Photo by Lara Jameson on Pexels
If you’re Gen X like me, you may mostly remember Fran Drescher as the sassy nanny from Queens, New York, in the hit television show from the 90s, “The Nanny.” You may also remember her braying laugh, pinched-waist dress suits, and brassy attitude.
Well, in her speech today as the president of SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), Drescher brought the fire and brimstone as she announced that the actors’ union had not reached an agreement with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers). Actors would be joining their fellow writers in striking, and all I could think to myself was, “Let’s Goooooooooooo!”
all I could think to myself was, “Let’s Goooooooooooo!”
Of course, you may think of millionaire actors as not being worthy of our support. Do we really care if Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt make even more millions? But the power in a union is in its numbers. So many of the actors that make TV shows and movies immersive and realistic are background actors. These background actors aren’t pulling in millions of dollars. Matt Damon spoke out in support of the strike, saying that many of these actors need residuals to even make the $26,000 per year needed to get health insurance. Think about that. Here we have studios fighting with the actor’s union about residuals when you have actors not making even $26,000 a year, while Disney head, Bob Iger, makes $27 million per year.
One of the more appalling parts of the contract discussions is that the studios offered to pay background actors for one day’s worth of work for scanning their likenesses for AI training so that studios could then use their likeness whenever and wherever they wanted forever. Um, no thanks!
I actually was pretty inspired, seeing the actors join the writers in this strike. With AI making CEOs everywhere salivate at the thought of cutting millions of jobs so they can replace them with soulless software that can only even exist because of the hard work done every day by writers, actors, painters, illustrators, creators…it makes my stomach turn. These fat-cats are turning to these technologies that will put out meaningless drivel that they can sell to people for premium prices. Well, if we’ve all lost our jobs, how will we buy this crap? And, if we’re no longer creating, how will AI continue to steal from our labor so that billionaire CEOs can make more profits?
The labor movement has been gaining ground in recent years, and that has been a welcoming change from when I was younger. Remember the 1980s movie “Wall Street,” where naive stockbroker Bud Fox was supposed to be the hero in all his disaffected disillusionment? What happened instead? Everyone began worshiping Gorden “Greed is Good” Gekko, the wealthy, literal criminal of the movie.
But we're seeing the tide change. When you see that, according to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay has ballooned a grotesque 1,322% since 1978 and that the current CEO-worker compensation ratio is 351-1 as of 2020, that is simply not sustainable. And we're now seeing labor respond. We’ve seen labor organization happening at Starbucks and Amazon, and now, we’re on the cusp of a huge strike happening at UPS.
If you haven’t seen Drescher’s speech, I highly, highly recommend finding it on social media somewhere to watch it. It’s inspiring, and I could feel the power of labor in our numbers when she ended her speech with the following:
“We stand tall. You have to wake up and smell the coffee. We are labor and we stand tall and we demand respect and to be honored for our contribution.
You share the wealth because you cannot exist without us.”
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