I’ve been watching this discussion of the Writer’s Strike for a few days now and I finally feel compelled to speak up.
First, on the point about tipping, in New York State, wait staff can be paid as little as $4.60/ hour because the system accounts for tips. If you don’t get tipped, you don’t make rent. (http://www.labor.state.ny.us/workerprotection/laborstandards/workprot/minwage.shtm)
Before I get into my second point I should give some background on myself to disclose my bias; I am a third generation theatrical stagehand and have worked on Broadway. I’ve also worked as an engineer for an amusement park and I am now interviewing for an engineering position with a major TV sports network. My uncle is a member of the WGA-East, even though he’s an anti-union, Zionist, Reagan-ite schmuck. He’s a member because he needs health insurance and a pension, so like most people he lives with contradiction. I hate the concept of intellectual property that we currently have because it generally ignores the influence of society on you to create those ideas (no one lives in a vacuum, so how is it that only you own your idea?).
Anyway, on to my actual point. The Writer’s Guild members deserve their cut of online residuals, because they performed the labor to create the work, unlike the studio bosses who keep pushing more crap like Fear Factor or American Idol on us. If the writers don’t win the residuals for their work shown online, it isn’t like the studios are going to use that saved money to make better programming or need to show less advertisements. Instead the studio execs will be even wealthier and wield even more power and push even more crap programming on all of us. Most writers aren’t well off, very few ever get big hits, most of them are stuck writing drivel for some show that some executive pitched after watching the exact same drivel on another network. Their residuals are how they support their families during the lean times between writing gigs, and it isn’t even like the residuals are all that great either. Most writers are paid by the script, and usually only the scripts that actually make it to air. Until then they live off their residuals. The networks re-run these shows and films over and over again, getting nearly as much advertising revenue from the same original piece of content for, while the writers get ever decreasing piece of that money. Too much of this debate has been held in the extreme abstract while families go without food because their primary income earner has a higher level of class consciousness then probably most people on this list. Check out http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/ to hear from the actual writers what’s going on.
On the subject of pro athletes, it’s the same as the writers. Yeah sure some of them get paid a lot, but they also put their physical bodies on the line every day at work, while enormous profits are earned from their individual actions. If the athletes got paid less, fans sure as hell wouldn’t see cheaper tickets; the owners wouldn’t stop trying to bilk taxpayers into funding their stadiums. That money would just line the pockets of the owners even more. The fact that their unions have won these athletes their high wages is an argument in favor of unions, not against them. For more on athletes check out radical sports writer Dave Zirin, www.edgeofsports.com and his position on sports.
We should take the example of the Writer’s Strike and run with it. If a company makes more money off the millions of copies of a piece of software you helped write, you should get a share of those profits. The point of Marxism is that workers should collectively own the means of production, and get their fair share for their labor. To argue against the writers getting their fair share (which they aren’t even asking for by the way) is to argue against the entire basis of Marxism, class struggle towards the goal of winning social and economic equality.
--Josh Karpoff _________________________________________________________________ Get the power of Windows + Web with the new Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_powerofwindows_012008