The season is two-thirds over, but these months of 2023 continue to be California’s Hot Labor Summer, with unions even adopting the phrase as the handle for a website keeping track of just who is striking this June, July, August and presumably September: everybody.
Well, not every. But many.
“It’s official: Another Hot Labor Summer is here. Across the country, temperatures are HIGH and workers are fighting like HELL for better pay, conditions, and a voice on the job,” its introduction reads.
There’s UNITE HERE Local 11, representing hotel and hospitality workers in Los Angeles and Orange County, which saw over 100 hotel hospitality contracts expire on June 30. Collectively, these contracts cover over 15,000 workers.
There’s the 11.550 members of the Writers Guild of America, TV and film writers who say that entertainment giants are getting rich while they face unfair compensation during the ongoing transition from broadcast and theatrical releases to streaming, compared to the way the old residual system used to work.
There’s the actors’ SAG-AFTRA union, which says the studios also refused to make them a fair deal on television, theatrical and streaming work, with lots of talent on the picket lines of Hollywood and New York striking for a better contract.
It’s obviously — and even sometimes properly — easy enough for workers to strike in our state.
This editorial board doesn’t care for the costly-to-society situations created when public worker unions such as teachers go on strike, holding children’s education hostage in the bargain, along with parents’ ability to go to work themselves.
But, by and large, American workers have the right to strike.
There are economic costs to both sides when workers walk off the job. Strikers don’t get paid, since they are not on the job. Management and owners see hits to productivity and to profit, making it hard to do their own jobs. While making it tough on all concerned, the silver lining to the economic pain is the incentive it gives to both sides to compromise.
Senate Bill 799, a poorly thought-out piece of proposed legislation authored by state Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada Flintridge, would provide unemployment insurance payouts to striking workers who are off the job and on the picket lines for more than two weeks.
In so doing, it would remove workers’ economic incentive to find a compromise. And who would pay for these new benefits, the end result of which would surely be to lengthen work stoppages? Employers would, through their contributions to unemployment insurance. So they’d get it coming, and going.
“There is tremendous concern within our workforce across California. Currently, we see writers, hotel workers, nurses, city and county workers all striking and it is deeply concerning,” Portantino says about his bill. “SB 799 will help workers put food on their table when they need it most, in the middle of a labor negotiation.”
To be just a little bit facetious, in order to level the playing field, how about making owners and managers whole in the bargain, artificially upping their coffers with “unemployment” monies as well, even if the unemployment is by workers’ temporary choice?
It’s much easier, on a humanitarian level, to rationalize the passage and signing last year of California’s AB 2530, which provides subsidized health coverage to striking workers whose employers terminated health benefits. For striking workers facing a personal or family health emergency, such coverage could be argued for as a literal lifeline.
But unemployment insurance was created to tide over workers who suddenly find themselves out of a job for reasons beyond their control. The decision to hit the picket lines rather than show up at the classroom, factory floor or office is a voluntary one, an economic calculation aimed at achieving a pay-off in the end. In a rational world, California employers simply can’t be asked to subsidize and lengthen worker actions against themselves.
—The Editorial Board, Southern California News Group
