Timing Is Everything

As de-globalization gets a foothold, and we start to repatriate the jobs companies have been sending overseas for 30 or 40 years, maybe unions really are on the rise in a way that will make a real difference.

🤞🏻

Keeping The Union Alive

Gotta wonder why Republicans are so dead set against "union".

union

/ˈyo͞onyə

noun: union

plural noun: unions

noun: the Union

singular proper noun: Federal Union

singular proper noun: the Federal Union

1. the action or fact of joining or being joined, especially in a political context.
2. a state of harmony or agreement.
3. a marriage.
4. a club, society, or association formed by people with a common interest or purpose.
5. an organized association of workers formed to protect and further their rights and interests; a labor union.
6. a political unit consisting of a number of states with the same central government.
7. the US, especially from its founding by the original thirteen states in 1787–90 to the secession of the Confederate states in 1860–61
8. the northern states of the US that opposed the seceding Confederate states in the Civil War.

Out Of Balance

I admit that I spent a lot of time and energy in the 70s and 80s hating on unions. I was convinced they'd outlived their usefulness. And maybe, at the time, I was at least partly right. There was plenty of corruption and feather-bedding going on.

But now I think I was getting suckered into believing it was just the unions that were fucked up, and that the companies had practically nothing to do with any of it - they were being victimized by union members who were just looking for a free ride.

As per usual, there's some truth to it, but mostly, it's PR - purely cynical and manipulative bullshit put out by coin-operated politicians and their plutocratic paymasters.

There's some pretty unsavory history to be written about American Economic Evolution over the last 50 years, and about Labor Relations in particular during that time. And if we survive the next few election cycles, I hope to see a little muckraking that would do Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell proud.

Anyway, the Hollywood strike may well be in the process of telling an important story that we all need to internalize.

Opinion --Joseph Gordon-Levitt

If artificial intelligence uses your work, it should pay you

Actors love residuals. Don’t worry, this is not some annoying Hollywood thing like quinoa or crystal healing. I actually do like quinoa — sorry. Anyway, what are residuals?

Residuals are an important part of how actors get paid. They’re checks you get long after you’re done shooting, because audiences are still watching the movie, perhaps on a new channel or in a new country. Some residual checks can be for pennies, some for thousands of dollars or more.

At the moment, Hollywood’s labor unions for writers and actors, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, are on strike, and streaming residuals are one of the main deal points being negotiated. I’m a proud member of both of these unions, and I strongly support their demands. But zooming out, so to speak, I think there’s a larger conversation to be had about residuals that goes well beyond Hollywood.

Actors, writers and the rest of us film and television professionals might be some of the first (but not the last) to have our jobs threatened by so-called artificial intelligence — technology that ingests enormous amounts of “training data,” crunches the numbers and spits out new combinations of the data, following the patterns it was trained on. Tech giants, entertainment giants and every other profit-hungry giant will soon claim that AI can do human-level work at an astonishingly small fraction of the cost.

However, this claim will be hiding something, like the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” What’s behind the curtain of AI? The cost of the human labor it took to produce the training data. “Generative AI” cannot generate anything at all without first being trained on massive troves of data it then recombines. Who produces that training data? People do.

And those people deserve residuals.

For example, let’s say a new AI program could generate a complete feature film at the click of a button. (Some industry insiders think this could actually happen pretty soon.) Building that AI will require a bazillion past movies to be used as training data. Therefore, anytime this AI yields revenue, the people who made those past movies will deserve a substantial piece. And I’m not just talking about actors and writers. I also mean people who don’t get residuals today: the camera operators, the costume designers, the sound mixers, everyone whose work the AI will be ingesting, mashing up and mimicking.

This principle holds true whether we’re talking about entertainers, doctors, engineers or pretty much anyone whose work involves a computer. AI can’t do our jobs yet, but it might be able to soon. And people whose jobs are threatened by AI will be the same people who produced the data used to train it. A new kind of residuals for these human data producers could potentially provide some much-needed economic relief.

And by the way, I’m not the only one advocating this kind of thing. Renowned technologists and economists, including Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl, have long argued that Big Tech should not be allowed to monetize people’s data without compensating them. This concept of “data dignity” was largely responding to the surveillance advertising business models of companies such as Google and Facebook, but Lanier and Weyl also pointed out, quite presciently, that the principle would only grow more vital as AI rose to prominence.

Technologically speaking, the type of residuals program I have in mind would be a tall order. An AI system would have to track every piece of its training data, and then be able to determine which of those pieces influenced any given output generated and to what degree. On top of that, each of those pieces of data would have to be attributed to a verified human or set of humans, and there would need to be a channel of payment for those humans to receive their residuals. We did something a little bit like this at my company, HitRecord, producing pieces of art and entertainment with sometimes thousands of online collaborators and paying each contributing artist. Residuals from AI, in comparison, would require an astronomically huge scale, keeping track of zillions of bits and bytes, as well as billions of people, dollars, cents and microcents. (Disclosure: My wife serves on the board of directors of the OpenAI Nonprofit.)

So, now that I’ve said how hard the tech will be, let’s talk about the really hard part.

Tech companies won’t be incentivized all by themselves to build the necessary software. The law will have to make them do it. The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued an official statement that completely AI-generated works are not eligible for registration, saying, “These technologies ‘train’ on vast quantities of preexisting human-authored works and use inferences from that training to generate new content.” I imagine the copyright question will force tech companies to come up with a solution to attribute some sort of human authorship to an AI’s outputs. But here’s the question: Who owns the copyright to the training data? Who will therefore reap the benefits?

