None of that is uncommon. It’s tragic and infuriating and grievous, however it’s also very, very regular. Utilizing wonderful print and loopholes and the tectonic grind of the authorized course of to cheat working folks is as American as a Norman Rockwell portray. And whereas superficially there won’t seem like a direct connection between my father’s losses and the W.G.A. strike, each spring immediately from this time-honored exploitation of the powerless by the highly effective.
Do I sound bitter? Good. I’m. Nonetheless, after 20 years.
Now you understand why I’m a union man myself and why I’m placing. Unions, imperfect although they may be, are the one entities which have ever offered an efficient counterbalance to the company rapaciousness that victimized my father. A strike is just not a battle in any respect, however somewhat a collective assertion of our dignity. It’s not about cash — besides insofar as, in America, cash equals respect. For me, it’s in regards to the look in my father’s eyes when he realized that not solely was his physique damaged however so have been all of the implicit guarantees that go together with being employee bee and paying your taxes and staying on the correct facet of the regulation.
My previous man finally bought a settlement and was capable of purchase slightly double-wide through which he would die, 5 years later, at 57, of lung most cancers that was absolutely a legacy of his army service and his working life as a firefighter. It was good, I suppose, that he was made entire and will purchase one other house for himself and my mom, however the fact is that, as with the center assault itself, the injury was performed. The house he’d purchased together with his labor, through which he had raised his youngsters, was gone. The humiliation and frustration of shedding it couldn’t be rolled again. That is one other approach they swindle you: making you’re feeling that, hey, you bought your cash, the correct factor has been performed, so why are you continue to so sad?
I’m wondering if the folks on the opposite facet of the negotiating desk will ever perceive that it’s not about cash and by no means has been. There’s an nearly genetic-level reminiscence of wrestle and privation amongst working folks, and we’re uninterested in having to battle like animals merely to be handled like human beings. We’re uninterested in coming into into agreements that, a technique or one other, all the time get damaged.
That’s what this strike is about, no less than for me. I don’t want a lower of Netflix executives’ inventory compensation. What I want — what I demand — is that they deal with me and the folks I like as if our lives and labor are each bit as important as theirs.
Ron Currie Jr. is the creator of the novel “The One-Eyed Man” and a author for movie and tv, most lately for the sequence “Extrapolations.”
