKinlay and Chris Smith, eds., Creative Labour: Working in the Creative Industries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The contributions of geographer Susan Christopherson have been valuable; see below.

³ Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1997).

⁴ Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It, 19.

⁵ Ibid., 21.

⁶ Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 381.

⁷ Dave Laing, “Musicians’ Unions,” Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, ed. John Shepherd et al. (London: Continuum, 2003).

⁸ For a recent analysis of the problems of the U.S. labor movement, see Stanley Aronowitz, The Death and Life of American Labor: Towards a New Workers’ Movement (New York: Verso, 2014).

⁹ Alan McKinlay, “Making ‘the Bit between the Adverts’: Management, Accounting, Collective Bargaining and Work in UK Commercial Television, 1979–2005,” in Creative Labour, ed. McKinlay and Smith.

¹⁰ Meryl Aldridge and Julia Evetts, “Rethinking the Concept of Professionalism: The Case of Journalism,” British Journal of Sociology 54.4 (2003).

¹¹ Will Herberg, “Bureaucracy and Democracy in Labor Unions,” Antioch Review 3, cited in Peter Fairbrother and Edward Webster, “Social Movement Unionism: Questions and Possibilities,” Employment Responsibilities and Rights 20 (2008): 309, who also quote an alternative formulation of the tension: “sword of justice” or “vested interest.”

¹² Alan Paul and Archie Kleingarter, “The Transformation of Industrial Relations in the Motion Picture and Television Industries: Talent Sector,” in Under the Stars, ed. Gray and Seeber. Gray and Seeber’s collection is the most detailed and valuable study of media labor organizations, but its cases are confined almost entirely to the United States.

¹³ Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher, The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 82.

¹⁴ Ibid., 104.

¹⁵ Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 94.

¹⁶ Robert Taylor, “The Future of Employment Relations” (Swindon: Economic and Social Research Council, 2001), quoted in Richard Saundry, Valerie Antcliff, and Mark Stuart, “‘It’s More Than Who You Know’—Networks and Trade Unions in the Audio-Visual Industries,” Human Resource Management Journal 16.4 (2006): 378.

¹⁷ Susan Christopherson, “Beyond the Self-Expressive Creative Worker: An Industry Perspective on Entertainment Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2008): 89.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ James Welsh, “WGA Lauds Public Support Polls,” Digital Spy, November 15, 2007, www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/news/a79902/wga-lauds-public-support-polls/.

²⁰ In the United States, different socio-economic groups are often reductively indicated by the clothing they wear to work: formal white collars for professionals, (originally denim) blue collars for manual workers. “No collar” indicates the wearing of T-shirts by those who work from home or in the self-consciously informal IT industries. While the dress code is casual, the workload and working hours are often very demanding.

²¹ Bob Barbash, interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project (Los Angeles: Writers Guild Foundation, February 24, 1978), 7, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Los Angeles, CA.

²² The battle over self-definition is a recurring theme in Miranda J. Banks, The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). This chapter draws upon research for that book and material that appears in it.

²³ Barbara Corday, interview with Banks, August 30, 2013.

²⁴ M.W., “Kanter Adds Dimension to Hyphenated Career: Writer-Prod-Dir-Emcee,” WGAw Newsletter, December 1967, 7, Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles.

²⁵ John Furia Jr. and David Rintels, interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project (Los Angeles: Writers Guild Foundation, May 3, 1978), 44.

²⁶ Robert White and Phyllis White, interview by the Writers Guild Oral History Project (Los Angeles: Writers Guild Foundation, spring 1978), 22.

²⁷ On the politics of such distinctions, see Jason Toynbee, “How Special? Cultural Work, Copyright, Politics,” in Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural and Creative Industries, ed. Mark Banks, Rosalind Gil, and Stephanie Taylor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Mayer, Below the Line; and especially Stahl, Unfree Masters.

²⁸ Marc Norman, interview with Banks, June 2011.

²⁹ Kevin Sanson, “Production Service Firms and the Spatial Dynamics of Global Media Production,” paper presented at annual meeting for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, Washington, 2014.

³⁰ Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2008).

³¹ Howard Rodman, interview with Banks, February 15, 2011. None of this is really new. In the late 1940s, American writers saw this internationalism as both a boon for business and an encroaching threat. In 1948, Robert Pirosh, who worked with René Clair on a Maurice Chevalier film, referred to American writers who had contracts as “part of a postwar invasion of Europe through international coproductions.” Yet in 1947, an editorial in the journal The Screen Writer portended that “in the years to come, it is not inconceivable that the film industries in India and China may further encroach upon areas which we once held almost exclusively.” Editorial, The Screen Writer, July 1945, 38.

³² Studies of writers around the world include Eva Novrup Redvall on television screen authorship in Denmark and Bridget Conor on British and New Zealand screenwriters. See Redvall, Writing and Producing Television Drama in Denmark: From “The Kingdom” to “The Killing” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Bridget Conor, “Subjects at Work: Investigating the Creative Labour of British Screenwriters,” in Behind the Screen: Inside European Production Cultures, ed. Petr Szczepanik and Patrick Vonderau (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and her “Problems in ‘Wellywood’: Rethinking the Politics of Transnational Cultural Labour,” Flow TV 13, last modified January 28, 2011, http://flowtv.org/2011/01/problems-in-wellywood/.

³³ Norelle Scott, interview with Banks, March 2014.

³⁴ Agustín Díaz Yanes in Hablan los guionistas, dir. Alfonso S. Suárez, Sindicato de Guionistas ALMA, 2013.

³⁵ Conor, “Problems in ‘Wellywood.’”