Los Angeles is littered with pickets and marches

The “City of Angels” is becoming increasingly important in the struggles of American workers. However, a hundred years ago in Los Angeles (hereinafter referred to as Los Angeles), “the powers that be” held the deck in their hands and brutally suppressed the emerging initiatives in the field of collective rights, turning the city into a place for profit only and forbidden to unions.

Those days, fortunately, are long gone. Progressive Recovery union Losangelin had a defining moment during the 1990 national election marches. Justice for janitors directed at janitors and organized by SEIU, first in Los Angeles, where it faced brutal police opposition (Ken Loach’s film Bread and Roses tells the story). In 2008, when about thirty contracts with 350,000 workers expired, the huge 28-mile procession “Hollywood to the Docks” brought together various categories of workers.

Today, a Cornell University study found that 1/4 of the 226 major strikes in the US this year took place in California, most of them in Los Angeles County. The main characters in March were the non-teaching staff of the school, and today they are hotel employees, as well as Hollywood writers and actors. Last week, city workers again marched from downtown to Los Angeles International Airport, chanting the slogan of their distant predecessors: “Strike. Close it. Los Angeles is a union city.”

Los Angeles County, with a population of 11 million, a concentration of immense wealth and relentless poverty, a land of dreams and opportunities (often destroyed), where at least 600,000 people live in poverty and 80,000 are homeless according to the census.

As we wrote in Pressenza in July and August, the housing problem is also acute for large groups of permanent workers, whose wages are often slightly above the minimum. Buying an apartment costs an average of one million dollars and the market is largely in the hands of short-term real estate speculation. At least half a million affordable housing is missing, and rents in the city are also skyrocketing (average rent is nearly $3,000 a month). Thus, both tent cities (which almost resemble the tent cities of the great internal migration to the West in the 1930s) and the number of people sleeping in cars, including low-wage workers, are on the rise.

In the phase of the recovery of trade unionism in the United States, it is inevitable that in places where workers are more united and organized, disputes will gradually accumulate. The most recent of these took place on August 8: a strike by 11,000 city employees in Los Angeles, the first in 40 years, involving employees, as well as sanitation and highway workers. Organized by the SEIU mainly due to severe staffing shortages and “repeated violations of labor laws” by the Los Angeles city government, which has councilors backed by unions and associations who very often sharply disagree with moderate unionists. The Democratic Party, which ruled the city for a long time.

Meanwhile, the initiatives of the hotel workers continue, already in the fourth wave of strikes, with boycotts of hotels and “concerts” under their windows, as well as the entertainment sector: screenwriters have been on strike since May 2, actors since July 14. After demonstrations in New York and Los Angeles (5,000 people in mid-August in front of Warner Brothers headquarters), renewed negotiations with studio owners stalled again over the same priorities of the striking workers. The issue of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more central, replacing human labor with artificial creations that reduce workdays associated with streaming videos, movies, TV programs to one-day sessions paid for in just one day. And film studios could continue to earn millions in the future, endlessly using the work of writers and artists.

In this question, the workers scored two points in their favor. A Washington District Judge ruled that works created by artificial intelligence cannot be protected from Copyright because “human processing is a fundamental requirement”. And the support of this fight by the UNI Global conference in Philadelphia this week, where speeches denounced that the use of AI in anti-work functions threatens to lay off thousands of creatives.

At the moment, it’s about sheltering from the heat during street pickets, avoiding the risk of heat stroke with sunscreen, moisturizing and frequent rotation, and organizing themed days taken from a trendy TV series (one of the most popular). popular, one that is dedicated Dungeons and dragons in front of NBC Universal headquarters) to attract strike supporters and, why not? have fun.

Contrary to what one might think, few of them, especially among actors, have astronomical salaries. The rest live on minimum wage if and when they work. In fact, striking actors and writers accuse the owners of deliberately dragging out the dispute by making ridiculous proposals to deprive them of their homes. Today, many of the strikers make a living from non-profit organizations: 2,600 film and television workers are being helped by the Entertainment Community Fund, which has already committed $5.4 million since August 25, with one-time grants of up to $2,000 for individuals. or $3,000 for families. Numerous small businesses, bars, churches and community associations offer mutual aid goods. And the SAG-AFTRA Allied Fund is distributing to the strikers survival money raised at auctions and charity shows, as well as donations from famous actors totaling $15 million. One million each from Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Oprah Winfrey, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Dwayne Johnson, Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and others, as well as from Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Governor of California from the Republican Party, and now anti-Trump. In fact, even big stars have strong concerns about the unlimited use of their faces by AI and need actors to surround them in their films.

Finally, a very serious problem: 86% of the 160,000 unionized workers cannot work long enough for a year (and earn at least $26,000) to be able to receive medical care in this sector, and are forced to seek a second work (in bars, babysitting dogs, etc.) to be able to pay rent. Especially in this year of strikes.

So it’s unexpected Hollywood, similar to most of the city, with many poor people bordering on poverty and without health and pension insurance. A situation that connects many entertainment workers with hotel room cleaning and cleaning workers, public sector and hospital workers, Starbucks bartenders, or Amazon warehouse workers. It is not for nothing that unions and workers of all these categories are present at the increasingly common marches and meetings in Los Angeles. A good sign of a united effort in the historically fragmented US work world.

Sources:

https://www.wgacontract2023.org/strike/special-pickets

Ellie Stephens, Here’s who’s on strike in LA and what it means for the people of LACNN, 8.8

Flight Tebo, How Los Angeles went from union enemy to strike capitalWashington Post, 18.8.

Mark Grunberg in Human World SAG-AFTRA strike continues, workers win AI strike25.8 and Global Unions Gather in Philadelphia Say Autocracy and Artificial Intelligence Threaten Workers29.8

Associated Press, Working class Hollywood turns to non-profit foundations to make ends meet during strike8.30