Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Year of the Union

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

Today on The Sunday Story host Ayesha Rascoe talks to NPR labor correspondent Andrea Hsu and NPR culture correspondent Mandalit del Barco about the forces driving this year's massive strikes. More than half a million workers went on strike in 2023, largely from the private sector.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story. No bucks, no trucks! No bucks, no trucks! No bucks, no trucks! This year, workers have been asserting their power in big ways. I say hey! I say hey! Corporate greed has got to go! Massive labor strikes have rocked Hollywood, the auto industry, and major care institutions. There have also been smaller strikes at hotels, hospitals, schools, and threatened strikes by airline pilots and UPS drivers. What do we want?

Country! When do we want it? Now! It's all a sign that many workers are fed up. Some of it's about money, but that's not all that's going on. That's what it's been about from day one, is getting a fair agreement for our membership. We don't want to be out here on strike, but we're going to do whatever the hell we got to do to get it. So let's get it done. Stand up, everybody. Joining us to talk about this year of the union

and what's been driving all this discontent are NPR's Labor and Workplace Correspondent Andrea Hsu and NPR Culture Correspondent Mandelit Delbarco. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Hi, Aisha. And so it's not just my imagination. Andrea, like there were a lot of strikes this year, right? It was not your imagination, Aisha. We have seen more than half a million workers go on strike this year. That's close to three times as many people striking as we saw last year. I talked to Johnny Callis about this. He runs Cornell's Labor Action Tracker, and he crunched those numbers. He told me the last time we saw this many workers striking was 2018

and 2019 when teachers went on strike in Arizona and Kentucky and Oklahoma and other states. You know, those were government workers. What's different about this year is these strikes were really rooted in the private sector. And what's interesting about that is that companies are where unions have traditionally been the weakest. But this year we've seen strikes all over the private sector and all kinds of industries. So we're going to hear some details from a couple of those industries in a minute. But first, I wanted to ask, like, why now? Like, why are people so fed up this year? Well, it was a combination of things. And for many of these union workers, this was the

first contract negotiation since the pandemic. And Aisha, the pandemic changed so much for workers. You know, it was this unprecedented disruption. You had mass layoffs, followed by severe labor shortages, and lots of people rethinking their jobs and their own value. You know, you had people in jobs that had to be done in person, like manufacturing and healthcare and retail. They started thinking to themselves, if I'm truly essential, if I risked my life going to work so that others could stay home, don't I deserve to be paid more? So, you know, airline pilots, UPS drivers, healthcare workers, autoworkers, this was the first opportunity many of them had to ask

for changes to their pay and benefits. And don't forget, this was happening at a time when people were experiencing steep inflation. So even if you'd gotten a raise, you felt like you were falling behind, like you were actually getting a pay cut. So your dollar isn't stretching as far, which would make you get pretty fed up, I could imagine. Yeah. And, you know, all of this contributed to the kinds of demands that unions put forward this year. Johnny Callas mentioned to me that back in the 1970s, strikes were far more common, but they were also often defensive. They were about trying to stop companies from offshoring jobs or getting rid of their costly benefits. But this year's strikes were not that. These strikes are certainly not defensive. I mean, workers are really fighting

to secure higher pay, to secure better staffing. These are very much offensive strikes. And that's also been driven by the fact that many of these companies saw their profits soar in the pandemic. So workers are feeling like they deserve a bigger share of the pie. But this wasn't just happening in factories or warehouses, right? Mandalay, like we saw this over in your neck of the woods. Yeah, we did. We saw Hollywood workers fed up too when screenwriters and actors and other performers went on strike. There was a lot of resentment directed not just at those old legacy movie studios, but even more at the big streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon. And in many ways, those have taken over the film and TV business. And those strikes stretched out more than six months.

