Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today’s topic, in a sense, we’re going to be talking about something that has two parts, but the overriding theme of what we’re going to be talking about is unions, labor unions. Now, obviously this has been in the news a lot given the Writer’s Guild and Screen Actors Guild strike. A little bit less known, but certainly no less if not more important, is a potential strike with UPS, the United Parcel Service, that also has been in negotiations recently. And we want to talk a little bit about the mechanics and the logic behind how unions function. How strikes, in particular, what do they do? What leverage or lack of leverage do strikers have? And we’re going to do this really in two parts.

We’re first going to look at strikes that happen with, I suppose you could just say transportation organizations at the railroad, for example, and UPS sort of fits in there as far as interstate commerce goes. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about Hollywood and actors and very different kind of strike, but certainly a strike that potentially at least can get a lot of public attention.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So let’s start, first of all with the United Parcel Service and the workers for UPS, both the permanent workers and the temporary workers who were represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. They actually represented about 34,000 UPS workers. So the UPSS workers did not actually go on strike. They were threatening to walk out on August 1st, which is the day that their contracts expired but instead they cut this deal. The full-time workers won last week, a new contract to replace the one that’s expiring on August 1st. That increases the pay for full-time workers up to $49 an hour. Well, that’s a pretty good paycheck. But the part-time workers who made up a significant number of people in that contract got a raise that brought them to $21 an hour, which is maybe a lot if you’re living in a state with very low wages, but actually not that high a wage.

And the UPS also agreed to create 7,500 new full-time union jobs and to fill 22,500 open positions that had not been filled. So one of the things happening here is rebuilding the workforce and rebuilding it with good paying jobs, especially for those who are permanent UPS workers. It does come at a time when UPS’s post pandemic revenue had increased 70% from 2019. So UPS is not able to go to the table and say, “Oh, we’re losing money hand over fist.” In fact, with everybody turning during and after the pandemic to having things shipped to their homes, the profits for UPS have gone sky-high in the past three years.

Joanne Freeman:

Which raises an interesting theme that I think will bear true throughout the episode, which is the ways in which these labor movements, this union work, these strikes are responding in part to massive changes in one way or another in American society, American industry. We’re looking at big changes that lead to changes in work. And some of these strikes are a direct response to business doing whatever it can do to benefit from these changes. And workers of various sorts piping up and saying, “Well, no, actually there’s been a change here. We need to negotiate something.”

So unions and strikes, I think it’s tempting sometimes for people to think about labor unions or strikes as some isolated economic factor. But the fact of the matter is they pretty much reflect everything that’s going on in American society and can shape everything that’s going on in American society because they affect, in one way or another, fundamentals.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The idea of strikes that shut down major industries that move goods to me is a very different kind of strike than strikes in more localized industries. And we can talk about why that would be the case. But it’s worth pointing out that if in fact the UPS workers had gone on strike on August 1st, as they had said they were going to. A 10-day strike from the UPS was estimated that it would cost the United States economy $7 billion, with a B, dollars and would wipe out small businesses because they rely heavily on UPS to deliver goods to their consumers.

Joanne Freeman:

And it’s worth noting too, the question of leverage and what leverage strikers have. The contract for UPS was going to expire August 1st. So here we are at the end of July with that looming on the horizon and those dire outcomes of a strike looming beyond that. That was a powerful tool of leverage for the strikers.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s interesting that this president, Joe Biden, has always touted himself as a strong union supporter. And yet last fall, he put an enormous amount of pressure on a number of railroad unions not to go on strike for paid sick leave in the days before the winter and the Christmas season. And at the time he took a lot of heat for that because a lot of the railway unions felt that he should have stood more firmly behind them, in order to get paid short-term sick leave, it was a little bit complicated and he didn’t. He said he would continue to work on that, but that they really had to agree to a deal not to go on strike.

And I want to pick that up because he did in fact go ahead to continue working with the unions to get them four days of short-term sick leave and the potential to turn three days of vacation into short term sick leave a few months ago. But as I say, one of the things that jumps out to me when we talk about the strikes in industries that move goods as opposed to strikes in industries that do something else, is that one of the key things we can see from previous strikes in those sorts of industries that move goods is that the American public turns against those strikes on a dime. So it’s one thing to say, “Oh, well, I can’t live without my widget. The widget makers are on strike from making, I’ll work around that for a few months.” When goods stop moving, the American people turn against strikes instantly, and we can talk about that in our history.

