Craft vs. Industrial Unionism

The impending return to the air of Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien without their writers demonstrates the inherent problem with craft unionism. Although there has been good solidarity among Hollywood workers, there are also a ton of working people without a stake in this strike who are suffering. Not the big actors or celebrities of course, but the middle-class people who work hard for a living and can't handle several months without a paycheck. The late-night hosts have done a good job of keeping their employees on salary, but you can't do that for months on end without receiving some kind of salary of your own. Even millionaries feel it when they pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars a week.

Hollywood is still on the old craft-union system. Rather than an entertainment-wide union fighting for the rights of all workers, it is made up of a maze of individual organizations. When one goes on strike, everyone suffers. But not everyone gains when the strike is won.

This reminds me of the decades before the CIO's founding in 1935 when the American Federation of Labor ruled the national labor movement. Not only did the AFL refuse to organize blacks, women, children, immigrants, or most industrial laborers, they split everyone up into crafts rather organizing them around industry. Thus the pipefitters in a steel mill might go out on strike. But the rest of the steel mill would either continue to work or be unemployed for no reason. This was such an ineffective organizing method that the CIO formed to revolutionize labor, which it did during the next two decades. Unfortunately, the CIO could never break the AFL's back and the two organizations combined in 1955. More relevant to the topic of this post, the CIO's failure meant that a lot of industries remained organized on craft lines, thus helping to set the stage for the writers' exploitation by entertainment executives and the situation where shows are returning to work, even without their writers.

On the other hand, there is some talk of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert making temporary agreements with the Writers' Guild to allow those writers to return to work. If they gave the writers a good deal, they might force the industry to crack. That would be good. Maybe they could help create a positive end to the strike.