Planting Liberally

Via CNN, it looks like the writer's strike may soon be over, with WGA leaders voting to recommend the contract negotiated last week with the AMTPA. In addition to support from the leadership, it appears that members who attended meetings in LA and New York yesterday generally approved the contract.

This contract includes provisions for royalties on Internet media, which was the major sticking point from day one. Unfortunately, contract clauses which would have allowed WGA to represent animation and reality TV workers were dropped. WGA will pursue these workers, but without guaranteed neutrality on the part of studios.

I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the industry to say whether the deal is a good one or a bad one, although it strikes me as very significant that the writers have won an agreement in principle to royalties for Internet distribution. That should lay the groundwork for the union to share in the prosperity of new media distribution. Moreover, I think the strike has been a very visible reminder to America's workers. First and most generally, that workers have power and that when they stick together, they can win. More specifically, that professional workers belong in unions and that union representation is highly relevant to them. There are, I hope, millions of professional writers, artists, designers, and software developers taking a look at what the WGA has accomplished, and the degree to which it has reshaped its industry, and thinking, "hey, I can do that."

Congratulations to the writers on a hard-fought victory!

There's been a lot of interesting news in the world of labor and in religion and politics lately. In case you're paying no attention at all to the Super Bowl tonight, some of this might prove interesting:

• The New York Times reports that the writers' strike may be nearing its end. The writers conceded their desire to represent animation and reality TV workers, but appear to have won concessions on royalties for content distributed on the Internet. The agreement now goes to the guild's governing boards, and then to the writers themselves.
• Last week was the celebration of the New Baptist Covenant, a group convened by Pres. Carter and composed of about 30 different Baptist denominations. The meeting's theme was unity, especially along racial and ethnic lines, and it appears that the meeting did indeed include a diverse cross-section of Baptists. While the group is expressly apolitical, it focuses on themes of social justice and peace, a notable divergence from the Southern Baptist Convention's focus on a conservative orthodoxy revolving mostly around sexuality. The SBC did not formally participate in the meeting, although individual SBC members were free to attend.
• Pastor Dan notes that the SBC is losing membership and is having trouble attracting younger folks, putting to rest the notion that only liberal denominations have those kinds of problems. Membership appears to be slipping away towards Pentecostal churches and non-denominational churches. (Full disclosure: my wife is a once-a-week front pager at Street Prophets.)
• Via Zack Exley, the Barna Group this week reported the results of a poll which show that born again voters no longer favor Republicans. This is a group which voted for Bush over Gore by a 57-42 margin, and for Bush over Kerry by a 62-38 margin. They now favor a generic Democrat over a generic Republican by a 40-29 margin. On the other hand, evangelical voters would vote for a generic Republican over a generic Democrat by a 45-11 margin, with 40% undecided. Evangelicals remain extremely conservative, with 72% self-identifying as conservative, 24% identifying as moderate, and 2% identifying as liberal.

Well, it's mostly religion news, but I thought the writers' strike news was pretty interesting too. So, is there anything interesting on TV tonight?

This isn't exactly a full-blown labor links roundup, but I've recently found a couple examples of unions using Facebook in interesting ways, and I thought I'd share them here.

First is Change to Win's Facebook app, Smack the CEO. Written by CtW online communications director Jason Lefkowitz, Smack the CEO is a fairly straightforward game that allows you to compare your salary to that of prominent union-busting CEOs. When you sign up, the app asks for your salary. After signing up, you're asked to invite friends to join you in the game. As you recruit more friends to the application, their salaries add up; hopefully, after recruiting about a bazillion friends, your combined salaries add up to the CEO's. For disclosure's sake - I've worked with Jason a bit on fine-tuning the instructions and help text for this application, so I have a bit of a stake in its success (although not a monetary one). Although at first I was a little put off by the way it asks for your salary up front, more and more I think it's appropriate. The most popular Facebook applications are really, really simple - they basically involve ornamenting your profile, playing a game, or dressing up the traditional Facebook wall/poke mechanism. This application falls into the game genre squarely, and still it manages to a) educate Facebook users about the wage gap, and b) give users some idea of what union organizing is actually about - adding up enough of your friends to take on powerful people. That's pretty impressive, considering the fairly rigid formula for success as a Facebook application.

Incidentally, Jason and I have discussed using Facebook for more elaborate quasi-organizing. I'd really like to see something like that take shape. For example, I'd love to see a some kind of widget which allows coworkers to gripe about work online, perhaps with some anonymization to prevent recriminations at work. Or I'd love to see a "sign a union card" Facebook application, perhaps similar to Younionize but with the advantage of higher exposure. I've suggested similar kinds of approaches to online union organizing before, but I think it would take a fairly sophisticated online community builder to make it work, since my hunch is that most people are generally very cautious about openly discussing work gripes online.

The second example of unions using Facebook recently was this clever guerrilla event which takes advantage of Facebook's new Pages feature. The idea is to support the WGA strike by signing up as a fan of one of the shows which is currently on strike; I chose The Office. Once the friend request is approved, you can pursue all kinds of mayhem, light writing comments on the show's wall, or changing your user photo to some graphic which indicates your support of the writers. Of course, the idea is to embarrass the networks and encourage them to negotiate in good faith already. This is a pretty simple idea, but I think it could have some potential. Why not replicate this same tactic with WalMart, Verizon Wireless, American Eagle, or FedEx - all of which are currently targets of various union campaigns? Moreover, it seems to me that this kind of campaign opens up a new avenue in eActivism applications. Currently eActivism for non-profit advocacy organizations is limited to some pretty simple functionality - make a donation, signup for an email list, send an email to your congress person, and sign a petition (and actually, those last three actions are pretty much identical). But why not expand the capabilities of non-profit eActivism applications to include this kind of Facebook activism? It'll be interesting to see if the large non-profit web developers like Convio, Kintera or Grassroots Enterprise pick up the slack on this.

