Brigid Bergen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergen from the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer today.

It's no secret that the United States has seen a major decline in union membership over the last 40 years. According to Pew Research, Union membership has gone down from about 20% of the workforce in 1983 to about 10% in 2022. Are the tides turning for unions? This year, three major strikes have ended with what appears to be big wins for workers. The Writer's Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA negotiated contracts with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The United Auto Workers have also secured improved deals with the nation's big three auto companies and gained major support for their strikes from President Biden, who joined workers on the picket lines becoming the first sitting president in US history to do so.

What do these union successes mean for the balance of power between workers and corporations in this country? Are we moving away from this 40-year period of corporate dominance over workers in the United States? Joining us now to answer these questions and discuss the recent wins of the UAW and SAG-AFTRA unions is Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, an author of several books including Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave, and We are the Union: How Worker to Worker Organizing Can Transform America, coming out early next year. Eric, welcome back to WNYC.

Eric Blanc: Thanks for having me on again.

Brigid Bergen: Let's start off by setting this scene here. US labor unions have broadly been in decline since the 1980s. How would you say this translates to the lived experiences of workers across the country?

Eric Blanc: For the last 40 years, as you mentioned, we've basically been living in a one-sided class war, corporate America against working people. What that means is stagnant wages, it means having very little say at work. It means the level of overall insecurity in which you don't know if you're going to have your job next year, even next month. That is the product of employers, very consciously breaking unions and very consciously breaking labor law with very few repercussions from politicians. Hopefully, we're starting to see that change.

Brigid Bergen: Listeners, we are going to dig into the SAG-AFTRA contract and what the negotiations produce, but we are inviting SAG-AFTRA members as well as any UAW members listening in and around the country to weigh in on your new contracts and the end of your strikes. Are you satisfied with the results from your picketing and your union's negotiations? What's the biggest gain for you in terms of working conditions that came out of the strike?

Actors, we'll also accept your shameless self-promotions. Was there something you were working on that you weren't able to promote due to the strike? You can do so now. Give us a call, at 212-433 WNYC, that's 212-433-9692. You can also text us or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Eric, let's talk about that SAG-AFTRA negotiation and the contract that came out of it. It's, of course, the union that represents actors. They had a 118-day strike, the longest in the union's history. What does the contract look like? What did they actually win from your perspective?

Eric Blanc: Well, that's a really good question, and it's actually a little bit of a hard question to answer because the details for the contract are haven't actually been made fully public yet. All we have for the moment is what the union leadership has released, and it sounds really good. I think we should withhold judgment until workers, I believe today, are seeing the details have their say. I'd love to hear what callers have to say.

The big line item is over $1 billion in gains for workers, and that sounds like a very impressive victory that wouldn't have happened without such a long and cohesive strike. Then also major gains on one of the major sticking points by all accounts, actually one of the major reasons the strike dragged on so long, which is around artificial intelligence, AI consent, and compensation. According to the union leadership, there were big gains won on AI as well. It sounds like a victory. It's going to be up to workers to look at the details and vote it up or down.

Brigid Bergen: As our calls are coming in, unions come in different shapes and sizes. People might not immediately see the common ground between actors and auto workers. Can you talk about some of the underlying fundamentals about these two unions what they were fighting for and how that people might understand what they have in common?

Eric Blanc: Sure. It's just worth saying that from the start that the auto workers who also recently ended their strike, as you mentioned earlier, won huge gains. We're talking just like historic breakthroughs, 25% wage increases for everybody, up to 150% wage increases for some of the lower-paid workers. Big gains around the transition to electric battery production.

The reason I mention that battery production is that one of the commonalities between auto workers, actors is a very real understanding that major technological shifts are going to put a lot of workers' lives into jeopardy unless unions and working people have a say over these processes. Whether that is the transition to a green economy or whether that's the introduction of AI and more technologies and streaming and everything that comes with that in Hollywood, workers understand that CEOs are going to continue just using these processes to enrich themselves unless workers push back.

That was a major sticking point in both strikes, and it's a major commonality of workers not having control at work and wanting have a real say over how technological processes are being implemented. Then there's just broader commonalities really for any working-class person, which is, if you have to sell your labor to survive, the bosses are making a profit off of you. The profit comes from the difference between the value of what you produce and what you're getting paid, and the bosses take the rest. There's a level of exploitation, I think, inherent in any way, labor job. Workers understand that the way they push back then is by coming together against billionaires, whether it's in something like Hollywood or higher ed or in auto work.

Brigid Bergen: If you're just joining us, my guest is Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, and we're talking about the power of unions, and we're looking at the linkages between unions from the auto workers to actors in SAG-AFTRA. We've got a call out to those actors who just recently settled their contract. Let's go to Ethan in Brooklyn. Ethan, welcome to WNYC.

Ethan: Hey, thank you so much for taking my call. I love you guys. I just want to say I was on the picket line. I'm a member of SAG-AFTRA. I was on the picket line at 19th Street where Netflix and Warner are for the last month of the strike. I was away before that, but it was just incredibly uplifting and almost, it was celebratory in a certain way. There's a playfulness and an efficacy of getting a bunch of artists together to shout at the corporations that are behaving in egregiously, exploitative ways, and it works. That's the amazing thing.

