But How Is Ronald Reagan To Blame For Actors Strike? We're Glad You Asked!

Fran Drescher, the flashy girl from Flushing, is killing it.

At noon Pacific (3 p.m. Eastern) today, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) will be officially on strike, after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) for a fair contract fell through.

This is the first time both actors and film and television writers from the Writers Guild of America have been on strike at the same time since the writer's strike of 1960, and the first time that SAG-AFTRA has gone on strike since 1980, so it's a pretty big deal. It's not something the union takes lightly, given how many people's livelihoods are impacted by it.

She Had Style, She Had Flair, She Was There!

SAG-AFTRA President (and fashion icon) Fran Drescher gave an incredible speech on Thursday, explaining the reasons for the union going on strike and blasting the greed of studio CEOs. "They plead poverty — that they're losing money left and right — while giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs," she said.

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She was careful to be clear that the people who suffer the most from the current system are not the big time celebrities but the everyday working actors who are just trying to pay their rent.

Drescher explained that the whole business model has changed and that the compensation structure for workers must therefore change along with it.

"The entire business model has changed, by digital, streaming, AI," she said, adding that this affects all workers and not just actors, because "We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines." This line was rudely snarked on by conservative publications like The Daily Mail , which came out with the headline " SAG union president Fran Drescher says she fears striking actors could be replaced by ROBOTS ," except ... that it's true.

Indeed, in a speech of his own, the union's chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland talked about the "groundbreaking AI proposal" the film and television producers had given on Wednesday: that they should be able to pay background actors for one day of work, scan their bodies, and use their likenesses in movies and television shows forever. Because Black Mirror's "Joan is Awful" is a documentary now.

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In a later interview on MSNBC, Drescher explained that it was ridiculous to expect people to be "satisfied with incremental changes from a contract that was forged in 1960 and it no longer applies, it's a completely different game."

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And it was not a very good contract to begin with.

But How Is This Ronald Reagan's Fault?

Glad you asked!

So, one of the things people always say about Ronald Reagan is "Before he was a conservative, he was a union leader!" — and that's true, but he was not a particularly good union leader. In 1951, during his first term as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, he negotiated a crappy deal in which actors would forfeit residuals from films made before 1948 in exchange for mere negotiations on residuals on films made going forward. At the time, movies were just starting to be shown on TV and actors felt, rightly, that they deserved compensation for this. Those negotiations lasted until 1960, until his next term as SAG president, when actors (and writers at the time) went on strike in hopes of pushing the heads of the seven major studios at the time to come to a fair deal.

That strike lasted for about six weeks, with Reagan eventually coming to another very bad deal for the actors — they would forfeit residuals not only from before 1948, but also from before 1960 in exchange for residuals going forward and the studios contributing $2.65 million to the Guild's first Pension and Welfare Plan, which was about half of what they were asking for.

This crap negotiation was the crux of a 1981 lawsuit filed by Mickey Rooney against eight studios on behalf of himself and other actors ( including Rock Hudson, Paul Newman, Glenn Ford, Lana Turner, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Jane Powell, Shelley Winters, Barbara Stanwyck) who felt they deserved compensation for the movies they made before 1960. (Side note: This is interesting because he was deeply shitty to Lana Turner .) The suit was thrown out a year later, which was pretty unfortunate for a whole lot of actors who hadn't been as big as those stars and also had to watch as other people made piles of money off of their old films (including in commercials).

“What I’m angry about and will always be angry about is the terrible blow actors were dealt when our supposed union negotiated our rights away from receiving monetary compensation for all the work done before 1960. Why didn’t the union protect us? Ted Turner gets the money and the performers get an actors’ home to get sick and die in.” — Mickey Rooney, to Drama-Logue
 

I love Turner Classic Movies and am glad it isn't going away (so far), but these crap negotiations very definitely allowed Ted Turner to make piles of money off of people's work without properly compensating them.

The Guild would go on strike again in 1980, as Reagan was running for actual president, to demand residuals for home video and cable, which they did get under the same terms as the initial 1960 contract.

This Isn't Just About Actors And Celebrities

As Drescher repeatedly explained, this is about all workers who are in danger of losing their jobs to AI and related technologies, because if labor contracts do not keep up with the times, everyone (except the very rich) gets screwed. It would be lovely if we could all benefit from new labor-saving technologies, but our economic system is not set up that way. Labor-saving technologies only benefit those whose income is based on profiting off of the labor of others.

Now, things like acting and writing are a bit of a different animal entirely, because in those cases we're talking about careers that people want for reasons beyond just supporting themselves. The idea of watching or reading something created by AI leaves us all a little cold for that reason. It's not just about getting information or being entertained, it's about the human creativity involved in those things.

However, let's be real — for the most part, people have jobs because they need to survive. Jobs can't go away or be swallowed up by machines, because if we don't pay people to do them, then those people can't eat or pay rent. Those people don't get to benefit from labor-saving technology. It would make more sense for fewer people to work if we have something like a Universal Basic Income — or to cut down on hours but figure out a way to pay people the same. It would be incredible to figure out a way for all of us to benefit from technologies that allow us all to work less and enjoy life more, but this is the United States of America and, let's be real, it'll be a while before people are going to go for that. Work isn't so much about what we need as a society, but something to which we attach personal morality and value. It is how you prove "I am a good enough person to deserve to eat, live somewhere, and have health care."

We are also a celebrity-obsessed culture, so the SAG-AFTRA union taking a stand is something that is going to have a much wider impact than just on how much actors get in residuals. Not only will it prevent the normalization of replacing people with technology, but it will demonstrate the power of a union and hopefully inspire people from other industries to unionize as well.

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