The Writer’s Guild And All That Stuff

The writers guild is striking. Granted, it’s the high profile writers who are getting into the news. The rest of us hacks look at them and shake our heads over their foolishness.
There was a time when belonging to a union really meant something. The industrialists of the 1880s and 90s, while they were just as ruthless as the neocons of today, had one thing going against them that the neocons have managed to overcome. They were accessible. They may have lived high on the hill in mansions that evoked a sense of awe in most of the men, women and children who toiled in their factories, but, they tended to live in the same towns and cities where they’d established their work. Owning sweatshops half way around the world was a concept nearly inconceivable to those tycoons.

So, when Tom, Dick and Harry decided they could no longer put up with the long hours and the low pay, and they went on strike, they knew they held in their hands a weapon that would hit the local factory Tsar in the place he prized most-his pocketbook. As they knew the minions of the law would protect the moneyed tycoon a hell of a lot sooner than it ever would the likes of a downtrodden work horse, they understood the risks they were taking when they went on strike. But they did it anyway.

The stories of those early strikers have largely been suppressed-we wouldn’t really want innocent school children to know their own potentially inflammatory history, even though their grandparents may have taken part in some of it.

Much has happened since the bad-good-old-days. Unions have been severely hampered, and legally they now hold much the same position they did in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, when they were first being established. In many offices and hospitals across the country, a man or woman could lose his job if he so much as mentions the word Union at work. Some bosses are so paranoid of those scurvy things that they would happily get rid of employees who talk of those things in the company of their friends at home.

And yet, here is the paradox-why are they so eager to stamp out Union activity in their plants, warehouses and stores, as Walmart does, when these corporations are so wealthy they could buy up almost any country they chose. A local union hardly stands a chance against the almighty international corporation. The little-people are being systematically written out of the code of laws in this country. But, could it be that We the People still have a potent weapon against them? Looks like this could be food for thought.