Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1488780
shrift in high school history textbooks, com- pared to the presidents and generals about whom we were taught, but they're remem- bered in the labor movement as titans who marshalled the power of working people in epic fights against exploitation. As instrumental as any leader's vision, direction, or charisma might prove, though, the stories of movements cannot be fully told as the stories of individual, powerful figures. The grand gestures of particular high-profile personae might serve as useful focal points for telling the history of a move- ment in shorthand, but the actual work of a movement is carried out by a multitude of hands performing smaller, sometimes even invisible acts. Struggles for justice are always, necessarily propelled from the bottom up, not from the top down. Our f ixation on the great and pow- erful isn't a concern just for how we tell our history, though — it also affects how we can understand and shape our present and future. Take our union. Last year, some journal- ists wrote of our contract fight over the Basic Agreement in terms of the dynamics be- tween the high-profile leaders on each side. "Do-Or-Die IATSE Contract Talks Expected to Continue Friday; [AMPTP President] Carol Lombardini & [IATSE President] Matt Loeb Have Long History of Finding the Deal," declared one unwieldy headline in Deadline. But such a characterization reduces the complexity of the situation to a drama playing out between just two actors, Loeb and Lombardini, effectively sidelining the more than 50,000 IATSE members who had voted to authorize a strike (never mind an array of studio executives and stakeholders to whom Lombardini was accountable). In a labor movement powered by collective values and collective action, we are done a disservice by narratives fram- ing our story as one of powerful individuals acting in isolation. Because, ultimately, whatever we may collectively achieve as a union isn't really up to Matt Loeb — or, for that matter, to Cathy Repola, or even to our elected board of di- rectors, the body that sets official Local 700 policy. It's up to the 9,000-plus members of the Editors Guild and up to the 160,000-plus members of the IATSE. In the fights ahead of us, each member will need to play an active role; we can't prevail with members sitting passively in the audience. In our most recent Guild elections, you might have noticed more names on the bal- lot than you're used to. We saw a significant uptick in the number of members running for seats on the board. That's a good thing. A healthy union is one in which people take an interest in governance, run for office, and engage fully in the democratic process. But our Guild's system of proportional representation by classification means that the ratio of members to elected board members is close to 200-to-1. That ratio works fine for a legislative body charged with deliberating and deciding organiza- tional policy, but it's not a large enough group to ensure that every rank-and-file member has a direct and personal connec- tion to Guild leadership. It's for this reason that the Guild seeks to develop an intermediate tier of leaders: Eugene Debs leaving the White House the day after being released from prison in 1921. P H OT O : W I K I P E D I A Struggles for justice are always bottom up, not top down. 14 C I N E M O N T A G E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D