And it makes it more important both for the unions and the workers not to have that happen because that really undercuts unionization. But also it really matters to an administration not to have that happen because the first people who get blamed are the workers. The second people who get blamed are the people in charge of the country. And yet there is also the reality that the way people in the United States think about unions has a great deal to do with how they are represented in popular culture. Last year in 2022, unions were at their lowest level of membership since we have started keeping records on that with only about 10.1% of American workers being unionized.

In 1954 in contrast, the peak was 35% of American workers. Part of the dip is that there’ve been so many jobs added to the economy in the last 18 months. But part of it is that on the heels of the real pushback against the New Deal, which really supported unions and against the unionization of the 1950s. One of the things that happened was that anti-union business people began to work with, especially the Republican Party, to argue that unions were exercising too strong a role in American politics, and the unions themselves were corrupt, which wasn’t helped by the fact, of course, that a lot of the unions were corrupt.

There was this sense that if you belong to a union, you were somehow a mobster. Saying that now is very hard to get traction in the public sphere because first of all, most people don’t remember those days. And second of all, because the union membership has been so decimated, it’s a little hard to say, “Oh yeah, unions have way too much power.” You see it still with people in politics trying to argue that teachers unions have too much power or police unions have too much power. But trying to say the Democratic Party is run by the unions is really a stretch in 2023.

Joanne Freeman:

And what’s interesting about that is even as we see this dip in membership, this August 2022 Gallup poll says that 71% of Americans approve of labor unions, which is the highest degree of public support since Gallup began tracking labor approval approval in 1965. So it’s a really interesting paradox, which may actually not be a paradox, that what we’re looking at is unions lower membership, not as large of power holders in society. And Americans at this moment of great economic disparity in which that in almost any number of fields, you can see people saying, “Wait a minute, these people are getting billions of dollars, and Americans are getting two.” That at that kind of a moment, Americans logically would be in favor of labor unions and what they can do for workers against what might be perceived as the elite rich few.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if we look at it that way, which I think is absolutely the way to do, it does seem instructive to look back at first of all, a major railroad strike. This is a really cool one. They’re all kind of cool actually. But the Pullman Strike of the early 1890s, and that timing is actually going to matter. It’s a time when the American economy looks not unlike the way it does now, there’s a bunch of people making a gazillion dollars, that’s a scientific term, and a lot of people who are not. But Pullman is especially interesting because he started the Pullman Palace Car Company, and that was an attempt to create upper class sleeping cars that looked as if you were dining and sleeping in an elite hotel. And these were absolutely beautiful.

I was lucky enough to get to see one in a museum recently, and they’re just spectacularly beautiful. So the Pullman porters on the trains were usually Black Americans, and they actually unionized pretty early on, and they were the really good job for Black Americans in the Jim Crow era in America. But that’s its own story as well. The workers who built the cars were mostly Scandinavians, Germans, Irish, Dutch, English people, generally immigrants. And the trick to this is that Pullman saw himself not only as an industrialist building these luxurious items. He saw himself as somebody who could create a new kind of an economy.

Joanne Freeman:

Part of the way that he played into this larger vision of changing the economy, changing in a sense American society large scale, was that he wasn’t just focused on the railway. He constructed what was essentially a massive company town, which logically enough you could guess this in one guess, he named Pullman, 14 miles south of Chicago, and it was completed in 1884. It soon grew to a population of 8,000, which entirely were Pullman employees and their families. And it was decorated all in brick. It was meant to be a statement of sorts about Pullman and what he represented as far as the future in some way except, and in a sense you might say this does represent a Pullman view of the future, he did not provide housing for his employees for free.