I went to so many picket lines where I met strikers like actors Kristen McLaughlin and Jordan Hall. These CEOs that are making millions and millions of dollars and they think that we're being ridiculous, asking to have fair wages. We're not asking for an obscene amount. We're just asking to be able to survive. Writers and actors and directors and everyone in front of and behind the camera

are the reason that movies are made. And so we deserve compensation. And so I hope these studio corporate greed heads start to realize that. Okay, so Manda Lee, let's dive into what happened in Hollywood. Sure. Well, you know, first you have to understand that this year's dual strikes by Hollywood writers and performers almost completely shut down the film and TV industries. Movie premieres were delayed and TV shows went on hiatus. There were no red carpets. And other than some independent

productions, almost no one in Hollywood was working. Not the actors, not the people writing the scripts, not the crews or even the behind the scenes people. And the thing is, Aisha, a dual strike in Hollywood hasn't happened since 1960 when Ronald Reagan was president. But not of the U.S., right? Because that was the 80s. Right, right. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild. And here he is in Hollywood 63 years ago talking about that strike. And I believe that in a spirit of goodwill and fair negotiations, we are now on our way to a settlement of what has been a very regrettable and tragic affair. It's a very different Reagan on that tape. Yeah, much more old Hollywood style, right?

Well, you know, the strike was a big success. And as a result, actors and writers got health care benefits, pensions, and a compensation system of residuals when movies were aired on television. But, you know, we're in a really new reality with streaming. Yeah, look, I have all the streaming services and I have cable. TV is very important to me, right? But it has changed everything, having like all of these different options, right? That's so true. Yeah. So you get in this moment, 2023, what did the writers and actors want and what did they get? Well, let's start with the writers since they went on strike first in May. And besides wanting

more pay, they complained about the way they're asked to work. For so many years, TV writers worked in writers' rooms. They hashed out story ideas and scripts together. But as the streaming companies cut costs, they've hired fewer writers for shows with fewer episodes a season. Now, in so-called mini-rooms, TV writers are hired essentially as gig workers to work on parts of scripts that would be handed off to somebody else during production. Writers said they couldn't go on sets or on location to rewrite or to make sure the storylines make sense. You know, Howard Rodman, his father had been a TV writer in the 1960s, and he told me he was hired by one of the streamers

earlier this year to work on a drama. There was no room full of writers. There were just assignments that came in by text. And in what other ways has the work changed for writers? Well, the residuals, you know, that's the money writers get when their work gets rerun. In the new streaming model, those have shrunk. Brittany Nichols, she's a writer for the hit TV show Abbott Elementary, she talked to me about getting paltry residuals in the mail. You get a green envelope, you're like, all right, here we go. Hopefully something good's in here. And then sometimes you just get a stack of checks for seven cents. I mean, seven cents, though, I don't understand it. I mean, Abbott Elementary is a big hit. So how do you get so little money?

That's the question they all had. So many writers I talked to on the picket lines told me very similar stories. Okay, so you have the writers going on strike, but then, you know, the actors, the people in front of the camera, the performers in SAG-AFTRA, they also go on strike. Yeah, exactly. Actors and dancers and stunt performers and voiceover actors, they had all been on the picket lines in solidarity with the writers. But then when their negotiations also broke down, they went on strike too. And one of the main characters in their saga was Fran Drescher, the president of SAG-AFTRA. You might remember her from starring on the TV show The Nanny in the 1990s. Well, Fran Drescher had her labor activist Norma Rae moment when she called

for the strike, and she gave the studios an impassioned ad-lib mouthful. How they plead poverty, that they're losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. And she had quite a style. You know, during the contract talks, she brought in a small heart-shaped plush toy, something a fan gave her, to the negotiating table for emotional support or maybe a bargaining tactic. Here she is on Instagram. I don't have to emulate male energy to lead. I can be exactly who I am. I can lead with intellect.

I can lead with wisdom. I can lead with empathy. I can lead with wisdom. I can lead with empathy. I can be me. And I can still rock a red lip. Okay. Okay, Fran. So she didn't come to play here. Okay. So Fran Drescher's style probably caught the big studio heads really off guard when they showed up to the bargaining tables themselves. And those CEOs began to feel the pressure of the strikes. Disney's Bob Iger got the actors and writers on strike really riled when he talked about them on CNBC. There's a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic. And they are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing

that is quite frankly, very disruptive. So they're not being realistic? No, they're not. Unrealistic. He sounds really dismissive of what workers are asking for. So did this attitude strike a nerve with some people? You bet it did. It really angered a lot of people because we didn't really hear much from the studio heads. Social media really fueled the writers and the actors, and that helped them control the narrative. And, you know, part of the story they tried to get out was that writers and actors are workers, not just living some lavish Hollywood lifestyle.

