MAD askS for my thoughts on the strike by movie actors and production workers and links to an interesting story in the New York Times. I know almost nothing about the subject but it gives me an opportunity to talk about something that I have been thinking about for a long time. By the way, I was delighted to see that Fran Drescher is leading the strike. And if I am not mistaken, Sharon Stone is also involved. My natural inclination is to be on the side of the workers, and this is no exception, but let me try to put this in a broader context. What follows is idle speculation, of course, since I know next to nothing about the economics of the movie industry and its spinoffs and associates.
Early in the development of capitalism, Marx shrewdly
observed that capitalism seeks to justify its exploitation by mystifying the
capital/labor relationship. As he argued in volume 1 of CAPITAL, early political
economists misrepresented the relationship of labor to capital as an encounter
in the marketplace of free and equal parties. By one of those historical
ironies which Marx so much enjoyed, this mystification was undermined by the
process of bringing craft workers into the factory, where they were able to
recognize directly their common interests and their common opposition to their
employers. It was out of this process that there emerged the modern labor
movement. As a result of a century of struggle, often violent and always
opposed by capital, labor unions developed to fight for higher wages and better
working conditions and to protect the interests of workers.
In the last 20 years and more, capital has sought to undermine
labor unions and liberate itself from the constraints the unions imposed upon relentless
exploitation, by giving new life to the old myth that workers are simply petty
capitalists making bargains in the marketplace for the sale of their commodity
– labor. Uber drivers, gig workers, independent contractors – all of these are
devices for reducing the bargaining power of labor and liberating capital from
such constraints and demands as overtime pay, pensions, healthcare, and
restrictions on dangerous working conditions.
I see the current strike as one more struggle against this attack on the
interests and power of labor.
All of you, I imagine, have had the experience of sitting in
a movie theater at the end of a showing and watching the credits crawl across
the screen. I am always astonished to discover how many people it takes to
produce a movie. Even in a simple
scene in which two actors are talking to one another, with first one and then the
other appearing on the screen or reacting to what the other is saying, I have
to remind myself of all the people it takes to record those “reaction shots”
and to merge them in the cutting room to get the simple compelling conversation
into the movie. All my life, I have wanted simply to sit quietly on a movie set
and watch a scene filmed so that I see, and not simply imagine in my mind, the
elaborate processes involved.
I will quite happily watch old movies or nothing at all for
as long as it takes for the workers in the film industry to win their fight.
13 comments:
Given the collective nature of most film-making, it's remarkable that 'auteur theory'-- the idea that the works of major directors, and even a number of 'B' filmmakers, exhibit kinds of stylistic developments and consistency characteristic of bodies of work in visual arts, music, and literature--has as much purchase as it does. But one sees it in Don Siegel and Edgar Ulmer as much as in Hitchcock or Ford. Among actors perhaps only Fred Astaire sustained the degree of relative autonomy across decades and around 30 movies necessary for such development and consistency.--While looking at old movies, one might go to Truffaut's Day for Night for some attempt to capture part of the collective nature of filmmaking. The more limited sense of a film as a collective improvisation among actors is perhaps best shown in some of Jacques Rivette's works: Dominque Labrourier and Juliet Berto alternately witnessing and attempting to describe the mysterious drama in the house in Céline and Julie Go Boating; the rehearsals in The Gang of Four; Nathalie Richard's endless dancing in Haut Bas Fragile. And given how long Rivette's movies are, by the time you're done watching them the strike will be over.--Apropos the professor's recent posts on affirmative action and elite education, Freddie deBoer now has a short video mostly re-stating the points he made in his earlier blog piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcvP8AGrGas&ab_channel=FreddiedeBoer
Thank you very much professor. It will be interesting to see how the attack on bargaining power of labor plays out over the next couple of decades. We will be told about "flexibility", "variety" and "growth". I also wonder if union membership will ever increase to 1960s levels.
re: an analysis of profits and wages at the aggregate level
This is from a perspective of Kalecki/Levy.
Assume an economy with no government and no external sector. Capitalists earn profits and workers earn wages. Since GDI = GDP, we have:
Profits + Wages = Consumption + Investment
Profits = Consumption + Investment - Wages
If we make the simplifying assumption that workers spend all their wages, then consumption and wages being equal drop out, and we're left with:
Profits = Investment
In such an economy, it is impossible for capitalists to earn more by paying their workers less. What is a gain to one capitalist comes at the expense of other capitalists, i.e., the capitalists are fighting for a share of a fixed pie which is investment.
In point of fact, if capitalists were to invest zero in a given time period, their profits in the aggregate would be zero for the same time period.
There is no profit in a pure consumption economy. Profits are determined by investment, not by wages.
Very much on topic for once.
Chris Hedges interview Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty by America,
where among other topics he goes into the need for more unionization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCyCfNnXGOE
Where Profits Come From - The Critical Question Never Asked | David Levy | TEDxElonUniversity
David A. Levy is chairman of The Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, LLC, a macroeconomic forecasting and consulting firm using an uncommon, profit-centered methodology. He is a widely respected economist, investor, successful hedge fund manager, speaker, author, and former member of various public policy study groups, including a presidential commission. He forecast that the collapse of the housing bubble would cause a broad financial crisis and severe recession—and started a hedge fund in 2004 exclusively to capitalize on the resultant interest rate collapse. Levy graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College with a B.A. in mathematics and has an MBA from Columbia Business School.
