I wonder what the WGA settlement would look like if Hollywood was organized Industrially rather than by craft. For those of you not familiar with Terrence Powderly, Eugene V. Debs, or John L. Lewis, what i am talking about is if, instead of being split between and among above the line guilds and the below the line mix of craft and industrial unions - IATSE, IBT, etc etc - Actually i guess those are all (nominally, at least,) craft unions - Movie and TV industry workers were all part of the same union or federation of unions coordinating their actions with each other. I'm no expert on the film and TV industries and i'm not particularly knowledgeable about the labor history of said industry. But so many commentators have remarked that so much of this strike's outcome was determined by and against the settlement that the DGA reached with the AMPTP a few weeks prior to the end of the strike.

Revisionist labor history of the 70s and 80s greatly complicated the conventional read on craft unionism as exclusionary and limiting. It allowed and allows for particular kinds of labor arrangements, particular cultures of work, particular kinds of subjectivity. Dorothy Sue Cobble's Dishing It Out (1990) on waitresses in what we now call Unite-HERE is particularly instructive, but think about Bruce Nelson's argument that segregated locals in the fin de siecle South sometimes made it possible for black workers ot have more power over their labor than in 'progressive,' multiravcial, integrated locals elsewhere and later.

Fine. Point taken. But, and I'm not sure Cobble's book sufficiently deals with this, craft unionism IS limiting, and it IS exclusionary. Exclusionary in the sense i pointed to last november - why don't those BTL service workers get to negotiate for residuals too? - and limiting, certainly, in the sense that more radical and strategic forms of solidarity and direct action become untenable, even if, as in this case, the threat of what the IWW used to call "union scabbing" - when one union remains at work while another strikes - was avoided. Indeed, one of the most intriguing demands of the strikers, to extend jurisdiction to reality TV 'story editors' and animation writers, was dropped in exchange for what many feel was not enough of an inroad into "New Media" ownership rights. What if the DGA, SAG, and WGA/W/E weren't just de facto striking together -- what if they were negotiating together? And what if the other union were at the table with them?