Carl Kurlander: The WGA/SAG strike and 4 lessons from a steel town for the modern-day labor movement
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With Labor Day approaching and the writers and actors strike continuing into the fall, I thought this might be a good time for a historical perspective on the modern-day labor movement.
I write as someone whose oldest membership outside of the AAA is the Writers Guild of America (member of WGA since 1985, thanks to my first screenplay, “St. Elmo’s Fire”). I am also a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where we voted in 2021 to unionize and join the United Steelworkers. As the director of Pitt’s summer program in Los Angeles, I was out picketing in front of Disney and Warner Brothers this summer while also, as a teacher, having writers and executives speak to my students on what is known out there as simply “the business.”
Pittsburgh and Los Angeles may seem to have little in common. But during the last century, both became one-industry, union towns that manufactured a single product — steel and entertainment, respectively — that they exported to the rest of the world.
Pittsburgh’s labor movement goes back to the Homestead Strike of 1892 when Henry Frick hired Pinkerton guards, who ended up killing seven steelworkers. This tragedy turned public sentiment toward unions and helped prompt Carnegie, who was richer in today’s dollars than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos combined, to give his vast fortune away, endowing public libraries so others could follow in the Scottish immigrant’s footsteps.
A steel mill and a movie set might seem like very different places, but both involve grueling 12- to 18-hour days for highly skilled workers. Here are four lessons from a steel town that may be instructive for this moment.
1. Everyone can win. After the Homestead Strike, Pittsburgh’s steelworkers eventually won higher wages and safer working conditions that strengthened unions across America. Pittsburgh’s steel industry did not fold as a result, but rather the city became “The Steel Capital of the World,” with its factories producing more steel in World War II than Japan and Germany combined.
The city so prided itself on this achievement that the football team was named the Steelers, who ironically became champions just as the steel industry declined. As the struggles of Pittsburgh’s labor movement proved in the first half of the 20th century, management and labor can work together. If the studios and writers and actors can resolve their differences in a fair way, decades of growth can follow.
2. Disruption means changing your mentality. Yes, there are plenty of headlines about the uncertainty of artificial intelligence, but disruption has been going on in Hollywood since four Warner brothers (who started in Pittsburgh) bet on a new technology called “sound” with “The Jazz Singer.”
In making the 2008 documentary “My Tale of Two Cities,” about Pittsburgh’s struggle to reinvent itself in a post-industrial age, I spoke with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who as CEO of Alcoa turned that company around while other corporations were fleeing the city. O’Neill said the crash of the steel industry was not inevitable. But, he noted, when management and labor most needed to cooperate to deal with a changing business environment, they fought.
In the good times, steel executives were making fat salaries, and steelworkers were earning 85% more than the average American. After O’Neill took charge at Alcoa in 1987, he cut back on executives’ perks and corner offices. At the new headquarters, everyone — including himself — worked in cubicles of the same size. Worker safety became paramount because it affected every employee. The result: Alcoa became the largest producer of aluminum in the world and the best performing stock of the Dow Jones average. If the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and union leaders can acknowledge the new reality and create new models, there are huge upsides for both executives and workers.
3. Canary in the coal mine. Much has been written about how this Hollywood strike appears elitist, involving rich writers and actors who have nothing to do with the average working American. But both Fran Drescher from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Chris Keyser from the WGA have been articulate in framing this as “America’s strike.”
The American narrative today is dominated by stories of CEOs making obscenely more than their average workers, reflecting the reality facing many industries from UPS drivers to food and service workers. Clips are going viral of Snoop Dog pointing out how his songs are getting over a billion streams on Spotify and yet he and other artists are not getting paid. The public has become wise to the tech companies’ strategy as they disrupt industries from taxis to hotels: Using billions from venture capitalists, they appear to be creating value — but instead, they use the funds to subsidize below-market values of what things really cost.
Uber rides started off cheap. But you can’t have a personal limo take you anywhere for 10 bucks. Nor can consumers watch all the content in the world, as Netflix promised, for 12 bucks a month. Now that subscriber growth has peaked and Wall Street has pointed out that trajectories are going in the wrong direction, these entertainment CEOs seem to believe cost-cutting is the solution. In squeezing those who drive the engines of their business, they risk framing themselves as the villains in this conflict and losing the public opinion war to labor.
4. Leadership matters. After World War II in Pittsburgh, it was the Republican businessman Richard King Mellon who reached out to Democratic Mayor David Lawrence. They catalyzed the Renaissance that allowed the city to develop industries beyond steel such as medicine, which led to Jonas Salk developing the first polio vaccine here (and Dr. Thomas Starzl transforming the city into “The Transplant Capital of the World”).
It was 1982 when I first arrived in Los Angeles, on a college award affiliated with MCA-Universal Studios. In that era, studio owner Lew Wasserman was in the commissary every day. In 1960, the last time SAG and WGA were on strike together, Wasserman worked with his former client Ronald Reagan, who had become SAG president, to help settle that conflict. It resulted in residual payments for writers and actors, along with the establishment of pension and health care coverage.
The entertainment business only became more profitable. I was part of WGA’s longest strike in 1988 over home video. Strikes since then have fought for content creators getting a piece of cable, DVDs, foreign residuals and streaming. But I have never seen both guilds so united; everyone seems to understand the business is at an inflection point.
If this was a movie, one would long for a statesman like Lew Wasserman to ride into town and find ways to bring both management and labor together and save the future of entertainment. Now more than ever, visionary leadership matters.
When I moved back to Pittsburgh, I wrote an op-ed in 2002 titled “Pittsburgh’s Next Industrial Revolution: Entertainment,” stating that the city’s greatest export was no longer steel, but talent. Today, through the efforts of many, Pittsburgh has become a thriving production hub. Movies and TV are no longer made just in LA or New York City and this WGA/SAG strike affects more than just those on the coasts. And its outcome may have far-reaching consequences, going well beyond the entertainment industry.
Carl Kurlander (carlkurlander.com) is a screenwriter and TV writer/producer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and is founding director of the Pitt in LA program.