alt Hacker NewsAs much as I support unions and labour rights, the last SAG-AFTRA strike mostly just helped the big studios realize they could do more with less.
Hollywood is a factory town at the end of the day, and we all know what happened to most factory towns in America. This one is just getting there a few decades after the others.
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This is definitely another case where a union could either understand where the bigger economic forces are headed (in this case globalization, IP licensing, residuals that no longer make sense, attention economy fracturing the marketplace etc) and adapt to how people will consume content in the future, or double down on an economic model that is one generation behind.
In theory the union is the only org capable of standing up to the streamers' buying power, but it has to make sense within a business model where consumers pay one monthly fee for content. I'm not even sure what that really looks like in the end.
Maybe it's also that the FTC allowed all this monopolization to happen, and turns out that having three media companies in the US is bad.
Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.