“The rise of piecemeal work is a key
issue in the Hollywood writers’ strike.
Universities devote a smaller share
of faculty slots to tenured professorships than in the past — and hire more
adjunct professors who have little chance for promotion. Law firms employ
relatively fewer partners and more lawyers who are paid less. And Hollywood
hires fewer writers to participate in the entire production process, relegating
more of them to piecemeal work.
This trend is part of what my
colleague Noam Scheiber calls “the fracturing of work,” and it is a central
issue in the Hollywood writers’ strike that is now 11 weeks old. As one
historian explained, there is increasingly a “tiered work force of prestige
workers and lesser workers.” The arrangement has its roots in manufacturing, Noam writes in a story that just published:
At the turn of the 20th century,
automobiles were produced largely in artisanal fashion by small teams of highly
skilled “all around” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and
systems — ignition, axles, transmission.
By 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly
divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading more than 150 men across a vast
assembly line. The workers typically performed a few simple tasks over and
over.
Specialization does have big
advantages. Companies can complete tasks more efficiently and inexpensively.
But workers sometimes pay the price in the form of lower wages and less
responsibility, especially if they are not unionized
and lack bargaining leverage.
Piketty’s
rule
Screenwriters — who are unionized —
have gone on strike in an attempt to use their collective leverage to avoid
becoming Hollywood’s equivalent of adjunct professors. Until the past decade,
writers not only wrote scripts but also remained on set during filming and
participated in the process. They offered thoughts about costumes and props and
would tweak the script as the cast acted it out.
The producer Michael Schur has
compared the job to an apprenticeship. Schur was a writer on “The Office,” and
the experience helped him learn how to create and run his own shows. Later, he
did so, with “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place.”
Today, only one or two writers
remain with a show through production, while others produce scripts and are
then dropped from the process. “The making of television is very
compartmentalized now,” John Koblin, who covers the television business for The
Times, told me. “The writers write. The actors act. The directors direct.”
(John went into more detail as a guest on the NPR show “Fresh Air.”)
As a result, writers’ pay has
stagnated even as streaming has led to a boom in the number of television
shows. Studio executives say that they need to hold down costs in response to
declining revenue from cable television and movie theaters. And those
challenges are real, but the executives also seem to be using the shift to
streaming as an excuse to change the economics of their industry in ways that
are less favorable to many employees.
The trend is a microcosm of larger
developments. Nationwide, the pay of the bottom 90 percent of earners has
trailed well behind economic growth in recent decades (as you can see in these Times charts). Most
Americans have not received their share of the economy’s growing bounty, while
a relatively small share have experienced very large income gains.
That’s not shocking.
As the economist Thomas Piketty has explained, inequality tends to rise in a
capitalist economy, partly because the wealthy have more political power and
economic leverage than the middle class and poor do.
But history also shows that rising
inequality is not inevitable.
There are forces that can push in the other direction.
Rising educational attainment can give more people the skills to become
specialists. Taxes on top incomes and large fortunes can redistribute wealth.
Labor unions can give workers the bargaining power to prevent wage stagnation.
Hollywood writers — and, as of last
week, actors too — are now trying to
make such a push against inequality.”
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