The London Financial Times published my letter today that takes issue with their attack on a lawsuit against Wall Street investment banks. The plaintiffs are suing those banks for their manipulation of the IPO process during the technolgoy bubble of the late 90s.
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Letters – Citizen investors deserve protection
It has to say something about the global labor environment that Chinese workers are better off striking in Romania than they would be in China itself. Can you imagine what would happen to the same workers in China itself? Thousands there have been arrested, harassed and jailed for leading a massive protest over the last few years again unemployment and inequality. One can only imagine what would happen if Romanian workers working in China tried to strike.
Generally, I detest the idea that so-called “big labor” is a bloated overpaid bureaucracy. Usually those attacks come from places like the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page. But just what have the football players been getting that is worth paying their union head $3 million a year?? Especially in light of the tragic plight of many retired players decribed here by the New York Times and last week by Yahoo Sports. Could finding a way to cover health insurance and a minimal pension for these players be so difficult for today’s union leadership to accomplish? Last year, Congress held hearings into the way the Players Union operates and that is likely to continue this year. Every union has an obligation to help those who worked so hard to establish what current members enjoy. The Mine Workers did so when black lung struck an older generation and the Auto Workers are attempting to do the same with retiree benefits (though with only moderate success). Where the pay gap between one generation and the next is so large, today’s generation has a responsibility to “do the right thing.”
Ex-Players Say Increase in Pensions Is Needed – New York Times
Ever wonder what it would be like to predict the future? Sometimes a hard look at the past is the best way to predict the future.
Workers in Hollywood – actors, writers, directors, and craft workers – have just such an opportunity today. Down one road is that laid out by Nick Counter in his propaganda campaign over the last couple of years. Every time he says the same thing about the internet and digital delivery: “Who knows?” and since we don’t know, we can’t pay. Down the second road, those in Hollywood who develop and create the content that then is distributed globally share equally and fairly in the revenues generated by this new business model.
How can we know that there are two possible roads? Because in many ways the tragic plight of today’s aging NFL stars – described so well in this piece from Yahoo Sports – indicates what happens when a weak union is unable (and apparently still unwilling) to counter the “Who knows?” argument from employers. In the 1960s the early Super Bowls could barely fill up the LA Coliseum! Now the Super Bowl makes the league, broadcasters and advertisers hundreds of millions (an estimated 379 million this year). But that is no consolation to the players of the 60s and 70s who were unable to get their fare share of the value they helped create.
The Canadian strike is on and all eyes turn to the North. The battle over the future of the EMI sector is underway. Digitalization is at the heart of the strike as this piece from Canadian TV (online!) indicates.
CTV.ca | Inside the Actors’ Picket Lines: FAQ on the Dispute
As this report in CFO.com suggests, there seems to be something in the water at the SEC that turns otherwise experienced and competent SEC Chairmen into politically tone deaf bureaucrats. After years of growing pressure to change the regime of stock options, and at the very point that shareholder activists succeed in ousting a major CEO over excessive pay (Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli), and just as Congressman Barney Frank takes over as head of the House committee that oversees his agency, the SEC’s Chris Cox decides to give public companies a free pass that allows them to disclose stock option the way Enron reported its earnings from off balance sheet entities!
This is a useful commentary on the dramatic rise to power of private equity funds. The upside has limits and there are strong indications that the incentives can be skewed against the large institutions, including pension funds, that funnel money into this off-exchange world.
The Guilds and other labor organizations in the entertainment and media industries have two signficant advantages. First, they are collective bodies that (generally) act with the legitimacy that only a democratic organization can provide. Second, only the Guilds can write achievements like higher residual rates into collective bargaining agreements that can be enforced across the board and long into the future – in other words, they can institutionalize gains for their members in a way that other forms of activity (such as using an individual agent or lawyer).
The Guilds are not business organizations seeking a profit. Businesses constantly suffer from the conflicts that profit seeking sets up as inevitable. The fracturing of the agents into two tiers described by the LA Times recently – with the high end looking more like producers everyday – reflects this kind of pressure. Democracy and transparency help overcome that fracturing in unions. When used effectively a union’s collective power can mobilize hundreds of thousands if not millions of people behind a collective bargaining agenda. That means the Guilds can, if they want, reshape the entire structure of the EMI sector. They have, in fact, already done that several times in the past. What other industry has the kind of collective agreements that cover professionals of such high skill? Very few. If used to confront the new delivery systems and financial structures the collective power of the Guilds can make gains that benefit all actors – stars or not.
At the end of the day, in fact, the agents, lawyers and managers know they are better off with the collective power of the Guilds establishing a base of wage rates, residuals, and working conditions upon which they can build rather than having no base at all. And presumably most successful actors know how difficult it is to count on the kind of success that top tier stars have and how fragile that is.
The collective power of the Guilds is critical to blocking a race to the bottom in the industry. That does not mean, of course, that among the agents – particularly at the top tier groups like ICM, WM, CAA and Endeavor – there is not a plan afoot to basically replace the Guilds with the agencies. the role benig played by some of the agencies amounts to a form of dual unionism with a company union in the form of the agents. This suggests that the effort to improving the relationship between the Agents and the Guilds will be a complex process.
Anyone looking to predict what negotiations are going to look like when the major collective agreements between actors, writers and crew open up for negotiations here in the U.S. over the next two years need only look north of the border. There the Canadian union representing 21,000 domestitc performers are in tough bargaining with producers including many U.S. based companies like Disney, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.
Linked below is the union (ACTRA) website with an update. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting on the possibility of a strike (Actors Strike Looms in Canada). Interestingly, the contract under negotiation covers most of Canada but not British Columbia where Vancouver is located. B.C. performers are in a separate union with lower wages. And the producers are threatening – as they do in the U.S. to move production to B.C. from the rest of Canada. In light of intense concern in the U.S. about runaway production it is interesting to see that the ‘race to the bottom’ affects much of Canadian film and T.V. too. American EMI workers may be able to learn a great deal by paying close attention to the Canadian negotiations. And, of couse, support and solidarity for their fellow performers could go a long way to helping build a critical bridge with Canadian labor that could help in upcoming bargaining in the U.S.
Anyone looking to predict what negotiations are going to look like when the major collective agreements between actors, writers and crew open up for negotiations here in the U.S. over the next two years need only look north of the border. There the Canadian union representing 21,000 domesitc performers are in tough bargaining with producers including many U.S. based companies like Disney, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.
Linked below is the union (ACTRA) website with an update. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting (Actors Strike Looms in Canada). Interestingly, the contract under negotiation covers all of Canada but not British Columbia where Vancouver is located. B.C. performers are in a separate union with lower wages. And the producers are threatening – as they do in the U.S. to move production to B.C. from the rest of Canada. In light of intense concern in the U.S. about runaway production it is interesting to see that the ‘race to the bottom’ affects much of Canadian film and T.V. too. American EMI workers may be able to learn a great deal by paying close attention to the Canadian negotiations. And, of couse, support and solidarity for their fellow performers could go a long way to helping build a critical bridge with Canadian labor that could help in upcoming bargaining in the U.S.