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Hollywood Writers Strike

Posted by Michael Link on November 5, 2007 at 10:50 AM

As profits shift away from television and to the web, you can expect to see new conflicts about how to deal with it. A perfect example comes today, with a strike resulting from the break-down of negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producer.

In the long-term, this may symbolize the new challenges facing many of today's workers.

Not that the old struggles are over. As the AFL-CIO blog recently noted, each year about 5,700 workers are killed on the job. But today's strike still serves as a way for us to take another look at our assumptions when discussing the future of the labor movement, which working people depend on.

And that means we must keep questioning what issues matter to today's workers. Stephanie, who recently left the DNC, told me a while back about her days as a union organizer. When she would go from home to home trying to start a union, she said the key was always beginning by asking people about what their own concerns were -- because often they wouldn't be what we would expect as outsiders. Not many of us would have guessed this strike would have been born out of issues surrounding DVDs and web video, but in this way the same principle applies to organizing in this modern age.

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