It’s the summer of the strike: Hollywood actors and writers are staging a massive joint walkout, UPS Teamsters have won a historic tentative agreement on the back of a strike threat, and a major labor stoppage is likely in coming months at one of the “Big Three” American automakers. What does this recent wave of activity in the labor movement tell us about the power of a strike?

We often view power as being concentrated at the top. The billionaire capitalist class owns it all and dictate the conditions under which everyone else, forced to sell their labor to survive, must live.

While this is true, the ultrarich’s power is derived from the wealth they extract from workers. The workers they employ produce the profits that sustain capitalists’ enormous strength. This very fact is what makes the strike the most powerful tool that the working class has: by withholding their labor, strikers eat into corporate profits and force employers to make concessions. It’s a tool that workers across the country, in various industries, are now using to demand a greater share of the wealth they create.

The Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) launched their strike on July 14, 2023, after failing to reach a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents over three hundred fifty Hollywood production companies in collective bargaining with the union. It is the first SAG-AFTRA strike in forty-three years.

Workers on strike with SAG-AFTRA joined the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which has been on strike since May 2, 2023. This marks the first time writers and actors have been on strike simultaneously since 1960. Major issues in both strikes include Hollywood producers’ use of technology, primarily artificial intelligence (AI), in an attempt to cut costs by replacing the labor of writers and actors.

Writers in WGA are fighting against the use of AI to generate scripts on the cheap. Meanwhile, actors are fighting the use of their likeness in AI-generated content without informed consent and fair compensation. While this may sound like a dystopian nightmare reserved for the faraway future, it’s a real, near-term threat that Hollywood production companies are fighting to uphold.

Actors are also fighting for a fair share of residuals from streaming services, as studios refuse to release the streaming counts for content on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. In the meantime, residual checks for actors have shrunk from a large portion of most working actors’ salaries to literal pennies per paycheck.

Actors and writers on strike are calling attention to the fact that Hollywood runs on their labor. When they stop working, Hollywood stops working. These entertainment workers are going on strike to fight for themselves. But workers of all kinds are getting screwed as badly or worse than writers and actors — and they can flex their muscle against their bosses just as powerfully by walking off the job.

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