The Humble Nailbanger

I had a thought today about the proposed bailout of the US auto makers.  Now, I’ve got a position which I won’t get to in this space.  But this right-wing meme about how it’s the unions that are responsible for this problem?  It reminds me a lot of hearing during the strike about how the failure rate of stinkers on Broadway are somehow the fault of labor costs for stagehands.

Neither are grounded in reality.

I don’t get out much. The fact that the business keeps me busy or recovering mostly around the clock means that when I do get a day off, I don’t feel like doing much of anything. Add to that my natural semi-agoraphobic tendencies (I’m not at all agoraphobic, but if you knew all the details, it wouldn’t surprise you), and it might be months between nights when I go out.

So when I do get out, I’m already at a disadvantage. I’m a bit socially stunted, and all I really do is work or read novels and politics. Who wants to hang out with a guy whose only viable conversational topics are work and politics? Or, now, the latest doings in the world of mass entertainment, along with some obscure novelists??? What I need to do is get religion, and then I’ll officially be impossible to socialize with.

Just before Christmas, I got to get out to a party thrown by friends of the Mrs. I was really quiet and very, if not totally, over-aware of how little I felt like I had to talk about. Then a friend of hers (who I rather like, so I forgive him) asked me: “So, you still working at….?”

How the hell do I answer that?

Some of you know that this isn’t a regular business, either because you visit here or you have some personal experience. For those of you who don’t know, well….being a stagehand isn’t a regular business.

I’ve been working for one company for much of the last few months of my time…actually, one network. But just because I’ve been bouncing around one network for a while doesn’t mean I work for them in the traditional sense…I don’t “work for” them the same way that most people “work for” a company. I may know most of the crew, I may know my way around the studio. In fact, I’m in that situation to the point where I could pretty easily blend in in any number of studios…I know my way around, I know the nooks and crannies.

But I don’t work for them. I just work there, and I am asked back pretty regularly.

I don’t have a job with any network, or any theater. I don’t have a job, per se. I’m not really a freelancer, either. I mainly just bounce around, and go where the money is. The question is, how do I explain this in one sentence, so it fits within the bounds of party conversation?

And I guess another question: what is it that one might call being a stagehand, anyway? It’s a job, but not in the traditional sense: I don’t work for anyone, I don’t have a regular spot at which to show up (generally….we go in spurts, and those of us who don’t have regular positions might get 6 months here, 3 months there, etcetc). I’m not a consultant. Is this a lifestyle? A career? Or are we just mercenaries? Go where the money is, leave when it runs out?

More importantly, I know that I love doing what I’m doing, stressful as it may be at times.  And I love that I can take pride in my work, as can all my fellow stagehands.  It’s pretty cool, all in all.

I recently worked a loadin that was a pretty big deal, if the population of men with ties standing around having worthless, conflicting opinions can be used as a measure. Actually, that’s not really fair. I know for a fact it was a huge deal. The fact that there was an endless parade of management in addition to the usual producers, directors, designers, advertising people and everyone else just made it more ridiculous. I could never truly comprehend how many assholes in suits one could actually sandwich into each square foot of a studio before, I think because I needed to actually see it…mere visualization wouldn’t suffice. Turns out it’s a whole hell of a lot, and some of them are actually so soulless and vapid that they can occupy the same space at the same time. Einstein was wrong. Management defies physics.

The best (read: worst) part of this scenario is that they all have the power to tell you to change something. This is made further infuriating by the fact that none of them agree, none of them consult on what they want, and all of them can be overruled by someone who thinks that their opinion trumps all, and isn’t afraid to tell you to make huge changes to anything.

A loadin is a crazy thing. There are a huge number of plans…the basic plan for the studio and where all the scenery will land, to within an inch or less. These may or may not be relevant depending on whether the designer knows how to use the measuring tape usually stuck to his belt. (This is a purely random factor, if within the definition of random you include “two chances: slim and none”). Then there’s lighting plans, plans for monitors, audio gear, wireless setups, computers to run projectors, the network plans for the computers…it’s endless. Literally endless.

But all of that is beneath a man in a suit. He will walk in the room, cast his sharp management eye about the studio and everything else be damned: he wants it moved, and he wants it to be moved now. No matter that cables have been run, or we’re hampered by inconvenient elements of the building we’re all standing in…..why isn’t it moved yet??!

“Why isn’t it moved,” he’ll ask, and then repeat himself to you like you’re a moron. This is to show you that he has all the power in this particular conversation, and to infuriate you as much as possible. It’s a good thing, and he knows it…for he, as a manager has been trained to impart fury to the working man, as it allows him to channel this fury and thus accomplish bigger tasks with fewer people. It’s all about the bottom line, after all.

