A horrible way to solve a problem

Have you been deeply impacted by the Hollywood writers’ strike? I haven’t. In fact, I’ve scarcely noticed. My TV viewing consists largely of rerun viewings of L&O, CSI, the Simpsons, PBS offerings (when they’re not on one of their interminable fundraising drives,) and TCM. If not, there’s always DVDs, or a good book. So, really I have noticed no change in my life. In other words, I don't really care if it's never resolved.

Yet, I guess, as a person who earns a living of a sort as a creative compiler of words, I should be deeply sympathetic. Indeed, with the writers' cause, I am deeply sympathetic. For decades the film-biz’s scribes have been treated like something a braindead glamourpuss stepped in on the sidewalk, and all cameras will be on the braindead glamourpuss with little thought going in the direction of the underpaid and unheralded guy or girl who put the script together – trying to hold back on words of two syllables or more so that peabrained multimillion dollar pay glamourpuss GP can actually learn the script.

As I say, I have great sympathy with their cause. I have very little sympathy with their technique. That’s because strikes, of any kind, are dreadful things and never hurt the people the strikers are hoping to hurt. Mainly it’s those on the picket-lines who get to hang onto the dirty end of the stick. That’s combined with the fact that strikers rarely gain back what they’ve lost during the dispute. Needless to say, their union bosses never tell them that when they are exhorting them to go out.

I have lived through one strike. I never, ever would want to repeat the experience. It indeed was probably the worst experience of my life. I have told people, not entirely waggishly, that my divorces were easy compared to the big strike.

It was in the late summer of 1994.My newspaper, of which I was assistant/city editor at the time, had just celebrated its 103rd anniversary. Thanks to union behavior and a huge conflict between the union boss, and the newspaper’s publisher, it wouldn’t see 104. The boys and girls of the newspaper guild hit the bricks in August.

It was ugly. Former friends became enemies, or at least adversaries. Because I was management I was deemed by union colleagues to be a bad guy. This was a joke, since I made considerably less than printers and compositors (union members) and didn’t have a union to argue for me. My domestic partner of the day had an even harder time. She was a very unhappy union member, and she was one of a group deemed to be “sleeping with the enemy.” She finally quit the union and any hope in future to not be deemed 'hot' (in the union, not pulchritude sense) in disgust, and I will also suggest this dispute was the beginning of our domestic downfall.

Anyway, the end result was sad and stupid. Other than the ugliness of of my having to cross a picket line every day and be jeered at by former workmates, and pathetic attempts to try to get the paper out with management at the helm, eventually it unfolded that everybody lost. The multinational publishing company shut down the paper without so much as a by-your-leave; something the union told its lackeys would never happen, and we were all out of work. This was a job I planned to do right until retirement, because frankly, I loved the work.

Journeymen ultimately had to go out of town to get employment; the impact on the business community locally was big since the paper employed 150 people, which is a lot in a smaller community, and bitter resentments had been formed, and they took a very long time to heal. Even union members developed animosities to each other, the militants against the moderates. Solidarity forever, my ass. Some people have never really healed and remain bitter and adversarial until this day.

The local paper that was formed after the strike was immediately deemed a “scab rag” (which it wasn’t) and there are still those who will have nothing to do with it. It’s the local paper to which I contribute, by the way, and I served on its staff for four years, part of the time as assistant editor, with a salary that didn’t resemble the one I got at my former paper. The bucks just weren’t there.

So, I cannot fathom why, in this day and age, strikes are still considered to be viable alternatives to decent and respectful collective bargaining. Then again, that would be like asking people to seek intelligent solutions to disputes. That doesn’t seem to happen much.

So, will network television ever fully recover from this dispute? I’d be prepared to suggest that the impact will carry on for years, even after settlement. It seems to work that way.