He charged rent so that he could guarantee a 6% return on his investment in constructing the town. He believed and he says in 1882 that this kind of town is going to usher in a new era of compassionate capitalism in which employees would be far more productive and self-sufficient. And these are Pullman’s words. “Capital will not invest in sentiment nor for sentimental considerations for the laboring class, but let it once be proved that enterprises of this kind are safe and profitable. And we shall see great manufacturing companies develop similar enterprises, and thus a new era will be introduced in the history of labor.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So historians study Pullman partly for the economic side of it, but partly because sort of my favorite stories in American history. If you really, really, really made it as a Pullman employee, the first thing you did was you moved the hell out of Pullman and move to a nearby slum basically. Because whenever I think of Pullman, I always think of… Joanne, did you ever read the book A Wrinkle in Time?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, million years ago.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There’s a planned society and the kids all have to bounce a ball in the same rhythm. And whenever I think of Pullman, I always think of the kids bouncing the ball in the same rhythm. People hated it. They hated that he basically owned every piece of them. He owned their work, he owned their leisure…

Joanne Freeman:

He controlled the prices over everything.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Company store too. So he made them pay rent, but basically they were little machines to produce more money for Pullman.

Joanne Freeman:

And this whole idea of the fact that this kind of company town was all consuming, all powerful over the people who lived there was expressed in the Chicago Tribune in 1888. The Tribune said, “None of the ‘superior or scientific advantages’ of the model city will compensate for the restrictions on the freedom of the workmen, the denial of opportunities of ownership, the heedless and vexatious parade of authority and the sense of injustice arising from the well-founded belief that the charges of the company for rent, heat, gas, water, et cetera, are excessive, if not extortionate. Pullman may appear all glitter and glow, all gladness and glory…” Talk about a little alliteration there. “To the casual visitor. But there is the deep, dark background of discontent, which it would be idle to deny.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what’s cool about this is the Chicago Tribune is actually a staunchly Republican newspaper in this time. They actually staunchly support the government putting up tariff walls, for example, to protect big business and all that. But even they look at this and see the kid bouncing the ball and say, “This is way over the top.” So what happens is that there’s a economic panic in May of 1893, and it really is sparked by the election in 1892 of all of the Democrats to come in and change some of those rules that protect big business so fully. And when that happens, industrialists say, “Take your money out of the stock market, shut down your businesses, the Democrats are going to ruin everything. You got to get out of it.”

So there’s this total psychological panic where the economy collapses 10 days before the Democrats get into power before Grover Cleveland takes office. When that happens, there’s this major crash across the country beginning actually in the railroad yards. And when that happens, Pullman cuts wages really significantly. He starts to slash wages by about 25%, and they’re like, “Wait a minute, we need to negotiate about this. We need to have some conversations about this.” Not least because at the same time he didn’t reduce the rents or any of the costs in the company town. So if you’re a worker watching this, a quarter of your paycheck is gone, but the same guy who just cuts your paycheck…

Joanne Freeman:

Is making sure he’s getting as much as he wants to get. It’s a double raw deal. And there’s a deploy, a Pullman employee at the time who puts this pretty bluntly and says, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman School, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die, we shall go to the Pullman hell.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this is going to become a national strike. Pullman employees, in June of 1893, they formed the American Railway Union or the ARU. And the president of the ARU was Gene Debs, Eugene V. Debs, who was a locomotive fireman out of Indiana. And very quickly about 150,000 workers joined the union. Now, once again, I know I’ve said this a thousand times, but it’s really important. Everything in the center of the country travels by railroad. Along the coastlines, you’ve got some coastal boat traffic in some of the lakes. But if you are going to move anything in 1893, you’re going to move it by rail. So the fact that 150,000 of them are of the people moving those trains, they’re saying, “Well, yeah, we’re going to have to go on strike here.” This is not like saying the jewelry makers are going on strike. This is we have our hands around the neck of the American economy in a sense.

Joanne Freeman:

So the ARU tried to negotiate with Pullman, but Pullman pretty much refused to arbitrate at all. And as a result of that, in May of 1894, the workers decided to strike. Pullman, not at all moved by this, simply closed up the factory and fled Chicago. Now obviously that doesn’t necessarily have a good look to it. If the response to people asking for negotiation is the person who’s being asked simply leaves the room, leaves town, closes shop. So Eugene Debs not surprisingly, really takes advantage of this extreme action in some of his rhetoric when he’s talking about the need for negotiation and the need for the union to have some power and some say and to gain some success. Debs says, “I believe a rich plunderer like Pullman is a greater felon than a poor thief. And it has become no small part of the duty of this organization to strip the mask of hypocrisy from the pretended philanthropist and show him to the world as an oppressor of labor.

