“What is happening to us is happening to all fields of labor,” Fran Drescher, president of the actors union, SAG-AFTRA, said in a fiery speech Thursday.
Just Monday, several thousand workers from hotels near the Los Angeles International Airport walked off the job, disrupting travelers.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a writer or a hotel worker, this city is not livable,” said Brenden Gallagher, a TV writer and 10-year L.A. resident who joined Unite Here hotel strikers on the picket lines on July 3, to show solidarity and support. “Our fight is the same fight.”
It’s not just Los Angeles. What social media has labeled a “hot labor summer” is flaring all over the country. And it could be adding up to a critical moment for the labor movement, which has been losing strength in the United States for decades.
Last month, the union representing 340,000 UPS employees authorized a nationwide strike that could have sweeping implications for the economy beginning as soon as August 1. Union leaders said strike preparations had moved into “high gear” after contract talks with UPS broke down following the July Fourth holiday.
More than 7,000 nurses went on strike in New York City in January and won a big salary increase and mandatory nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. That followed a one-day strike by Kaiser nurses in Los Angeles who later clinched a deal that gave them significant wins and averted further labor stoppages.
Meanwhile Starbucks workers at 150 stores from coast to coast went on strike last month over allegations that some stores banned or restricted Pride decorations.
Tobias Higbie, a labor historian and director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA, said that there have been moments in the past when conditions allowed for workers to take a big step forward through organized labor actions, including to address wage suppression after World War II, and in the 1970s when young people were flowing into the workforce.
“That is what’s happening here,” Higbie said. “The labor market is tight, everybody knows it, the workers in these cases — talking about Local 11 (hotel workers) and the television writers — they’re all highly organized … this is a moment you organize for, to gain what the unions would consider a transformational contract.”
The outcome of the labor actions now happening will be closely watched for what it says about the strength of organized labor in an increasingly stratified economy. A fight to unionize Amazon, in particular, has big stakes for the broader movement, considering the company’s vast workforce. Last year, Amazon workers won a surprise victory when warehouse employees in Staten Island voted to join the independent Amazon Labor Union.
Amazon has repeatedly appealed the results of that election and successfully delayed the contract bargaining process. In Southern California, delivery drivers who work for a third-party elected to join the Teamsters union in April, but Amazon terminated their employer’s contract. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim Post chief executive Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.
In the current labor disputes in L.A., hotel owners and entertainment executives have defended their positions, with both groups accusing union members of making unfair demands at a time of rapid change and economic uncertainty in the entertainment industry and elsewhere.
The bargaining group representing hotels issued a press release Thursday running down its criticism of the union’s tactics, and announcing it had filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
“It is unfortunate that the union is more focused on strikes and its political agenda than on bargaining in good faith,” said Keith Grossman, spokesperson for the Coordinated Bargaining Group, which represents the hotels.
Kurt Petersen, co-president of Local 11, dismissed the charges from the Coordinated Bargaining Group as “frivolous.”
But workers on the streets of L.A. say they just want what’s fair, especially given how high home prices and rents have risen in Los Angeles. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is nearly $2,600, according to real estate site Zillow, 53 percent higher than the median nationwide. Home prices in L.A. are also among the highest in the nation, and the supply of affordable housing is shrinking.
“My priority is to earn more,” Julia González said in Spanish outside the JW Marriott in downtown L.A. recently, where she and hundreds of fellow strikers were dodging flamboyantly attired individuals attending a big anime expo in the convention center nearby.
González, 61, makes $25 an hour after working for Marriott for 18 years. She works in housekeeping and said pulling laundry out of the chute and pushing heavy carts piled with towels and supplies is getting more and more difficult.
“We need a higher salary because the cost of living and everything is going higher and higher and higher,” she said.
The hotel workers, represented by Unite Here Local 11, are seeking an immediate $5 raise, followed by three years of $3 raises and additional pension contributions. Workers representing 21 hotels in downtown L.A. and Santa Monica struck for three days over the July 4 weekend, but returned to work on last week without a deal. This week thousands more workers with the same demands walked off the job along the hotel corridor near the Los Angeles International Airport.
The thousands of attendees to the anime convention seemed mostly unfazed by the strikes, which in many cases were taking place at the hotels where they were staying. A few mentioned that the strikers, who were yelling through megaphones and banging on drums — accompanied by the honking of passing motorists — could get pretty loud. Several convention-goers said they supported the strikers’ demand, but with hotel rooms booked months in advance for the popular convention, they didn’t see how they could change their plans. In some cases they learned about the strike only when they arrived at their hotel.
“It’s unfortunate that it’s happening at the same time because we support them, but there’s nothing we can do about it … the hotels are booked solid literally months in advance,” said Risa Wiltsie, 30, who was in town with two friends, all dressed elaborately as princesses from Super Mario Bros.
The Writers Guild of America strike has been going on since May, with well-organized pickets happening daily outside studios and streaming service headquarters on both coasts. The strikers have received support from prominent actors, who are now going on strike themselves in the first simultaneous strike by both unions in more than six decades.
The unions have concerns over some of the same issues, including compensation from streaming services that have completely wiped away the design of what was once the standard sitcom.
“I’ve seen the stagnation of writers’ earnings, and the corrosion of the business norms which make it possible to write television and film over a sustained career,” said Michael Sonnenschein, a longtime L.A. resident and TV writer who’s been picketing outside Netflix and Paramount. “For me, the strike is about using our collective bargaining power to maintain fair pay and codifying and reestablishing those norms everyone in Hollywood pretty much took for granted until recently.”
The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a trade association that works on behalf of Hollywood production companies, said in a statement on Thursday that the actors’ union had “regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.”