The Writer’s Strike is Over!

I awoke this morning to the good news, the writer’s strike is finally over! I will admit that I haven’t been obsessively following it, but I have been mildly interested. As a writer, I do certainly care about the concerns of writers in the entertainment industry, but it’s been the little people that have been moe of my concern over the past few months. Without writers, sets were shut down, studios stopped filming, and while the rich complained about not being richer, the sound guys, the techs, the secretaries, the restaurants and waitresses near the studios… lost their jobs and couldn’t make their rent.

When factory workers went on strike 80 years ago, it was because they were paid criminally low wages to work long painful hours with risk of injury and sometimes even death. They had a real cause and a real right to better pay and better working conditions. When they went on strike, they did so at the risk of starvation and being homeless, but they did it because they knew they could not go on another day working in that environment. (And some people because they had to since everyone else was, and they might get a brick thrown at them for crossing the picket lines)

My Dad told me stories of times when my grandfather’s factory went on strike when he was a little boy. He said that they barely had any food to eat. The families in the neighborhood would band together and share food, having “cookouts” where they would build bonfires and roast hotdogs with no buns simply because they were cheap. He told how some families barely survived the strikes.

When Hollywood or Baseball goes on strike, it’s not as if they are having to eat hotdogs just to stay alive. They still go back to their comfortable houses at night and kick back with their latte and bonbons. While I might be sympathetic to their cause in some ways, I hardly feel for them the same way I feel when I think about those poor families a century ago fighting for their rights to minimum wage and safety at work.

But anyway, it’s over now, and happily, the shows will go on.