The paternalism of the Pullman is the same as the interest of a slave holder in his human chattels. You are striking to avert slavery and degradation.” Now, what’s striking about that statement? This is certainly not the first time in American history that people in their rhetoric use slavery or enslavement as a way to get across how dire and horrible conditions are. Well actually not including Black Americans at all in what’s going on. And in this case, the American Railway Union refused membership to the thousands of Black Pullman porters. If they had been allowed in, that strike probably would’ve been far more successful.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, what happens first is that on June 26th, 1894, Debs calls for a boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars. So they’re not going to shut down everything, but they’re not going to carry anything that’s got a Pullman car on it. About a quarter of a million workers joined the strike in 27 states. Then in Blue Island, Illinois two days later on June 28th, some strike supporters set some buildings afire and they have detached a mail car from an idle train. So the mail cars are going to matter a lot because remember, in this period, everyone’s still trying to figure out what actual laws are with regard to labor. But one of the things that the US government is supposed to do is it’s supposed to deliver the mail. So President Grover Cleveland’s Attorney General Richard Olney tried to get an injunction to force the boycotting workers to return to their labors.

And he actually was a former railroad attorney who was still on retainer from the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad for a $10,000 a year salary, which is a huge amount of money in this era. The two federal judges give a very broad injunction to the government on July 2nd to suppress the strike, and it blocked the ARU from doing anything to support the strike. And they did that weirdly under the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was supposed to stop monopolies from restraining interstate commerce. And they made the argument that the unions themselves were affecting interstate commerce. But one of the things that Richard Olney did is he attaches mail train cars, mail cars, to every train that has a Pullman train on it. So when the strikers won’t handle the trains that have the mail on them, they are directly attacking the United States government. It’s brilliant.

Joanne Freeman:

It is brilliant and sneaky.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, but it is such a sign that the US government is working for the employers, the capitalists rather than for the union. I think it’s a really incredibly important moment in that the Cleveland Administration is actually pro-worker. They’re actually way more pro-worker than the Republicans on either side of them, but they recognize that they can’t stop goods from moving across the country or things are going to get even worse because remember, we’re in the middle of this huge depression in ’94. They’re desperate to make sure they don’t hand the power of the country over to what they consider a mob of workers. He gets the injunction. On August 3rd, Grover Cleveland sends 10,000 federal troops into Chicago to quell the strikes.

And in the message that he sends with the troops, he says, “Those who disregard this warning and persist in taking apart with a riotous mob in forcibly resisting and obstructing the execution of the laws of the United States or interfering with the functions of the government.” That’s the mail cars. “Or destroying or attempting to destroy the property belonging to the United States or under its protection.” Mail cars again. “Cannot be regarded otherwise than as public enemies.” So what’s happening in this moment is that not just people like Grover Cleveland, but across the country, people who in the past had supported workers turn against them. The papers are full of, “How dare they? We’re going to starve because we’re not getting stuff. We’re in terrible trouble because of these rioters who have shut down the country.” And my favorite moment of this is when Jane Addams of all people, Jane Addams, who’s up there in Chicago.

Theoretically being pro-immigrant, pro-worker, the whole thing. Jane Addams comes out fervently against the strike because she says, “Okay, because you want better conditions down there in Pullman. You’re shutting down every other business in this country. You’re screwing over everybody.” She doesn’t say screwing over. That’s me. But the whole point is that, you look at it as a historian and you say, “Pullman just really screwed over his workers and they had a right to be angry.” But the way it snowballs with the government stepping in to make things move again, they managed to include all the industries in the country to threaten to shut down the entire country. The real issue was the American people looked at that strike and they were like, “Who the hell do you think you are? We’re going to starve down here in Des Moines or whatever because you won’t let the railroads move carrying food stuffs, for example, or clothing or any of the things we need.” And they turned against that sucker on a dime.

Joanne Freeman:

If people initially had sympathy with the strikers as workers, as people they can identify with. This is a similar kind of way of looking at things and the simple fact that all of these goods, all of these necessities for Americans of various kinds, now they are going to be affected. So it’s not as though Americans turn on a dime because they suddenly switch loyalty. It’s just a different way now in which they’re thinking about the fact of the common good being affected in some way or another. And now that’s on a huge scale and it might affect them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The other thing that happens is once you start to see this switch against the strikers. Once Cleveland sends in the troops, there’s obviously an escalation. About 6,000 rioters destroyed hundreds of train cars in the South Chicago panhandle yards after the troops arrived and the next day national guardsmen fired into the rioters. They killed as many as 13. And in the rest of the strike, as it went on, about 30 people died across the country. Now, Debs continued to plead with the strikers and the rioters to remain peaceful, but he also refused to give into the injunction. He said, “Strong men and broad minds only can resist the plutocracy and arrogant monopoly. Do not be frightened at troops, injunctions, or a subsidized press. Quit and remain firm. Commit no violence. American Railway Union will protect all whether member or not when strike is off.”