And that's what Writers Guild Strike Captain Gideca Lazzardi told me. She was one of the writers for the hit show Bridgerton. I think people had a perception of us before that we were all like comfortable, wealthy. We're not. The vast, vast majority of us are not. We have the same struggles everyone else does. Like, how do I pay my bills? How do I get my kid through school? People are rooting for us. People are rooting for us. People are rooting for us. Andrea, you covered

the UAW auto strike, which began during the shutdown in Hollywood. Were there any kinds of echoes or connections or overlap that you could see in their grievances with what Mandelit talked about? Yeah, actually quite a few. You know, I spent some time in Michigan and Ohio, and I heard from autoworkers who said, I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I'll introduce you to Isabel Teabuy. She builds Ford Broncos in Wayne, Michigan. And her story is like so many others you hear. Her father and her uncle both worked at Ford and enjoyed these solid middle-class lives. But she, on the other hand, you know, she told me she's been working at Ford for almost three years and was still making just over $20 an hour. I just had

to break my lease with my apartment because I couldn't afford it. Like, I'm not making a livable wage here. I have too many bills and I'm not even the worst off. And Ayesha, you know, auto workers once set the gold standard for the middle class. For generations, if you were building cars for GM, Ford, or Chrysler, you made enough money to afford a nice home, a nice car, family vacations, even a cottage at the lake. I talked to Charlie Ballard. He's a longtime economist at Michigan State in East Lansing, and he put it this way. There was a generation of people who graduated from Lansing Sexton High School who almost literally walked across the street to upper middle class wages and benefits. And he's talking gold-plated benefits that included pensions and health care for life.

I mean, for life, that is hard to beat and very hard to find these days. Yeah, exactly. Hardly any Americans have that. And by 2007, the American auto industry was in financial straits partly because of those benefits. The big three could not compete with foreign automakers like Honda and Toyota because their labor costs were so high. So with the future of the American auto industry on the line, the UAW agreed back in 2007 to the creation of a second tier of workers. So new hires earned half as much and didn't get pensions or retiree health care.

And thanks in no small part to that cost-cutting, the big three recovered. And in the last decade, they've become hugely profitable. Here was a video that the UAW put out last summer featuring their new president, Sean Fain. Collectively, the big three have made just under a quarter of a trillion dollars in profits in North America between 2013 and 2022. That's trillion with a T, as in time to pay up. It's trillion with a T, as in time to end tears.

So basically, we're auto workers looking to go back to how things used to be? Precisely. Sean Fain went into these talks with what he called audacious demands, you know, 40% in raises, plus cost of living adjustments, also the return of those pensions and the health care for retirees. He acknowledged it's more than the UAW had ever asked for at once. But he also said, this is what's needed to make up for the concessions that we've made over the last decade plus. And he said, you know, auto workers work hard.

And on that note, he even called for a 32-hour work week for 40 hours of pay. I talked to a bunch of workers about that early on. I reached Jerry Coleman. He builds Jeeps in Toledo, Ohio. You know, I would love to have that, but I don't think the company's going to go for that because they're too greedy. And I heard that from, you know, quite a few workers.

When we come back, we hear about what those demands led to. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with the Sunday story, talking to NPR correspondents Mandelit Delbarco and Andrea Hsu about the big year for unions and workers. We are the union! Mighty, mighty union! Mighty, mighty union!

Andrea, you just told us about the audacious demands the UAW put forward, but auto workers weren't the only ones with such lofty goals, right? That's right. We saw workers in all kinds of industries discover that they had a lot of leverage. We saw pilots at the major airlines threatening to disrupt summer travel. They ended up securing 40 percent raises over the life of their contracts. We saw UPS drivers threatening to bring package delivery to a standstill nationwide. They ended up with the most lucrative contract in UPS history, with some part-timers getting raises of 55%. And so, you know, Aisha, when the negotiations at the big three began, it wasn't surprising to hear that auto workers were going for something historic. I think what was surprising was how it played out.

