21st Century Labor Wars

Click herefor a post by Robert Reich entitled "The larger meaning of the Hollywood strike."

It's labor v. capital -- and capital has an overwhelming advantage.

Consider: Stock gains this year have been concentrated among five giant digital firms: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. Their combined market capitalization is now over $8 trillion, a figure that exceeds the GDP of every country but the United States and China.

Netflix’s Reed Hastings got a 2022 compensation package worth $51.1 million, up 25 percent from the year before. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO got $39 million. Comcast’s CEO, $32 million. Paramount’s CEO, $32 million. Disney’s CEO, $24 million.

Amazon’s Bezos and Meta’s Zuckerberg are raking in more than all these executives combined.

Meanwhile, the people who create the content are getting shafted. They have less and less bargaining power.

I’m talking about writers, designers, artists, musicians, software designers and developers, photographers, graphics specialists, coders, sound engineers, animators, singers, songwriters, architects, showrunners, journalists, and everyone who stores or delivers these creations.

Over the last decade, the pay of TV writers has fallen by 23 percent. The typical actor has also been on a downward escalator (last year, averaging $26,276). So have the pay, benefits, and job security of most other content creators.

In other words, what’s happening in Hollywood is also happening in a huge and growing portion of the U.S. economy.

This gap between the declining rewards going to digital creators and the soaring rewards going to the executives of the giant corporations that manage digital creations has become a chasm, and it’s becoming ever larger.

The Biden administration has been fighting valiantly for the little guy -- the most labor-friendly administration since FDR's --  but look at the 6-3 Supreme Court. Don't expect many victories for minorities, women, or labor for a couple of decades at least.