Getting Organized

by Rob Callahan

Rob Callahan.

Recently, a new applicant for membership asked me, “After I join the Guild, can I still work non-union?” As most members know, there is a simple answer to her question — Yes. She probably won’t want to accept non-union employment if she has other options. Only when she is working under an IATSE contract will she receive employer contributions 
to her health and retirement
 plans and otherwise enjoy all the benefits of union work. But the Editors Guild won’t stop her from taking a non-union job.

Unlike some other unions 
in the industry — the actors and
 directors guilds, for example —
ours does not prohibit members 
from working for non-signatory 
employers. Every now and
 again, someone will suggest that the Editors Guild implement such a policy, requiring members to forswear their right to work non-union jobs, but those proposals never seem to gain much traction. However much our members prefer working 
union whenever possible, few are keen on giving up their option of ever taking non-union gigs.
That is especially the case for members working predominantly in those sectors of the industry (digital labs, post-production facilities, animation, documentaries, commercials, new media and unscripted television, etc.) where much or even most of the employment opportunities now remain non-union.

SAG-AFTRA refers to its prohibition on non-union employment as “Global Rule One,” a title that gestures to the policy’s importance to their organization. Indeed, before the merger of SAG and AFTRA, some SAG members who resisted the consolidation had argued that merging would undermine actors’ strength because it would result in the dilution of Global Rule One. (Global Rule One has, in fact, been retained
 by the merged organization.) Clearly, for those labor organizations that bar their members from non-union employment, such a proscription is central to how they define themselves.

Why, then, do different unions in the industry take such different approaches to the prospect of union members working non-union jobs, and what is the significance of this difference in terms of how we exercise solidarity?
 With Global Rule One, SAG-AFTRA’s strategy is to limit access to an elite pool of talent and to leverage such limitation to lend bargaining clout to all of its members.

Those members who complain about the lack of union work without taking any steps to unionize their non-signatory employers are effectively complicit in the problem they criticize.

A producer has to pay all of a show’s performers under the terms of a SAG-AFTRA contract if it wants to be able to cast a recognizable, let alone a bankable, star. The union’s strength thus derives from exclusivity; it functions as doorman for a coveted club. This gatekeeper function allows it to push back against the usual forces of supply and demand in a labor market with very few employment opportunities and a seemingly unlimited pool of job seekers.

Although the number of job seekers in post-production classifications generally exceeds the number of jobs available in post, the ratio is not nearly so lopsided as the ratio of aspiring actors to available roles. And, although the artistry and skills of our most accomplished members are much in demand and are key to the filmmaking process, there are no bankable editors — nor Foley artists, story analysts, etc. — in the way there are stars.

Our strength as a union therefore derives not from our ability to wall off employers’ access to 
a highly sought-after elite few craftspeople, but instead from our ability to unite folks working in 
all crafts and at all strata in post-production, as 
well as from our steadfast alliance with artists and technicians in all the IATSE-represented below-the-line crafts. We do not want to erect walls between members working union and non-members on non-union jobs, but instead to bring folks currently working non-union into our tent and under the coverage of union contracts. If a strategy of limiting where members can work is predicated upon strength through exclusivity, our union operates on a model of strength through inclusivity.

Such a strategy can only be effective, though, when union members working for non-union employers take responsibility for helping to expand the coverage of our contracts. Members working
 for non-signatory employers function as the Guild’s ambassadors to those workplaces, as well as our eyes and ears there in. Whether by explaining to non-member colleagues the advantages of Guild representation, discreetly placing a confidential call to the union’s organizing staff, or lending support to co-workers seeking to organize, members working non-union jobs have critical roles to play in bringing more of the industry’s work up to the standards our contracts set.

We do not want to erect walls between members working union and non-members on non-union jobs, but instead to bring folks currently working non-union into our tent and under the coverage of union contracts.

Often I hear members who work in predominantly non-union sectors of the industry — post facilities or reality TV,
 for example — complain that there aren’t enough union jobs. They’re absolutely right; we need more union jobs, especially in those areas of the industry in which we’ve historically had less presence. But those members who complain about the lack of union work without taking any steps to unionize their non-signatory employers are effectively complicit in the problem they criticize.

When a group of employees win a union contract at a previously non-union employer, folks tend to say the job was “flipped,” in the casual parlance of our industry. But the verb “flip” suggests that the action is instantaneous and easy, like tossing a coin or turning over a pancake.

In fact, forging the solidarity requisite to unionize an employer can be slow-going and difficult work; it can demand mettle forged with an anvil, not flipped with a spatula. Unionization happens neither spontaneously nor effortlessly. Most non-signatory employers will agree to sign a contract only after their employees — union members and non-members alike
— have decided that a contract is worth the work of organizing.

To return to the prospective new member whose question prompted these reflections, here is my answer: Yes, as a member, you can accept non-union jobs. But with the freedom to accept non-union employment comes a responsibility to assist efforts to expand union employment. Contact an organizer about your non-union gig. Talk to co-workers about what makes union jobs better. If an organizing effort gets underway, come to meetings and sign a union authorization card when asked.