Sean Fain, the UAW president, he started hosting these Facebook Lives attended by tens of thousands of people. It became this platform for reaching autoworkers, but also for reaching the general public. And, you know, Sean Fain is no Hollywood actor. He's no Fran Drescher. But he wasn't shy with the theatrics. Let's listen to him talking about one of the early proposals that Stellantis, formerly known as Chrysler, had put on the table. UAW family, I'm going to be blunt. Stellantis's proposals are a slap in the face.

They're an insult to our members' hard work over the last four years. So I'll tell you what I'm going to do with their proposal. I'm going to file it in its proper place because that's where it belongs, the trash, because that's what it is. Oh, so, I mean, he threw it in the trash, in the trash can. In the bin. Yeah, that became his thing. You know, he kept calling the proposals from the big three garbage, basically. And so what did the auto companies say in response? Well, at the start, their public response, at least, was pretty much, you know, are you nuts? Here's what Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said on CNBC back in September.

There's no way we can be sustainable as a company. You want us to choose bankruptcy over supporting our workers? But, you know, under pressure from the six-week strike, the auto companies ended up putting a lot more on the table. Ford started out with offers of 9% raises. And in the end, all three of the big three settled on 25% raises plus cost of living allowances. And that's more in wage gains than auto workers had seen in the past 22 years combined. So, I mean, they didn't get everything, but they got some things, right? Sounds like it. Yeah.

Many of them say they did get back to the kinds of wages auto workers used to make. You know, they also secured bigger contributions to 401k retirement accounts and the right to strike over plant closures, which the union had never had before. But you're right. They did not get pensions. They did not get retiree health care back. The companies did not bend on those. It still sounds like it was a pretty big win, though, for the autoworkers, right? Yeah, I think most autoworkers, not all, but most felt it was a win after years and years of concessions.

And, Amanda Leet, how did the Hollywood writers and actors fare in the end. Well, in the deal that they finally got, union writers will now get residuals based on the number of views a show gets and bonuses for working on hit shows. And that is really unprecedented because the streaming companies have been so reluctant to give up their viewing data. And it was a cliffhanger for a while for the performers, but in their new contract, they got wage increases, streaming bonuses, and some protections against the use of artificial intelligence. Okay, artificial intelligence, AI, that's all, you know, anyone wants to talk about these days. Like, so what are writers and actors worried about when it comes to AI? Well, you know, the technology of AI has developed so quickly and so many in Hollywood feel it's an existential threat. The writers worry about their scripts and their screenplays getting replaced by chat GPT.

Here's one TV writer I met outside Universal Studios, Lynette Tichel. She was worried studios will hire fewer writers and use them to just doctor up whatever the machines come up with. We're coming back fighting so that Alexis and whatnot aren't writing our stories. We're not here to rewrite a machine. We're not against the use, you know, if we can find a way to be reasonable, but they cannot be the genesis of any creation. We create these worlds. Yeah, and it's not just the written world. Actors are also really freaked out about being replaced or replicated by synthetic performers generated by AI. I spoke at length with Justine

Bateman, the actress, writer, and filmmaker, and she has a degree in computer science. She's been sounding the alarm for months. You'll see every single person will be scanned. It'll be like a wardrobe fitting, which is very unsettling that there'd be some sort of copy of you floating around. And you know, this isn't just some sort of sci-fi fear of the future. It's already happening. I met background actors who told me they've already been asked to be scanned so that, for instance, they could be cut and pasted into big crowd scenes without having to hire more human actors and that sort of thing. I mean, you can see why Hollywood might be interested in that to save money, but you can also see why, if you're an extra, that might not work for you.