And yet the newspapers turned against Debs, blamed him for the violence. The New York Times said, “Debs is a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race. There has been quite enough talk about warrants against him and about arresting him. It is time to cease mouthing and begin. Deb should be jailed if there are jails in his neighborhood and the disorder his bad teaching has engendered must be squelched.” So the way this is going to play out matters, I think a lot both for then and for the way we think about similar movements today. After the riots had died down, Debs is sent to jail for six months for obstructing the mails. There’s the mail again and disobeying the injunction. But it’s really interesting to me that when he is in jail in Woodstock, Illinois, in that moment, he starts to read socialist thinkers and begins to think about becoming a socialist.

He also insisted that the injunctions against the strike were unconstitutional and got Clarence Darrow, who even then was a famed defense attorney to work with him. And Darrell later said that he had worked with Debs for these reasons. He said, “After the injunctions were issued, Mr. Debs and a good many of my friends came to ask me to go into the case. I didn’t want to take it up knowing what would be involved. I knew that it would take all my time for a long period with no compensation, but I was on their side. And when I saw poor men giving up their jobs for a cause, I could find no sufficient excuse except my selfish interest for refusing.” Again, a picture there of what a big question was at stake, not just Pullman and not just Pullman’s workers, but the law. Is it a democracy when the law has taken such a firm stand for one person as opposed to hundreds of thousands?

So not surprisingly, the Supreme Court, which at this point is under Melville Fuller and is a staunchly pro business court, issues the case of in re Debs, and they ruled unanimously in in re Debs that the federal government could issue strike injunctions in the interests of regulating interstate commerce. That is they could go after Debs as an individual if he was interfering with interstate commerce. What I love about the in re Debs case is they had just decided that the federal government was too weak to have an income tax, but it was strong enough to go after individuals. Again, a really corrupt decision or at least an inconsistent decision considering what they’d done just months before. But in it, Justice David Josiah Brewer, who wrote the majority opinion argued that the threat of mob violence and its interruptions to commerce and the mail were more important than the cause of the strikers.

He said, “A most earnest and eloquent appeal was made to us in eulogy of the heroic spirit of those who threw up their employment and gave up their means of earning a livelihood, not in defense of their own rights, but in sympathy for and to assist others whom they believe to be wronged. We yield to none in our admiration of any act of heroism or self-sacrifice, but we may be permitted to add that it is a lesson which cannot be learned too soon or too thoroughly. That under this government of and by the people, the means of redress of all wrongs are through the courts and at the ballot box. And that no wrong, real or fancied carries with it legal warrant to invite as a means of redress at the cooperation of a mob with its accompanying acts of violence.” Clarence Darrow, he was furious with this decision and said it signaled the ascendants of trial by judge rather than trial by jury.

He said, “When these powers are given to courts to determine upon the liberty and upon the life of individuals, the courts of America will soon become what the star chamber courts of England once were. And freedom will be more menaced by the judiciary than by any other governmental institution.” And why do I like that so much in this particular moment? Because if you look at the big picture, the same questions that were at the heart of the Pullman Strike of 1894, not just about Pullman or the strikers, and not just about Pullman or the strikers and public opinion, which really matters here. But the interplay of all those things on the rule of law, on the survival of liberal democracy. And again, the involvement now of the Supreme Court saying, “Go ahead, go vote.” When in fact it didn’t seem to matter that a lot of people had voted to fix the problem and the court was just stepping in.

Joanne Freeman:

Trial by judge.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Trial by judge. I just find the parallels to the present fascinating.

