Writer's, NAFTA, the "New Media"...Collective Bargaining is Essential

marjorie says...

This opinion piece by Harold Meyerson has finally explained for me in a succinct way what is at stake in the Writer's strike. I sort of knew all this, but now it's clear. The writers simply want a piece of a pie that they've helped bake.

And it looks to me like the show in fact can't go on without the writers.

Meyerson makes the point that as technology and productivity have increased in this country, the "corporate elites" have taken pretty much all of the profit. This is why this strike is important. On the one hand we have the diminishing of our manufacturing base and its unions along with it, which underpinned our huge (and disappearing) middle class for decades. While the Clintons and their other free-trader cronies (my word of the day) chortle and declare that our workers can be re-trained, they do little to nothing to strengthen the right to collective bargaining...which is apparently what is needed in order to get a slice of the pie. As ever. In this sense, this strike is very important, in so far as these writers represent the white-collar sector that the Clintons, et al, think all our former manufacturing workers can be retrained into.

I know, fall foliage is much better than this...and yes, my one-dimensional mind is showing. Nonetheless.