im running so late to this but holy fucking shit this is historic
last thing – while unions are obviously a collaborative effort and this incredible victory is the result of the hard work and sacrifices of many different people i think it’s absolutely essential to highlight the role of ALU’s founder chris smalls rn
chris was fired by amazon in 2020 for organizing a walk-out in the wake of their absolutely criminal handling of covid protocols in staten island. in a meeting with bezos and other amazon execs amazon’s lawyer was caught bragging that he wasnt “smart” or “articulate” enough to organize against them…now he’s helped facilitate the first successful union vote in amazon’s history – eat shit!
Talk about the ultimate satisfaction. :)
…And lest anyone be confused: I’m a proud union girl. For the first half of the twentieth century, writers for film (and when it came along, TV) were routinely, systemically cheated and abused by producers out to get the most labor out of them for the least possible money and benefits.
Then the Writers’ Guild started to get its wheels underneath it in service to its members. With the membership’s help the Guild(s) started teaching the industry that our kind was no longer to be casually stolen from… in case we lost our tempers and, you know, just stopped working all at once. Which turns out to be a strikingly effective technique when used judiciously… so that WGAw and WGAe are now two of the most powerful forces in Hollywood.
Seeing a group of workers who were shut out of power over their own employment now starting to change that game makes me smile day after day. More power to them. MUCH more.
This entry was posted by jbc on Saturday, April 2nd, 2022 at 6:47 am and is filed under Tumblr.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
