Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/855478
14 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2017 GET TING ORGANIZED employed at Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema; each of the film labs had employed hundreds in analogous positions prior. Moreover, the DTDC employees shared stories of low wages, of having gone years without cost-of- living increases, and of substandard health and retirement benefits. Without these technicians' efforts, the studios would have literally nothing to show for all the enormous investments of resources and talent they put into the production of feature films. Yet the people performing this final stage of post-production work consistently complained of stagnant wages, and many spoke of difficulties paying rent and other basic expenses. "After years of little or no pay increases, a large majority of us were living paycheck to paycheck, some just scraping by," said Jackson Benjamin, a quality control operator at DTDC. It wasn't all about compensation for them, though. It was also about dignity. Many of them volunteered stories of a corporate culture that left them feeling disrespected, even disposable. "We collectively felt that the company was not taking us, or our requests, seriously," said Moshe-Aaron Lopez, a mastering technician. "This was never about just scoring a win; it was always about what was right. We organized because it was the right thing to do." For decades now, enemies of organized labor (and even some of labor's half-hearted, liberal "friends") have encouraged the public to regard unions as anachronisms, relics of an industrial past with little relevance for the country's post-industrial future. We must admit that there's real cause for pessimism about the prospects for organized labor. Sixty years of dramatic decline have reduced the rate of union membership to a fraction of what it once was. Technological developments and sea changes in the global economy have resulted in the elimination of many of the US manufacturing jobs that constituted the bedrock of the American labor movement in its heyday. As the demise of the film labs reminds us, such market forces have taken a heavy toll close to home. Yes, labor has taken and continues to take a beating. But many go further to claim that unions have lost their raison d'être. Collective bargaining, they say, is intrinsically ill-suited to the employment of the emergent new economy: service sector, high-tech, professional, creative and casual jobs that don't lend themselves to the framework of shop floor democracy. Perhaps unions made sense in the context of coal mines, steel mills or automobile factories, our detractors assert, but they've no more role to play in the information age than do typewriters or celluloid. Those cheerleading for unions' obsolescence characterize the trends that have sapped organized labor of its strength as forces of nature — like gravity or magnetism — immutable laws beyond the influence of individual or collective human action. They hold that the decline and eventual extinction of organized labor is inevitable, irreversible and intrinsic to the essential workings of the marketplace. To resist the trend, they would have us believe, is not merely to tilt against windmills, but to fight the invulnerable tide. In fact, it's neither natural nor even accidental that newly created jobs are non-union. It's a deliberate choice that employers make, and they put real effort and resources into ensuring that those positions remain non-union. The DTDC employees at that lunch decided that they'd do better through collective bargaining. Too many of them had already been rebuffed after having individually approached supervisors seeking raises or other improvements on the job. If they wanted to make changes in the workplace, they needed to forge a unified front and all approach management together. Folks left the meeting committed to reaching out to more co- workers, and bringing more on board with the idea. Before long, an overwhelming majority of DTDC's digital cinema technicians had pledged support for the effort. Management eventually got wind that employees were Employees of Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema during their half-day strike on February 2, 2017. Photo by Deverill Weekes CONTINUED ON PAGE 16