“I just wanted it moved. I asked for it to be moved. They said it would be moved. ‘It’ll get moved,’ they said. ‘It’s no problem to move it sir,’ they told me. ‘We’ll move it right away,’ they said. But it’s still not moved. Is this such a difficult thing to move?”

Never mind that the piece is 800-900 pounds, top-heavy, cables have been run through it that must be disconnected and laid aside (causing some other tie to chime in “why was that unplugged????”), other still more massive pieces are in the way, and that the guys must be pulled off a bunch of other “absolutely imperative” jobs assigned by other men in suits. Oh, and it must be slid across a floor that we have been sternly warned not to mar in any way, because it was just painted.

And never mind that this is the like 4th assistant to some guy who is himself the man behind the man behind the man behind the man who actually met the man that they are all behind once. And that was just in passing, and the guy insulted him in front of his wife.

Inevitably, we move the piece, reconnect everything, and his boss walks in, looks at what we just changed, and says to the head carpenter “Who told you to move that? It’s all wrong. Move it back,” leaving the original guy (the prime mover?) looking sheepishly off into space, whistling quietly to himself.

There was another set of pieces they couldn’t stop shuffling about as well. They were not made to be moved as much as they were, and the base pretty much immediately started to fall off, scratching the floor and leaving two guys holding it in the air, grunting under a couple hundred pounds (full disclosure: I was one of those guys) as a quick solution was improvised.

As I was standing there shredding my fingers, I got to thinking back to the strike, when stagehands on Broadway were accused of “featherbedding,” basically padding out the crew so there would be less work to go around, and to give more guys room to “suck off the company teat.” Yet there I was, looking around at a room full of men in suits standing around for hours just watching us work and forming opinions. God save me from men in suits with opinions. They are forever wrong, and will make you do things just out of spite. They will also stand around doing their level best to radiate importance, yet all over the building and throughout the organization, these men’s desks were empty, their work presumably not being done.

How does the company continue to operate and grow without the stern hand of management that this particular crowd of dandies must surely provide? And how might we expect the organization to bloom in their absence, when they are assembled here, as a crowd, nervously shifting around trying to justify their existence(s)? More importantly, isn’t that a strategic error? What if something should happen, and the whole gang of them crowded together was somehow wiped out? What would become of our organization then?

Oh, those were dark and evil days there, my friends. Too much management in such a confined area having thoughts about things is never good.

Anyway, then they cut the crew. “There are too many guys standing around here, what the hell are all these guys doing?” Never mind most of them were footing ladders…safety’s besides the point when the bottom line is in play. So, they cut the crew in half. I made the cut, so I got to see what went on the next day:

“I need that piece moved.” Yes, the same piece, again.

“We can’t move it. It’s too heavy.”

“What do you mean it’s too heavy? I want it moved.”

“You cut my crew down yesterday. We don’t have enough men to move it.”

“What do you mean not enough men. There’s guys all over the place around here. I want it moved.”

“Look. There are three of us here. That piece weighs 1000 pounds. Three men cannot move it the way you want it moved. The forces of nature dictate it. I’m sorry. I’d like to move it for you, but it simply can’t be done with three of us.”

A blank stare. The piece must be moved, for this, surely, is the whole show. “OK, fine. Bring in the rest of the guys.”

Guys who have all, pretty much, found other work. The men who come in instead are all tired because they worked the night before, or have no idea what’s going on, etc. This is another phenomenon with stagehands….we go where the money is.  Call us off a call?  Thank you very much, we’ll go find other work, hopefully within an hour.

Anyway, the piece got moved.

And you know what? After all that, we still got in trouble for scratching the floor.

I keep meaning to post this: A Short Analysis of the Broadway Strike.  It’s by Jacob Coakley, in Stage Directions magazine…funny, I felt when I first saw it that it was among the fairest pieces I’ve seen about the strike and the issues at hand.  Apparently the commenters felt different….

A few questions, and maybe they’ve already been answered and I was out of the loop:

What happened to the $20 million strike fund the League had amassed by taking a small chip out of every Broadway ticket sold?  Has it been used up?  What on?  If not, what happens to the difference?

Is the League still going to be taking a small chip out of every Broadway ticket for the possibility of a strike by Actors Equity?  Or are they willing to lower the price of the tickets?

Just askin. I’m pretty sure I already know where it all went…yachts, fast cars, the Hamptons…..

Ah, the internet.  Where you’re only as good as your host.  My host has seen to it that I haven’t been able to post at all, check email more than once a day or so.  It’s great, I love it.  Sorry about that.  Good thing I’m not trying to make a living on this site….

So yes, the strike is over.  And now we enter into the always awkward phase, where now you’ve been subjected to almost three weeks of how much you don’t work, and how badly you’re overpaid for the privelege of not working in their particular theater, and how x-number of you are only there because the union says you have to be, so often and venomously spewing out of the mouths of people who then whirl around and expect you to go work around the clock to get their shows back up and running.