The freedom to take non-union work is good. But even better would be the freedom from needing to take non-union work. Only through members doing their part as Guild ambassadors to non-union workplaces will we achieve that more important freedom.

by Rob Callahan

Rob Callahan.

We Americans tend to sap our holidays of any holiness. Memorial Day, for many, serves less as an occasion to reflect upon our fallen soldiers than as an opportunity to celebrate the advent of summer’s hedonism. Presidents Day, in theory, ought prompt us to consider Washington’s and Lincoln’s respective roles in the establishment and preservation of a union predicated upon principles of freedom and equality, but mostly we just observe it as yet another occasion for retailers to offer sales.

The holiday now upon us, Labor Day, perhaps best exemplifies this American habit of stripping national celebrations of their underlying significance. Outside of the dwindling ranks of the labor movement, few regard the holiday as a commemorative event. It marks the close of summer, a late-season opportunity to barbecue, the date beyond which the arbiters of dress code look askance at seersucker. For most, Labor Day is all about leisure. The holiday nominally honors organized labor, but we are too preoccupied with those hot dogs and that final outing to the beach to think over much about the empowerment of working folks through the exercise of solidarity.

One might argue that missing the point of Labor Day is, in fact, the point of Labor Day. In certain respects, the original function of the holiday was to distract from, rather than to celebrate, the struggles of working people to improve the conditions of their employment through collective action.

Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 under President Grover Cleveland, who signed the law establishing it not long after ordering federal troops to suppress a nationwide strike of the American Railway Union against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Thirty strikers were killed and scores wounded in the resulting violence. In the immediate aftermath of mobilizing troops to defend management’s interests in a labor dispute, Cleveland felt some pressure to make a conciliatory gesture towards labor.

In instituting a September date as the official national celebration of organized labor, Congress and Cleveland established a more palatable alternative to May Day, which is celebrated throughout the rest of the world as a commemoration of the struggles of organized labor. May Day memorializes the General Strike of 1886 and subsequent Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, critical milestones in the movement for the eight-hour workday.

The fierce and sometimes bloody fight for a shorter workday and workweek is a thread that ran throughout organized labor internationally from the Industrial Revolution forward. Working people worldwide rallied around the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Over the course of decades of struggle, the labor movement set the eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek as the standard for much of the industrialized world.

If you are working a union job and have Labor Day off, you should recognize that you owe your leisure to a long tradition of solidarity.

Thus, Labor Day has ceased to be a meaningful commemoration of organized labor for much of this country, and even in its origins as an official holiday, Labor Day afforded a milquetoast alternative to another, more radical focal point on the calendar. But what significance does all this have for us today, almost 120 years after federal recognition of the holiday? That time was long ago; those folks are long dead. To borrow a line from Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”

This summer, the future of our industry was arguably on display in the Anaheim Convention Center at SIGGRAPH, an annual gathering for people working in the field of computer-generated imagery. The exhibit hall was crammed full of dazzling technology and sci-fi spectacle: immersive virtual reality, photorealistic rendering of skin textures, skateboarding models in skintight mo-cap suits, fantastic creatures fabricated with exacting verisimilitude. Thousands of flickering and pulsing screens opened windows onto intricate and insubstantial worlds conjured forth from nothing but imagination and vast arrays of data.

Toward the back of the exhibition hall, though, a steady stream of folks pooled around a booth without any flashy displays or animated eye-candy. The booth was for the IATSE’s nascent visual effects union, and the stream of artists and technicians who came there arrived with stories of months of seven-day workweeks and 16-hour workdays. They came to talk about economic insecurity, the crippling cost of health care and families with whom they could never spend enough time because of grueling schedules. They came to talk about how their talents generate fantastic profit for corporations, who regard the craftspeople themselves as disposable.

Acknowledging the presence of the past does not necessitate a facile equation between now and then. Nobody would suggest that these 21st-century pixel jockeys are identical to the children toiling in 19th-century textile mills. But their workplace concerns do represent a continuation of the old and unending debate over the nature of the obligations employers and employees have to one another. And, like all manner of employees before them, those working in the visual effects industry are coming to see that they need to stand up and stand together if they are to seek justice and security in their working lives. We may now be able to don headsets that plunge us into virtual worlds populated by computer-generated holograms, but, in the words of labor organizer and folksinger Utah Philips, “The past didn’t go anywhere.”

The fierce and sometimes bloody fight for a shorter workday and workweek is a thread that ran throughout organized labor internationally from the Industrial Revolution forward.

What this means for our celebration of Labor Day in this time and place is that, if you are working a union job and have Labor Day off, you should recognize that you owe your leisure to a long tradition of solidarity. Relish the leisure this holiday affords at least as much as you relish those hot dogs. It is a leisure that was hard-won through generations of folks banding together to demand time released from the demands of the workplace.

If you are working for a non-union employer, mark Labor Day by recognizing that collective action to improve working conditions is not simply a tradition relegated to history; it is a practice we must carry into the future. If you do not have a contract at your workplace, reach out to a union organizer to talk about how one might be won.