Finally, while it's not on Facebook, I encourage you to take American Rights at Work's FedUp with FedEx pledge: don't ship with FedEx this holiday season, unless they change their union-busting ways and allow their drivers to unionize.

Anything else interesting in the world of labor on the intertubes? Add a link in the comments!

This is a quick "I told you so" hit. The NYT reports today that Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is having a huge impact on the WGA strike. This reminds me of a post I wrote back in April, arguing that progressives should create a network of industry blogs in order to sway "public opinion" within a given industry. At the time, I wrote that such blogs could help sway industry insiders on internal debates which have political overtones, like the open source vs. proprietary debate within the computer software industry. I also wrote about the need to start progressive workplace blogs, and even suggested that unions could start a fleet of such blogs as a way to identify workplaces where they might find a lot of support. (I since incorporated that idea into a series on using the internet to strengthen labor unions.)

Well, the upshot is that these posts turned out to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Industry insiders and workers are already creating industry and workplace blogs, and those blogs are already having an impact on labor disputes and internal industry debates. Welcome to 2003. Now, it's time for the progressive movement and labor movement to wise up to these online developments and begin harnessing them for progressive cultural change within the workforce.

Incidentally, unrelated to all of the above, I've recently started using Google Docs to write my blog posts. The resulting HTML is a bit clunky when I copy into MyDD, and I can't figure out how to tag my posts, but otherwise, I'm loving it. Thanks to my former DL co-host Baratunde Thurston (who himself swiped it from Todd Plants, who in an odd twist was a college roommate of mine) for the idea.

Update: And just like that, Devilstower at DailyKos starts blogging about the alternative auto industry. Gosh I love the blogosphere.

I wanted to write something clever and brilliant about the WGA writers' strike, but I see Nathan Newman already beat me to the punch. Newman's take is that the writers' strike showcases perfectly how unions make sense for professionals. In our economy, technological innovation radically reinvents the work of professional workers at a blinding clip. For the writers, the introduction of home video in the 80's was followed quickly by DVD's in the late 90's, and Internet video delivery in the last few years. This video explains perfectly what all these technologies mean for the writers: With this kind of technological backdrop, effective legislation that guarantees fair rights for workers and enables industry growth is nearly impossible to craft. The government simply doesn't move quickly enough, and technological change is accelerating, meaning the problem will only get worse. Union contracts serve as a kind of second tier of law, allowing workers and management to creatively restructure the industry. When workers and management work together creatively, they can determine the appropriate rights and compensation for workers while keeping up with the pace of technological change and maintaining their companies' competitive edge. Union contracts are typically renegotiated every couple of years, whereas the government rewrites things like intellectual property law very rarely. As a result, as Newman puts it, "contracts look quite different in the construction industry compared to the auto industry compared to Hollywood compared to baseball", as they should. I think it's particularly interesting that one of the first shows to be affected by the strike, The Office, serves as a giant exclamation point on this argument. Anyone who's seen the show knows that it is a constant reminder of exactly the reason for professional unionism. Corporate policies are frequently bone-headed, and corporate management all too frequently promotes the wrong person into the wrong job. On top of that, many offices are fraught with many tiny instances of worker abuse which by themseles aren't enough to inspire any kind of drastic action like quitting; but taken together, these thousands of paper cuts create an abusive or simply unpleasant environment which could be made considerably more pleasant with a formal grievance system, like that provided by a union and a responsive shop steward. If you've ever worked in an office, it's easy enough for you to watch the show and sympathize with this basic point. But if you're an office manager or corporate supervisor, you should pay even closer attention. After all, the lack of union representation costs the fictional Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch dearly: sales are lost, good salespeople quit, and precious time is wasted routinely, all becaue the fictional office workers don't have any way in which to protest their condition without fear of being fired. As if the point is too subtle as is, the show examined the boneheadedness of coporate union-busting quite explicitly in a recent episode. I'm also struck, as Digby is, by the solidarity between professionals and blue-collar workers in California. If just compensation and sane working conditions are the meat of a union contract, this kind of class-crossing solidarity is the potatoes and gravy. White-collar and blue-collar unionism are natural complements, since white-collar and blue-collar workers often work side-by-side (in the case of Hollywood, there are several tiers: union actors from SAG, union writers from WGA, and union electricians form IATSE.) The ability to work together with people of a different class background is a rare but important benefit in an increasingly segregated country, and outside of the labor movement, there are very few places which offer that kind of opportunity. More than the intangible benefit of solidarity, though, white- and blue-collar unions can be powerful economic allies: one group of workers can help the other in contract and organizing disputes, by refusing to cross picket lines, slowing-down work, boycotts, and similar means. There's no reason that white- and blue-collar workers should struggle separately under the weight of corporate greed; joint organizing can alleviate economic stress for both groups. If you'd like to support the writers, visit United Hollywood to keep track of the strike and find out how you can help. Let's all hope the writers succeed in getting their fair share of residuals, from DVD rentals, Internet downloads, and so-called "promos". Let's also hope that the WGA strike serves as a call to professionals in many different industries to seriously consider the benefits of union representation.