*Awkward*

I’m glad everyone can get back to work now, and return to making a living.  We all love what we do, and I know it was bothering a lot of people that they couldn’t do it.

I’ve written before, earlier on, that this strike has been very educational for me.  I’m very pessimistic about America as “a political experiment,” or however goes the usual phrase.  Having gotten pretty radical in my younger days, I generally call it along pretty predictable lines, and in most cases rich vs. poor.  That was my feeling here, too: “Same old story, rich vs poor.”

Now, admittedly, stagehands are not poor.  But we are also not without skill, and we provide a service that makes boatloads of cash for the people we work for.  And our base rate of pay is not far above the median income…most of what we make is overtime, working long hours.

So in this case, call it “rich vs. working people.”  Call it millionaires taking money from people who have to work more than 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week to send their kids to college, own homes.   Call it millionaires charging outrageous ticket prices, blaming their labor costs, and pocketing profits so large most of us down here among the “regular people” can’t even conceive of them.  And that’s every week.

What has failed about the American experiment?  Something pretty large, when the people from whom the rich take as much as they can absolutely get away with at every opportunity actually fight so they can take more.  I’ve actually been losing sleep over this very thing.  Of course, I’m treated to the usual shit about unions by most everyone I know, I went into the business and back into union life knowing full well what I was in for, so there’s a base level of consciousness about these matters I walk with most of the time.
Or maybe that was the great American experiment….to take a country founded by the rich, set it up so they can get richer, and ensure that your best source of income, the lower classes, actually side with you to keep you that way.  In that case, bravo.  It’s working.

Or is it that the anger I felt directed at us was from people who felt slighted, and that this was actually just “little people” fighting for scraps, in these case tickets to the shows?  And that they just chose to couch it in anti-union rhetoric and talking points handed out by the League and published by most major media?
And no, I’m not a communist, not in the least.  I’m not exactly a capitalist, either, though, and it’s situations like this one right here that keep me that way.

I’m very hesitant, at this juncture, to criticize the union in any way. I feel very well represented and definitely don’t want to cock up anything, anywhere, for anyone. But I’d like to get out there, in whatever limited arena I have here, and mention that I’ve been contacted by a wide range of publications who have written after receiving no response from Local One.

Please, everyone in the front office, use the media. We have a strong case here, and a great story. We work our asses off and make a ton of money for our bosses, yet we’re still subjected to this treatment and this characterization at the hands of management. Please provide any and all info, and answer all requests. I understand that negotiations are the primary concern at this point, but I also feel that we have a case that’s as strong as the writers, yet our press is not nearly as good. And a big reason we’re not getting good press, apart from the usual suspicion of unions in the USA, is that our story is not getting out there.

I hate to question anyone’s judgement, but when I’m getting the emails I’m getting, well….

I mean, come on. Normally, when someone spouts boilerplate and corporate propaganda at me, I can pretty much always respond by shooting it full of holes. I love politics as much as the next guy….in fact, I generally say that politics is my sports, that I can watch Meet the Press and This Week and all the others like the average Joe can watch Sports Center, or whatever show the sports fans watch these days.

It’s about what most of the guys I work with love to make fun of me most…politics vs sports. Everyone’s sitting around hating on the Boston Red Sox or whatever, and my most relevant comment is something about rooting for clothing. Yeah, I’m that guy. Maybe it’s not surprising, reading this site, I don’t know. I try to tread lightly about politics and whatnot here.

And maybe I’m fixated on all the bullshit I’m hearing about unions. Really folks. Is this the best you all can do, to spout off about how unions are corrupt whenever the subject of the strike arises? And how is it that these people are the same people who hate hearing about how corrupt the American government is? Or that they roll their eyes, saying again and again that anyone who criticizes the government “hates America,” and that we “always say the same things?” How is it that these are the same people who spend 90% of their time griping about Mexicans and Indians are stealing all the jobs in this country? Or who love to rant about “moral equivalence” and “libruls” anytime anyone criticizes anything about anyone, anywhere?

And why is it that I’m always hearing this from people who have never worked in their entire lives, or people who have never worked in unionized trades? Do you all really think that stagehands get all the profit from overpriced Broadway tickets?!

Tell me…you who have been outsourced and out of work for a year, would you have liked to have had an organization to fight for you? An organization, yes, who takes a small percentage of your salary, but who when times are really tough and your job is on the line actually stands up and says “No!”? An organization which fights for your safety, benefits and your quality of life? Don’t you think that that might have been useful? You who have glimpsed what globalization truly means, at its very root….that you are merely a means of production who can be obtained for less than on that which you require to live? Have none of these people ever been victimized by someone who destroys their life merely to maximize their profits? Or are a lot of people just not asking the right questions?