From David Levy's Wikipedia page (emphasis mine):
Levy is the coauthor, with Jay Levy, of Profits and the Future of American Society, published by HarperCollins in 1983. Forbes magazine praised the book for explaining "why squeezing business profits for the alleged benefit of the poor or of the working man is a self-defeating exercise. It leads not to the satisfaction of human needs but to inflation and unemployment."
Assume an economy operating at full capacity. Now assume all the workers get higher wages.
Can they spend more? No, because the economy is already operating at full capacity. That leads to inflation and higher interest rates. What the workers gain in wages will be offset by higher payments on their mortgages and loans. The higher interest payments will make the rich even richer, thereby increasing wealth and income inequality.
Can the workers save more? No, because saving equals investment. It's an identity (S = I). The extra saving means inventories go higher as goods go unsold, which means some workers lose their jobs, and the increased saving of some workers comes at the expense of dis-saving by the unemployed workers.
Further to my comment about the inability of workers to save more due to the Saving-Investment Identity, this from Keynes:
For although the amount of his own saving is unlikely to have any significant influence on his own income, the reactions of the amount of his consumption on the incomes of others makes it impossible for all individuals simultaneously to save any given sums. Every such attempt to save more by reducing consumption will so affect incomes that the attempt necessarily defeats itself. It is, of course, just as impossible for the community as a whole to save less than the amount of current investment, since the attempt to do so will necessarily raise incomes to a level at which the sums which individuals choose to save add up to a figure exactly equal to the amount of investment.
— John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 7, p. 84
Profits = Investment
In such an economy, it is impossible for capitalists to earn more by paying their workers less. What is a gain to one capitalist comes at the expense of other capitalists, i.e., the capitalists are fighting for a share of a fixed pie which is investment.
In such an economy, it is also impossible for capitalists to earn less by paying their workers more. What is a loss to one capitalist becomes the gain of other capitalists, i.e., the capitalists are fighting for a share of a fixed pie which is investment. :-)
Ahmed Fares should tell Disney CEO Bob Iger Ahmed Fares his objections are unfounded. After all, workers' demands do not affect Disney's profits. I am sure that Iger will be most impressed. :-)
By the way, last time I checked, the US had a government (although, admittedly, a crappy one) and traded with other countries.
Great general analysis.
The following analysis is nearly two years old, but I found it interesting if not relevant, particularly if are interested in the role that Tom Hanks has played - within the union, that is.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/14/tom-hanks-the-trojan-horse-in-a-citadel-of-labor/
Anony Mouse,
I can't find the original quote, but someone paraphrased it in a comment:
Someone much wiser than me wrote that we need to kill the microeconomist that lives inside each of our heads.
I'm doing macro and you come back at me with micro. Here's Bill Mitchell on the fallacy of composition in economics:
Prior to the 1930s, there was no separate study called macroeconomics. The mainstream theory – which dominates still today – considered macroeconomics to be an aggregation of the individual. So the representative firm and household were just made bigger but the underlying behavioural principles that were brought to bear on the analysis were those that applied at the individual level.
So the economy is seen as being just like a household or single firm. Accordingly, changes in behaviour or circumstances that might benefit the individual or the firm are automatically claimed to be of benefit to the economy as a whole.
The general reasoning failure that occurs when one tries to apply logic that might operate at a micro level to the macro level is called the fallacy of composition. In fact, it is what led to the establishment of macroeconomics as a separate discipline. As indicated, prior to the Great Depression, macroeconomics was thought of as an aggregation of microeconomics. The neo-classical economists (who are the precursors to the modern neo-liberals) didn’t understand the fallacy of composition trap and advocated spending cuts and wage cuts at the height of the Depression.
Keynes led the attack on the mainstream by exposing several fallacies of composition. While these type of logical errors pervade mainstream macroeconomic thinking, there are two famous fallacies of composition in macroeconomics: (a) the paradox of thrift; and (b) the wage cutting solution to unemployment.
source: Fiscal austerity – the newest fallacy of composition
First, I just finished reading the article that Jerry Fresia linked to and while long, it's well worth the time to read it.
Having said that, unions are bad for workers because they deter capital entry. The work shifts elsewhere to where labor power is weaker. Paradoxically, strong labor is weak labor and weak labor is strong labor. A union is useless if you can't get work. Here's an example in line with the subject at hand:
More shows and films are made in Mexico, where costs are low and unions are few
The Giant and Safeway grocery stores near me are both unionized. The jobs can't be shifted to Mexico because I'm not going to fly from Maryland to Mexico to do my grocery shopping, and neither is anyone else. So would you rather be a Giant employee represented by UFCW, or not represented?
AF's model seems based on manufacturing that can be moved around. As LFC points out lots (I'd assert most) of jobs can't be moved. Also recent experience with the pandemic and China's political heel turn demonstrates that a focus on wages might be short sighted. Also industrial policy is still (or should be) a thing.
O course it wasn't twenty years ago, capital has never and will never give up. The Wagner Act and the switch in time were high points and the defeats for labor began in the next decade (1947). We are currently dealing with laws restricting child labor being walked back.
The true cost of low prices is, you know, the violence of globalization or such. As in, What's the true cost of Amazon's low prices? I recall maybe there is a Walmart documentary called 'Walmart -- the high cost of low price' or something. I'm not sure that 'the abuse of people in the workplace for profit' is really a big part of the 'why celebrities are striking', nothing really direct and brutal is at stake here? Actors don't want to have to get real jobs. And I *can* sympathize.
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