[Image Description: A series of sixteen tweets by John Rogers @jonrog1 that say:
1) A moment at the Teamsters/UPS rally this morning clarified our current struggle with the studio CEO’s (among other bosses). Teamsters got a lot of wins, but one of the main sticking points is the pay for the 65% of local UPS workers who are part-time …
2) If you read the SAG-AFTRA demands, a truly STUNNING amount of their points involve protecting background actors, and trying to improve conditions for the 87% of their union who makes less than $26,000 a year.
3) As WGA members know, this is not a strike for the showrunners. We’re trying to fix the fact the the current younger generation of writers can’t even afford housing and their pathway to advancement has been cut off.
4) Like … folks, I’m fine. There are maybe two proposals in there that affect me. I’m walking in 90% weather and losing over 50% of my income for the year because I want the younger writers to get what I got at this stage of their careers.
5) Our unions and the CEO’s and various negotiators have a fundamental cognitive disconnect. Because CEO’s types only succeed by FUCKING THEIR PEERS.
6) Zaslav, Iger , those types of execs, etc have never gone without so a fellow exec or a junior exec could thrive. A fellow exec failing is the moment to use your own leverage to advance past them, if not destroy them.
7) Part of it is the money but part of this, I think, is a genuine inability to grasp even the concepts of any labor action. Because it is always other-directed.
8) So many people treat capitalism as part of nature red in tooth and claw, but it’s not. It’s a human construct. There are different rules you can play by – but not if you want to win.
9) The greatest gift capitalism ever granted was the ability to validate selfish behavior as a virtue because that’s “just what’s necessary, I don’t make the rules!” (Look ma, it’s reification!)
10) This is where I usually point out that Adam Smith wrote that you have to overpay workers to keep your labor force up, and you need to take into account the psychic damage of capitalism to the workers, and that admiring the rich is the greatest source of moral corruption …
11) But I’ll stave off that diversion to just land with … this is a discontinuity of attitudes which I think was once breached by the fact that management USED to come from people who loved building their company or their trade, even if they eventually did management shit.
12) Now, even that thin thread of SYMPATHY (Adam Smith joke, get it? People?) is gone. The CEO’s are working off a different scorecard, practically and morally. We’re not just playing by wildly divergent rules, our lives and careers are DEFINED by those wildly divergent rules.
13) To them, we are IN FACT being “unreasonable”, as our behavior does not make sense in their moral framework. They don’t think they’re being evil, they think they’re playing by the actual rules, and we’re nuts.
14) There’s not great conclusion to this, other than to note that the bit about making writers homeless was described as “cruel but necessary” because they genuinely don’t understand the meaning of cruel, because they are always on the other side of the power dynamic.
15) And if they’re ever NOT on the top of the power dynamic, they’re not suffering, they’re dead. They are un-people in their own eyes.
16) These men are not irrational, but they are deranged. This isn’t about money, it’s about identity. And in a fight about identity … they will set billions on fire.
Because they can always get more money. But they’ll never shed the stink of losing to their lessers.“
end of image description]
