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Thoughts on the Line:Day 5 [1]

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Date: 2023-07-23

I come from a union household. My dad was a UAW member his whole adult life, retired with this thing called a pension. My mom was a teacher, also retired with a pension. To me, there is a romance to the whole labor movement. We found a way to beat Darwin. It’s no longer survival of the fittest or the richest or the most connected.

I’ve hardly slept. There is an adrenaline rush going through me. Finally the time for action has come. Since pretty much the beginning of May, I’ve been in a holding pattern. The writers struck and Hollywood went dark. I picketed once in the middle of May with the WGA over at Netfilx’s studio on Sunset and Bronson. I felt righteous but never really part of the masses clogging the sidewalk, like I was at a friend’s office party. Now it is SAG-AFTRA’s time. This morning, I’ll walk the line with fellow guild members at Paramount Studios. Fate again is in my hands.

At 8:45am, I walk west down Melrose after getting off the 10 bus. I didn’t pay attention to where the rally point was, so I’m hoping it’ll be obvious. The picket line starts at 9am. One guy with a WGA sign passes me by and turns up Van Ness. He has a weary confidence I lack. This whole strike business is old news to him. The writers are on day seventy something. I’m on day one (technically day 5) of our strike. Besides him, the sidewalk along the yellow stucco wall of Paramount Studios is empty.

Will enough of our 160,000 members show up? Will we look weak? Will the studio heads be laughing their ass off at their Idaho mountain summer camp while they complain about how difficult the business model they created to cut costs and rake in money is, well, difficult. They want us to be Uber drivers. Nobody, not even Uber drivers, wants to be an Uber driver for a living.

Finally down closer to Gower, I see a blue canopy nestled into a nook in the wall. It has the energy of a construction sight for a half built office building. A workman like attitude prevails. “Hey, Tom.” “Hey, Bill.” “Hey, Sue.” “Hey, Bill.” Again the writers, but across the street another blue canopy with fifteen or so people around it buzzes like bees at a new rose bush. Those are my people.

I get a black T-shirt with SAG-AFTRA STRONG across the front in yellow. I didn’t expect swag. After putting it on, I cross the street and join the small early morning group of people picketing in front of the Melrose Gate. We walk in a tight oval blocking the two lane driveway in and out of that yellow stucco walled juggernaut, waving and raising our signs to the passing cars honking in solidarity with the cause. Then we stop. And wait for the traffic light to change. What the hell is this?

Remember those early days of the labor movement? The miners, the dock workers, the meat packers, the truck drivers, the railroad workers. Do you think those Pullman strikers obeyed the traffic signals when national troops came to Chicago to gun them down? Why do I want it to be convenient for studio people to get to work, to cross the picket line? Let them back up Melrose as they wait to turn into the place that refuses to consider us anything more than an expense on the balance sheet. My buried twenty-year-old self wants to tear down the corporate structure. It doesn’t want to play nice. It wants to rumble.

Picture a sunny LA morning, a street lined with palm trees. Picketers walk back and forth in the hot sun on one side of the street. A bus filled with strike-breaking acting students unloads on the other side. Both groups charge and meet on the hot asphalt. The Lexi and Teslas (plus that one silver Porsche I saw) are splattered with blood, tufts of yanked out hair rain down, teeth hit windshields like hail. That’s a picket line.

The light changes, and we restart our march. I come to the conclusion that I got this strike thing a little wonky in my head. To win this we’re going to need resilience, fortitude and the least romantic thing of all, patience.

Oh, shit.

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