So what happened? Did actors and writers get the protections that they were seeking? Well, you know, the contract that SAG-AFTRA ratified does say that performers need to give their informed consent and also to be compensated if they're replicated. But a lot of union members voted against it, and they said the AI protections in the agreement don't nearly go far enough. In fact, I spoke to one member of the negotiating team who said the contract is filled with AI loopholes. And Justine Bateman, she says it will be up to every member to try to protect themselves. I recommend they go through it with your agent and your lawyer and understand what you're not protected over, and then put those things in your individual contracts. And so unlike the Writers Guild

contract, SAG-AFTRA's contract doesn't spell out that performances of human beings have to be done by humans. So as the AI technology develops, any future contracts may have to get even more detailed in any kind of protections that they offer. Andrea, were there similar technology concerns in the UAW strike as well? Yeah, I mean, well, kind of like AI in Hollywood, there is this huge historic change happening in auto, whether people like it or not, the transition from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles. Now, that wasn't originally part of the official agenda in these last contract talks, but it was on everybody's mind. You know, the automakers have warned,

this is going to be a really expensive transition. We need to reinvest our profits to make this happen and to be competitive with non-union companies, you know, starting with Tesla. And workers, meanwhile, are fearing for their jobs. I talked to Jim Cooper on a picket line in Toledo. He says he thinks all the time about his co-workers who build engines for the Jeep Wrangler. A lot of those jobs would be gone because I think at one point I saw a comparison

where a powertrain in an internal combustion car was like 140 parts and you could make an electric powertrain with seven or eight parts. And not to mention there is this big question over whether jobs building EVs and EV batteries will even be union jobs. That was not entirely resolved in these talks, but the union did make some headway, especially at GM, where existing battery workers were brought under the union contract. But there are still big questions hanging over the future, just as there are in Hollywood. And so, I mean, it does feel like this year with all of these workers kind of rising up, I guess, will we call it they were all rising up in solidarity? Yeah, actually. You know, I remember over the summer, I went to a solidarity rally in downtown L.A., and it was called the Union Strike Back.

Hollywood writers and actors marched and chanted with nurses, public school teachers, hotel workers, janitors, and so many other people. And during the rally, Writers Guild of America President Meredith Steem gave them all a pep talk. I think they misjudged our power, the backup we have from Hollywood labor and L.A. labor. And by the way, when it's your turn, we will be there with you. I don't think the bosses knew what they were up against when they failed to listen to us. But they should look around. They should look at this crowd and this unity. And if they didn't know, well, now they know. Union now, union forever. Let's go. Okay, well, that was 2023. What can we expect from the labor movement looking forward to 2024? Well, I am definitely keeping an eye on what the UAW does now.

You know, before the ink was even dry on those contracts at the Big Three, Sean Fain had vowed to organize like never before at non-union plans. When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won't just be with the Big Three, but with the big five or big six. You know, he's coming for the big three's biggest rivals like Tesla, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen. But it's not going to be easy. And already the UAW says some of these non-union automakers are threatening and coercing employees who are trying to get union campaigns going. And we've seen this play out at new unions like at Amazon and Starbucks. Workers there ran these spirited organizing campaigns. They won their union

elections. They got their union certified. But the companies have spent millions and millions of dollars to fight back. Their position is they don't want a union between them and their employees. And companies know labor laws are weak. There's little enforcement. So amid a sea of legal battles, collective bargaining at Starbucks, at Amazon, it's stalled. And none of these new unions has gotten anywhere close to a first contract. So it really remains an uphill climb. And you know, in Hollywood, visual effects workers and video game workers and animators and others joined unions for the first time this year. Other behind-the-scenes workers are represented by IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and they'll be negotiating their union contracts with the studios next year.

So there may be even more strikes. Just stay tuned. Well, thank you to you both for bringing us this incredible reporting. I guess we'll have to wait and see if the AI actors join together and form their own union for their rights. That would be something. That would be something, right? There's a whole other group to negotiate with. We'll have to bring the Terminator in to... Yeah, to deal with that. I'll be back.

This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt and Pallavi Gogoi. The engineer for this episode was Gilly Moon. Our team includes

Liana Simstrom and Justine Yan. And Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first is Back in Your Feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.