On Monday, the roughly 60,000 workers who build sets, apply makeup, hold cameras, and hole up in editing rooms to make America’s movies, TV shows, and streaming videos voted to authorize a strike against the production studios. Fully 90 percent of those 60,000 workers actually sent in their ballots, and fully 99 percent of that 90 percent voted to authorize the strike. For the first time since 1945, studios are facing a shutdown from their indispensable, if invisible-to-the-public, workforce.
Those 60,000 workers are members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, aka IATSE. In 1945, however, IATSE—then controlled by the Chicago Mafia—wasn’t the union that walked off the job. Indeed, it was a sometimes violent opponent to the non-mobbed-up and small-d democratic Conference of Studio Unions, which actually represented more behind-the-camera workers, and was the group of unions that struck. IATSE, not surprisingly, was the studio moguls’ favorite. Indeed, the studio heads paid off IATSE leaders in return for those leaders’ guarantee that no strikes or sizable raises for their members would crimp the studios’ bottom lines.
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