In spite of everything you hear, and in spite of the negativity directed towards this fantasy of a wealthy actor who's just asking for too much, that's not what was going on on that picket line were teamsters. There were background actors. There were intimacy coordinators. There were stunt performers. There were movie stars. I can't tell you how many stars. I would see this beautiful thing, which is all these faces of character actors walking around the picket line every day. I'd say, I know him, I know her, I know him. I don't know their names, but I've seen them in 50 things.

One of them, I just want to do a shout out. I was in a production, I was in a show which was on the short-lived Quibi, it was called The Expecting. Michael Gaston is the actor. He was one of the people I saw there. If you go to his Instagram, his subtitle on his Instagram is That Guy Who Was in That Thing, which was just so funny and beautiful because that's the experience of being a character actor.

Last thing I want to say is starting on night one of the strikes on Bastille Day, I started doing something called the No Promo Show on Instagram Live, the No Promo Show because we weren't allowed to promote. The show is continuing every night at 9:00 PM East on Instagram Live. My Instagram is [unintelligible 00:09:21] and now it's The Promo Show because now we're allowed to promote. We can all just get our ya yas out and talk about all the things we shot that we couldn't talk about.

Brigid Bergen: Phil, thank you so much for your call, for your promo, for The

Promo Show. Let's go to Ethan in Brooklyn. Oh, I'm sorry, Ethan, thanks so much for your call and for your promo. Let's go to Phil in Williamsburg

Phil: Hey. Hi guys, I know Ethan, and I was on those picket lines with him for a few days. I just want to say, overall, I'm a background actor in Stand-in on television shows and movies. The main thing was we really had nothing left to lose. I grew up in a household where my dad was a United Auto worker, and during the strike, I asked him about how he felt about strikes. He said, I remember when I was about nine, the auto workers went on strike in the early seventies.

He said, "Phil, we didn't go on strike. I wouldn't even have a pension. I wouldn't even have the healthcare I have now." That's the thing is you've got to put your foot down.

The thing that I've noticed about background particularly is, on a set, we're basically the country cousins barely treated just sub-standardly. They'll nick a nickle and dime us to the very end. It's crazy. They'll try to get out of lunch penalties, or giving us bumps or whatever it is for a small pay or whatever it is, but they have no problem spending $900 for a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes for some starter wear that you might only see the tip of in the edit. I feel that I'm very happy to see that SAG-AFTRA really fought very hard. I feel that most of the actors that I ran into, we were willing to take it all the way down to the mat.

The other thing I just want to finish saying is that one of the things I think that's very important for the people to realize is that, hey, listen, yes, these streamers have the money. They pay for the productions, they pay people's salary, they distribute this stuff, but at the end of the day, it's like a restaurant with a person who has a lot of money. If you don't have a good chef and good food, no one's coming to the restaurant, no one's going to watch the shows, and we're the flavor.

Brigid Bergen: Phil, thank you so much for your call. Ethan, before that, thank you for your call and for your Instagram show. Eric, any reactions to our two SAG-AFTRA callers there?

Eric Blanc: Yes. I think it's beautiful always hearing from workers about what the experience of being on a picket line is like. It's one of the things that maybe gets lost if you haven't experienced a strike directly. It can sound like it's all about dollars and cents, but really it's just as much about solidarity. It's just as much about ceiling power because you go through life normally feeling very little power over politics, over your job, and for these brief very beautiful moments, you can assert a collective pride. You can assert respect for yourselves and for others and come together. I just think it's a really very human and very beautiful thing. I can't ever get enough of hearing workers talk about what it's like to go outside.

Brigid Bergen: Well, I want to bring in one more caller who wants to remind us of another strike. Let's go to Chris on the Upper Westside. Chris, thanks so much for holding and calling WNYC this morning.

Chris: Yes, hi. My wife was a nurse for many years and very active with the nurses. Then she wound up in the hospital last December when we were in Morningside when the strike hit. It was just amazing. We spoke to a lot of the nurses on the floor. We're very supportive, but when it came down to it, it was a totally insane situation because she was in Morningside.

One morning, they called me at 4:00 in the morning. They're going tro truck everybody over to the Eastside to avoid -- because closed down the floor. When I got there, all of Madison Avenue was blocked with demonstrating workers. We had to go in through another entrance, and they had nurses inside, I wouldn't call them scabs, but they were called traveling nurses. They were--

Brigid Bergen: Chris, thank you so much for your call. I'm sorry to cut you off, but we are running short on time. The nurses' strike is one of the things Chris wanted us to remember as we're talking about both the SAG-AFTRA contracts and the UAW contracts, a lot of union activity we've seen. Just really briefly, Eric, while we've seen some of these major wins for organized labor this year, as I talked about at the very beginning, we're seeing that union membership is declining. Do you think that trend could be changing, just very briefly?

Eric Blanc: If we have more unions do what the UAW has done, which is workers taking back their union, electing militant leaderships, organizing and fighting, we're going to see that. Most unions are not like the UAW. Currently, most unions aren't fighting back still. We're seeing these big wins despite a relative business as usual amongst labor leaders. Until that changes, we're not going to be able to turn around labor density. I hope that starts to change. It's going to be up to workers to make that happen.

Brigid Bergen: We're going to have to leave it there for today. My guest has been Eric Blanc, assistant professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University. This is the Brian Lehrer Show in WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergen filling in for Brian. Tune in again tomorrow.

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