Joanne Freeman:

I want to add one little point here. One of the important factors that we’re talking about here in one way or another is the role of public opinion in helping to shape what the strikes are doing or how the strikes are going, and whether the strikers can gain traction because they get public approval of some kind, or if they have no traction from public approval of some kind. So initially, some of the traction that we’ve seen in the story that we just heard is it’s not fair for the workers. And so the public might have sympathy for the workers. We just saw a legal case that instead said we have to focus on the rule of law. That’s the real traction here. Bump ahead another decade or two, and now the traction skips a beat.

There’s another railway strike in the early 20th century, and in this case you have union and labor organizers writing songs to get the public to sympathize with the worker and have absolutely no sympathy for big businesses and the workers who they entice into being scabs. And I just wanted to offer this because it shows the effort to woo the public, which is important. Also, I bet it’s a song that in one way or another, a tune that people might remember. So the song is called “Casey Jones, the Union Scab” written by Joe Hill, who’s an organizer and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, also known as the Wobblies. I’m actually going to do as I ever do, which is just sing two little bits of the song. I should say, there was an original Casey Jones, he was a railway worker.

He apparently was also… He belonged to the union and there was a train crash, and he tried to prevent disaster and he saved many people’s lives and he was kind of a railway hero. Well, Joe Hill, the union organizer just turns that on its head. People know Casey Jones, they know the story. He says, “Oh, no, no, this is the real story of Casey Jones.” And he talks about how there’s a big crash, how Casey Jones is a scab who’s still running the railway when he shouldn’t be and should have joined the union, and he gets killed in this horrible crash. When Casey Jones got up to heaven to the Pearly Gate. He said, “I’m Casey Jones, the guy that pulled the S.P. Freight.” Southern Pacific. “You’re just the man,” said Peter. “Our musicians went on strike. You can get a job a-scabbing anytime you like.”

Casey Jones got a job in heaven. Casey Jones was doing mighty fine. Casey Jones went scabbing on the angels just like he did to workers on the S.P. line.” And what happens in the end to Casey Jones is the angels throw him down to hell. And he’s basically told that’s what you get for scabbing against the union. It’s just such a striking song. Now, one final little point I have to throw in here, because this is just me. I thought when I found this and it was so telling the idea of the song, why do I know that lyric? Why do I know that lyric? You know why? It’s a TV commercial. Do you know what it is?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I don’t, but I feel like… For some reason, I want to say Tootsie Rolls, and I know it’s not. What is it?

Joanne Freeman:

Good and Plenty.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s it. Good and Plenty. Yes.

Joanne Freeman:

Choo-Choo Charlie was an engineer. It’s the exact same thing. And the sort of chorus is good and plenty, good and plenty.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I hate that that’s going to be in my head all day.

Joanne Freeman:

Sorry about that. And to all of our listeners, you’re sharing with me my experience of looking this up and thinking, why do I know the song? You came close. Tootsie Rolls.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the railway and the transportation strikes we’ve set up I think are really different than what’s happening now in another set of strikes that are making front page news today. And that’s the fact that both the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Arts known as SAG-AFTRA and the Writer’s Guild of America, the WGA are on strike. And the WGA walked out first on May 2nd when it failed in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to secure higher residuals from streaming services and SAG after fallout on July 14th. And about 170,000 actors and writers are currently on strike. This is a strike that centers around, among other things, new technologies.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s one of the things that consistently fascinates me is the ways in which new technologies shape politics, shape society, shape democracy, and can really fundamentally shape everything. And in this case, part of what we’re looking at here in this strike is in part caused by big streaming giants like Netflix or Amazon Prime or Apple, who have cut into the profits of more established film studios and over the past year have resorted partly to cutting new productions and partly to layoffs to make up for the downturn. And also and you’ve probably heard some of this in the news, there’s the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and writers fear that perhaps AI might be able to write workable scripts.

Actors fear that AI likenesses of they themselves might be able to replace them on the screen. So we’ve got two ways, streaming and artificial intelligence, that suddenly are confronting people involved in the making of films with what might be huge changes that could certainly give studios an enormous way to make profit and a part of a profit that they themselves won’t necessarily benefit from.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Those questions now are incredibly important, not just for the actors and the writers, but for anybody who is engaged in any kind of production that now can be replicated either through AI, on intelligence, on computers in movies. If you think about the technologies we have essentially to put faces on another body. You could grab a famous actor from 10 years ago and continue to have that actor appear on-screen by pasting that face on somebody who moves similarly.

