Universities are devoting fewer faculty positions to tenured chairs than in the past, and hiring more adjunct professors who have little chance of promotion. Law firms employ relatively fewer partners and more attorneys who are paid less. And Hollywood hires fewer writers to participate in the entire production process, relegating more of them to piecemeal work.
This trend is part of what my colleague Noam Scheiber calls “the fracture at work,” and it’s a central issue in the Hollywood writers’ strike now 11 weeks old. As one historian explained, there is increasingly a “tiered labor force of high-ranking workers and lesser workers.” The arrangement has its roots in the making, Noam writes in a story just published:
In the early 20th century, automobiles were produced largely by hand by small teams of highly skilled “off-road” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and systems: ignition, axles, transmission.
By 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading over 150 men across a vast assembly line. The workers usually performed a few simple tasks over and over again.
Specialization has great advantages. Businesses can complete tasks more efficiently and economically. But workers sometimes pay the price in the form of lower wages and less responsibility, especially if they are not unionized and lack bargaining power.
Piketty’s rule
The screenwriters, who are unionized, went on strike in an attempt to use their collective influence to avoid becoming Hollywood’s equivalent of adjunct professors. Until the past decade, writers not only wrote scripts, but also stayed on set during filming and participated in the process. They offered ideas on costumes and props and tweaked the script as the cast performed it.
Producer Michael Schur has likened the job to an apprenticeship. Schur was a writer for “The Office” and his experience helped him learn to create and run his own programs. He later did it with “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place.”
Today, only one or two writers stay with a show through production, while others produce scripts and are later removed from the process. “TV production is very compartmentalized now,” John Koblin, who covers the TV business for The Times, told me. “Writers write. The actors act. The directors lead.” (John went into more detail as a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”)
As a result, writers’ pay has stagnated even as streaming has led to a boom in the number of TV shows. Studio executives say they need to keep costs down in response to declining revenue from cable TV and movie theaters. And those challenges are real, but executives also appear to be using the shift to streaming as an excuse to turn the economics of their industry less favorable to many employees.
The trend is a microcosm of larger developments. Nationwide, the pay of the bottom 90 percent of wage earners has lagged far behind economic growth in recent decades (as you can see in these charts from the Times). Most Americans have not received their share of the growing bounty of the economy, while a relatively small share have experienced very large income gains.
That’s not shocking. As the economist Thomas Piketty has explained, inequality tends to rise in a capitalist economy, in part because the rich have more political power and economic influence than the middle class and poor. But history also shows that rising inequality is not inevitable.
There are forces that can push in the other direction. Increased educational attainment can give more people the skills to become specialists. Higher income taxes and large fortunes can redistribute wealth. Unions can give workers bargaining power to prevent wage stagnation.
Hollywood writers, and, since last week, actors too, are now trying to make a big push against inequality.
Here you can read Noam’s story, detailing accounts from the writers of “The Mentalist,” “Billions,” and other shows.
For more
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