No, seriously. And no, I’m not protectionist, a conservative, or a Communist. These are legitimate questions that somehow aren’t being addressed. Or am I just naive?

Why is it, when my union is on strike, that an overwhelming percentage of people who want to talk with me about it start out talking about how bad unions are? Are there that many people who love being abused by the wealthy, and by corporations? Or is it a basic lack of understanding about corporations? Or can they just not see past wanting to see a Broadway show? Can they not see that stagehands are fighting for their lives against people who rake in every month more money than most of us will ever earn? Hasn’t anyone ever read anything by Sinclair Lewis? How is it that people who spend 40+ hours a week killing themselves to pay for their homes defend the kind of people who kick them around at every opportunity while they’re doing it???

No, seriously. I’ve heard more jaw-dropping bullshit out of the mouths of lower-middle-class people that would, if circumstances permitted, result in millionaires making more money than I ever thought I’d hear ever in my life. There is an appalling lack of critical thinking in this country.

And I say this as someone who grew up lower- to middle-middle-class, and who is as proud of the struggles of they who raised me as possible.

I hear people say things about corporations and/or the companies they work for like “Well, what do you expect?” And then they don’t make the connection.

Tell you what kids….you know those who employ us? Those people with five houses and absurd wealth? With petty possessions that cost more than you’ll make in your life? And who not only do not care, but who actively make sure we can just barely make a living? They merely want whatever we offer at the lowest possible price. This whole “outsourcing” thing is just selling out their fellow Americans for more profit. And I’m not someone who ever says (or even thinks) things like “fellow Americans” unless it’s with a smirk. For just this reason.

What all this does, for me, is recall something I read by Brian Eno

When I first visited Russia, in 1986, I made friends with a musician whose father had been Brezhnev’s personal doctor. One day we were talking about life during ‘the period of stagnation’ – the Brezhnev era. ‘It must have been strange being so completely immersed in propaganda,’ I said.

‘Ah, but there is the difference. We knew it was propaganda,’ replied Sacha.

What I’m hearing out of the mouths of these (mostly) otherwise intelligent people is total corporate propaganda. And somehow these people are happy to spout it.

Believe me, I’m not a fool. I’m one of the biggest cynics going. I know the bad things about unions. But I also realize that saying anything negative about corporations invites all sorts of accusations and snorts from people who work in corporate America. What I have to say to them is mostly along the lines of “It’s time for a re-evaluation.”

What, historically, have unions done in this country? You have unions to thank for the following:

Eight-Hour Workday
Five-Day Workweek
Health Insurance
Good Pensions
Paid Sick Leave
Fair Treatment for Women, People of Color and Workers with Disabilities
Livable Wages
Overtime Pay
Job Safety
Paid Holidays
Job Security
Severance Pay
Paid Vacations
Family and Medical Leave

Now, is this pro-union propaganda? To my mind, no, not really. This is reality…corporations traditionally abuse their means of production, which is……us. This is making a counter-argument to all the bullshit I’ve been subjected to about how unions are corrupt. This is just the beginning of my answer. There’s much more where this came from. I trust that most of you don’t want to hear it.

And to answer the specific question I’ve heard time and time again? Sure, of course some unions are corrupt. There are things wrong with unions.

But what’s wrong with unions is on a scale that’s far smaller than what’s wrong with corporate America. And I’ve worked on both sides of the desk…I worked in true coporate life, and left and returned to union life.

Ever hated working for the bosses son, and seeing all the bosses friends promoted, even though the came in late every day and never did any work? I did too….in an office. For corporate America.

Ever ranted and raved about how “it’s not what you know, but who?” Me too. While working in corporate America.

Ever hated the fact that you were just another schmuck in the machine? Me too. While working in corporate America.

Howzabout just scraping by while those above you, no matter how incompetent, live high on the hog? Seen how high the bonuses at Citibank are? After the company lost billions of dollars yon mortgages that any asshole could have told you were risky and predatory? Are you kidding me? These assholes make millions of dollars after they get fired. “Golden Parachute” is not a phrase that was coined about working people.

Who lost billions of dollars in Iraq just to make airplanes full of cash for millionaires? Not unions, I’ll tell you that.
And no one ever wrote an award-winning play about how slimy stagehands fucked over the public for all they were worth. But something similar exists…it’s actually called “The Producers.”

Come on people. Think. This isn’t hard. And stop telling me about how cushy my fucking job is just because I’m in a union. Or I’ll start ringing your doorbell you every morning when I’m leaving for work. Then I’ll ring it again for every time I’m sitting on my ass with nothing to do. Chances are you’ll only hear one ring, and it will wake you up at an ungodly hour.