Joanne Freeman:

People will know who that represents, and in the context of the suspension of disbelief in a movie that might be perfectly acceptable work perfectly well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it comes at a time again, where we have this new technology, but we also have this world in which a few people are making a lot of money from this industry. So Disney, CEO Bob Iger, for example, who took over the control of Disney again in November 2022 after he had stepped aside and been replaced and then didn’t go terribly well, he came back on. He has been very outspoken in his distaste for the strikes. And in an appearance on CNBC Squawk Box on the eve of the SAG-AFTRA strike, he said that the writers and actors were not being realistic in their demands. And what was interesting about that is that he will make as much as $27 million this year in his role at the head of Disney.

Joanne Freeman:

So recently, Fran Drescher, who’s a TV star, who starred in a show called The Nanny and now is the president of SAG-AFTRA, made a speech at a news conference that got a lot of coverage, got a lot of public attention and traction for what was going on in Hollywood. She said…

Fran Drescher (archival):

I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things, how they plead poverty. That they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.

Joanne Freeman:

And in a variety of different ways that we don’t have to go into now, this is clearly having an impact on movies and TV shows and production on what actors are willing to do or not to do to promote films. And it certainly is not the first time that we have experienced this kind of strike within this industry. But as we started out by saying at the beginning of this episode, an industry that is fundamentally different in many ways to the sort of basic needs of American society, the mail and the government, the social scale of a strike that involves commerce and transportation. Now we’re going to be looking at a strike that shapes entertainment and big money, but entertainment. So we want to compare the current Screen Actors Guild strike to another Hollywood strike that took place in 1960.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the 1960 WGA strike lasted 147 days from January through June of 1960. In the middle of that strike in early March, SAG also staged a four-week walkout, and both were concerned about television syndication of movies from the 1940s and the 1950s. A lot of the writers’ contracts did not take into account the idea that television could replay old movies. And when the TV started to do that, they weren’t getting any money for the profits that were generated by syndication.

Joanne Freeman:

Again, new technology. TV is coming along and changing the way that people can get access to films.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And most of them got paid for their TV appearances, but not for their film appearances. And a lot of this depended on the contracts that people signed and that their agents negotiated. So Abbott and Costello, for example, had worked TV rights into their film contracts, so they were covered, but people like the Three Stooges hadn’t. And this caused huge drama, of course, among the different people according to the contracts they signed. And a lot of that just had to do with whether or not their agents could see it coming. When the WGA walked out, producers initially were not concerned. Most of the scripts, both for film and TV for several months going forward, were locked in, but they were concerned about the strikes involving actors.

Joanne Freeman:

Billy Wilkerson, who was the editor of the Hollywood Reporter, acknowledged that these were two different kinds of walkouts. He said, “The walkout of the Writer’s Guild over the weekend does not worry the producers, but a strike of the actors because of the refusal of the studios to meet their demands would be a death blow to the business.” Now, the president of SAG at the time was Ronald Reagan. He had been the president of SAG from 1947 till 1952. He actually was president and led the Screen Actors Guild through some pretty intense years in the crosshairs of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s house on American Activities Committee. So at the time, he was seen as a great champion leading left-leaning actors off of or away from McCarthy’s blacklist and being a champion for Hollywood, in that sense. It was later learned that he had been secretly working with the FBI during his leadership.

Nothing is simple in Hollywood, but this particularly wasn’t. The threat of communism, sort of red scare, once again came out of the woodwork here and was used as part of the attempt to get traction during this strike. Hedda Hopper who was a very influential gossip columnist at the time, argued that the intensity of the strike was because of the influence of once blacklisted screenwriters and actors who had returned back to gainful employment in Hollywood. She said, “Isn’t it coincidental that at a time when some of the more liberal producers are hiring communist writers, that this strike came up?” You can sort of hear the dun-dun-dun. “It’s communism. It’s communism corrupting Hollywood.” Now the strikes shut down eight Hollywood productions, including one that I’ve never heard of, but the title gave me pause.

