Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a lot of things: a landmark oral history, a monument to conversation, a snapshot of labor across classes and collars at a particular unsettled moment in American history. It’s also a testament to how little things change.
Working captures the experiences of more than 100 working people from seemingly all fields: farming and manufacturing, sports and the arts, the trades and the vocations, waitresses and bureaucrats, organizers and meter readers. And on and on. It’s a staggering slice of American culture, and a unique prism through which to view it.
When Terkel stepped back to see what these Americans revealed about work in America — indeed, about America — he found some commonalities. People wanted their work to mean something more than a paycheck, and they wanted to mean something through their work. “In all instances, there is felt more than a slight ache,” Terkel writes in his introduction. “In all instances, there dangles the impertinent question: Ought not there be an increment, earned though not yet received, from one’s daily work — an acknowledgement of man’s being?”
A lot of his opening statement will sound — and feel — familiar to anyone who works for a living, especially if that means sacrificing aspirations and compromising on principles to ensure you have health insurance or, more importantly, a roof over your head. But as Working makes plain, and our lived experience verifies, working for survival increasingly means ever deeper sacrifices, compromises, and debasement just to prove — over the ever-expanding chasm of wealth and opportunity that exists between the rank and file and management — that you’re worthy of the job. (The weaponization of “work ethic” also comes in for harsh treatment from Terkel and his people.)
But there’s one piece of Terkel’s introduction that screams off the page.
“Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or see,” Terkel writes. “It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.”
This specter is the axis upon which the conversation around artificial intelligence turns — the axis which Silicon Valley and corporate America barons, ultimate peddlers of needless things, don’t want people to dwell on. (Just go back to creating weird images and text with DALL-E and ChatGPT. It will help you become a “prompt engineer” when you’re downsized out of a career.) And it’s central to the twin strikes roiling — and, hopefully, upending forever — Hollywood.
Members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike on May 2. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) joined them on July 14. It was the first time both unions struck at the same time since 1960. (In one of history’s great ironies, Ronald Reagan was SAG president at the time.) A central issue then was residuals — what creatives get paid after the initial run of a film or TV episode. Television gave movies an afterlife that didn’t previously exist, which meant executives cashing in endlessly on work they only had to paid for once. That strike lasted 148 days and, in part, created a residuals system that allowed actors — not superstar celebrities, but working stiff who are bit players or background fillers — to have a career.
Cut to 63 years later, and residuals are still an issue thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Max (née HBO Max) refusing to share data with anyone involved with a film or show it creates. Why? Because, they claim, it will harm its primary intellectual property: black-box algorithms that serve up content with increasing specificity to its subscribers. They pay handsomely up front, but after that comes barely a trickle of residual checks. And anyone who thinks they’re owed something for propping up this new, and frankly unsustainable, business model, executives say, are just immature babies.
“There’s a level of expectation that they have is just not realistic,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said at the outset of the SAG strike. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.” Try cutting into his $15 million salary, which he got in 2022, and see how fast that tune changes.
Where things get truly dire is with the introduction of AI. At the beginning of the SAG strike, chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland revealed a dystopic sticking point in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP): “They proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.” For its part, the AMPTP said sure they’d scan people’s faces but, trust them, they’ll only use the scans for that specific production.
And there emerges Terkel’s specter.
“Why should I care about what a rich actor gets paid?” It’s the question looming over these strikes. But putting aside that this is less about whether some celebrity gets paid more and all about whether a working actor gets paid anything, it’s also about whether someone will be able to simply work.
When we hear about AI, things tend to fall back to a debate over whether it will take our jobs. I confess to being optimistic in the long term — probably naively, probably wrongly. But what the SAG/WGA strikes confirm are realities labor has always struggled against. Any chance management has to undercut workers — whether it’s using AI to write a script or casting digital actors or automating an assembly line — it’ll take it. And any chance management has to completely replace human beings with technology, it’ll take that, too.
It doesn’t even have to be whiz-bang fancy like AI. In Barbara Kopple’s masterful 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, about a brutal coal miners strike in rural Kentucky, an old timer recalls the mine operators demanding he take care with one of the mules on the site. If it dies, he remembers the boss saying, “we have to buy another mule. We can always hire another man.” Later in the film, one-time United Mine Workers of America president John L. Lewis rails against management “who desires to make money from your misery.”
And so we come to the point, as Terkel was fond of saying. Automation, AI, robots — whatever technology greets us will always be seized upon to grease the wheels of the “planned obsolescence of people.” That could be coal mines or steel mills or auto plants or doctors’ offices or white-collar cubicle farms. (You hear lots of stories in this mode growing up in a union steelworker household.) Hollywood is an unexpected venue for the first skirmish in this fight. But centered as it is on a very showy bit of innovation, why not work it out on the streets of the world’s culture factory?
Those who control what we see and where we see it will try convincing us that these are inane whiny tantrums of the “elite.” Don’t buy it. Don’t believe it. This fight is happening around movies and TV today, but it’s headed for everyone else soon. “An assembly line is a line is a line,” as Terkel writes. And it’s a fight worth having — not only for the inhumane, indefensible gulf between what management takes and what the rank-and-file makes but because the future of work is at stake: for us, our children, their children, and our nation.
After all, if media moguls are willing to unhesitatingly replace actors with AI-generated avatars, what chance do any of us stand when the tech industry shows up at our boss’ office with promises of eliminating pesky human inefficiencies?
“When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run, we have a problem,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said in announcing the strike. “At some point the jig is up. You cannot keep being dwindled and marginalized and disrespected and dishonored. We are labor, and we stand tall. And we demand respect. And to be honored for our contribution. You share the wealth because you cannot exist without us.”
The WGA/SAG strikes are about the struggle for a fair wage and for basic respect — for an acknowledgement of one’s being. And it isn’t just the demand of Hollywood writers and actors. It’s the demand of everyone — blue collar, white collar, no collar — who wonders why they’re working harder and longer than ever yet rubbing pennies together simply to exist while executives hoard all the gains and who will junk you without thought if it meant a bigger cut for them.
We all have a stake in the outcome of what’s happening in Hollywood. Our planned obsolescence is imminent if those in power have anything to say about it. They’re imagining — and building — a world where they can exist without us.
But, as Terkel wrote, “The drones are no longer invisible nor mute. Nor are they exclusively of one class.” Or, indeed, one industry. The jig is up.
In solidarity.