The Wackiest Ship in the Army starring Jack Lemon. Never heard of it, but if it’s got wacky in the title, it’s definitely not going to be a modern film. And the strikes were major subject of discussion at the 32nd Academy Awards held on April 4th, 1960. So Bob Hope, the host made jokes about the strike. For example, saying, “Welcome to Hollywood’s most glamorous strike meeting. I never thought I’d live to see the day when Ronald Reagan was the only actor working.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

SAG eventually settled four days after that on April 8th. They dropped their initial requests for back residuals from films made before 1960. They did get a percentage of TV syndication revenue for all films moving forth from that date, including a major increase in the size of the SAG pension fund. And in late June, the Writer’s Guild secured a similar deal. This nonetheless infuriated some people, including Bob Hope, who had made a number of movies before 1960, and who of course was cut out. He said, “The pictures were sold down the river for a certain amount of money. I made something like 60 pictures and my pictures are running on TV all over the world. Who’s getting the money for that? The studios. Why aren’t we getting some money?” Nonetheless, Reagan gave us his soft-spoken middle of the road interpretation of the dispute saying that both sides had merit. “Well, a fellow would like to get everything…” I’m sorry-

Joanne Freeman:

That was a very Reagan-esque well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Do you have any idea how much or how many Reagan speeches I’ve listened to? “Well, a fellow would like to get everything he asked for anytime he walks in and asks for a raise. But let me say that a contract covering all the working conditions and rates of pay in an industry such as ours, and for people performing that work that we perform, you have to take it as a whole. In any negotiation, you give a little and you get a little, and in the attempt to weigh where you gave and where you got, you have to say the end result is satisfactory, and we believe fair to all of us.”

Joanne Freeman:

So let’s step back for a moment here and talk about some of what we’ve seen, and we highlighted already at the outset some of what we’re talking about here. We talked at first about strikes that involved essentials of various sorts, economic essentials, social essentials. Transporting goods across the country, very different thing than what we’re talking about here at the end. About entertainment, about actors and writers in their guilds not getting paid appropriately. In a sense, I think it’s harder to see actors and writers as workers in the same way that it is for seeing people involved in a, for example, a UPS strike. I think we’ve also seen something really interesting about different kinds of traction and how they’ve shifted different strikes and their outcomes.

And by traction, I mean ways in which the public did or didn’t get involved. So for example, one of the things in the Hollywood strike that hasn’t necessarily gotten a lot of traction, but at least brought it to public attention is the involvement of celebrities of one kind or another. And Fran Drescher got a lot of attention for giving this really rousing speech, but people noticed it in part outside of those who are centered more on the news because she’s Fran Drescher and people knew who she was. So there is the traction of celebrity status, but again, that’s not going to compete with the traction of everyday essentials, like the mail and transporting goods, basically the traction of need.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think that one of the things that really undermined the ’94 Pullman strike was that the minute you shut down, as you say, people’s own lives, they’re going to turn against you. Even if they cosmically agree, they’re going to turn against you. And of course, our laws increasingly were designed, especially after that period to move against labor. The issue with something like the writer strike is it’s complicated. I mean, I think a lot of people just look and say, “Oh, you’re on TV. You must be rich.” And it’s actually not the case. Of course, the big name people are really rich, but the majority of that industry is an industry like anybody else.

And the idea of residuals and who gets paid what for these fairly complicated ideas of an artificial intelligence, at some point you kind of throw your hands up and say, “Oh, whatever. It’s just too much for me to deal with.” One of the things that always interests me when we talk about labor issues in the country though, and the increasing struggle between labor and capital in a time when the laws have been moved, so to favor those who are making the big box. As they were in the 1890s, for example, and as arguably they have been since Reagan became president in 1981. It does seem to me that it is easier for people to understand that people at the top of the scale are getting too much than it is for them to understand that 250,000 people are getting too little.

Joanne Freeman:

Define too little.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, exactly.

Joanne Freeman:

Very easy to see the unfairness of that, to feel how distant that appears to be, particularly in a time like the present when there is such disparity in wealth. We’ve talked about economic complications. We’ve talked about technological complications. We’re talking about now the sort of financial equity and comparison complication, but there’s one factor I think it’s worth throwing in. And it probably in one way or another, under rides, if not in the foreground, in the background ideas about union and strike. And that is the right to organize, in one way or another being bound up with ideas about democracy or civic engagement. That the right to organize depicted the right way by the right people at the right time can indeed be recognized as something that people fundamentally have a right to do. The question at a given time is how the government is going to respond, and what that says about the balance of the public and popular power and the government and how at a particular moment is overseeing the United States, its economy and its people.