The answer to that key question, in the case of the film and television industry, is not the writers, actors, camera operators, costume designers, sound mixers or any of the other people who made the creations. The copyright is owned by the big studios. See the problem?

When I do a movie, and I sign my contract with a movie studio, I agree that the studio will own the copyright to the movie. Which feels fair and non-threatening. The studio paid to make the movie, so it should get to monetize the movie however it wants. But if I had known that by signing this contract and allowing the studio to be the movie’s sole copyright holder, I would then be allowing the studio to use that intellectual property as training data for an AI that would put me out of a job forever, I would never have signed that contract.

And again, this doesn’t apply just to the film and television industry but to many, many others as well. Take the medical industry. A doctor’s work produces lots of intellectual property in the form of medical records — and many doctors sign contracts allowing hospitals (or whoever) to take sole ownership of those medical records. But if the doctors had known this intellectual property would be used as training data for an AI that would put them out of a job forever, they, too, would never have signed those contracts.

So, if residuals from AI training data are based on existing copyright, then the aforementioned profit-hungry giants might indeed get to stop paying humans for their labor. How do we deal with this? Both of the Hollywood unions on strike today have expressed grave concern over AI, but their demands regarding AI will not address the pitfall I’m describing here. Nor do I think the problem can be solved by the courts. A number of independent visual artists have sued the AI companies Midjourney and Stability AI, claiming their work was used as training data without consent or compensation. Similar lawsuits are cropping up more and more. I hope these artists win these lawsuits. But I’m not sure they will without new intellectual-property law on their side.

I’m well aware that implementing this kind of residuals program would take a ton of work. It would require technology that doesn’t exist yet. It would also require new public policy, and most governments don’t exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to regulating new tech. Still, there are encouraging signs out there that the White House and Congress are moving toward regulating AI. So here’s my request: Residuals from AI training data should be made mandatory and intellectual-property law amended to make sure those residuals go to the people who deserve them. The seemingly miraculous outputs of generative AI should not be allowed to fill the coffers of tech giants or any other giants without paying the people whose data made those outputs possible.

AI is going to change things faster and harder than our intuition can predict. Will those changes be for the better or worse? I believe we still have a real shot at a world in which our careers are both more productive and more meaningful, and in which our compensation is both more honorable and more equitable than any we’ve ever known. But that kind of bright future won’t arrive automatically. As always, it’ll be us doing the work.

Pushing Back

Brandon Carter, The Hill:

“Local 100 filed charges with Region 16 of the NLRB against the Dallas Cowboys to stop owner, Jerry Jones, from threatening players with benching or termination for exercising their right to concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act,” its post read.

“Sorry, Jerry, you’re over the line, partner. Workers have rights!”

I spent a good buncha time hatin' on unions. I was (mostly) wrong.

Beyond their valuable economic contributions, Unions serve a very important function in the structure of Checks & Balances - holding powerful people accountable.

Yeah yeah, I know - 27-year-old millionaires aren't exactly the downtrodden proletariate. But that's kinda the point - if they can be squashed, it sends a very loud, very clear signal to the rest of us that we'd better shut up, stay in line, and do what we're told.

We have to push back against the Daddy State. Unions help us do that.

A Quick Tho't

I'm hearing way too much whining from people like John Schnatter et al about what difficulties they find themselves in, now that Obummer's been made King of Fuckamericastan.  Poor Papa; it's quite possible he'll be unable to afford the upkeep on his richly deserved 40-room house and personal golf course.  To that we can add the increasing volume of grumbling from those accursed unions and the under-employed.  Here's a shocker: I can't help but feel more inclined toward the people who're actually doing the work.

BTW - a brief aside:  Papa John's stock has been dropping since his little public tantrum - down something like 9%.  So lemme see.
9% of a company worth $1.09 Billion is $98,000,000.
Papa John's "Obamacare cost" = about $6,500,000.
Question:  Why are stupid people like John Schnatter in charge of these things?

I've posted before about an American Working Class that continues to get beat down while the Owner/Investor Class fattens up by getting a shrinking Management Class to work ever harder to maintain the status quo (ie: a continuation of the siphoning upward of as much wealth and power as possible).  And my only problem right this very second is that I can't find those posts, so maybe I just dreamed how great a thinker I am - not that my talking about the whole Class-Fuck thing makes me a great thinker in any case; shit, everybody's talked about that one.

So any-old-way.  I'm coming to realize that the overarching failure of US Government in the last 30 years is that they've done almost literally nothing to protect the American worker's standing as a major contributor to the success of American business - even while they've said almost nothing except how great the American worker is.  Really?  If you love us so much, why do you treat us like such shit?

Here's CNN/Forbes trying to spin the death of Hostess Brands into a cautionary tale about what happens when "the unions" are all intractable and/or stuck in the 70s or whatever.  It tries hard to do the Plenty-Of-Blame-To-Go-Around thing, but it's all about how the bad guy unions wouldn't let poor old Hostess continue to poison Americans with food that isn't really food do what a good entrepreneurial business knows it should do in a truly moral free market universe - which of course is ship all the jobs to Mexico blah blah blah.  And the kicker is that they use this one case to illustrate how nice it is for a Democrat Hedge Fund guy to try to help out and all, but he's just being too touchy-feely and the grownups need to step in to get it straightened out.

So far, in a courtroom near Manhattan and in a negotiating room in downtown Washington, they haven't come close, although a deal could happen even as you read this. The dramatis personaeare impressive: the Teamsters; two large hedge funds, Silver Point Capital and Monarch Alternative Capital; and the private-equity firm Ripplewood Holdings. In an acrimonious behind-the-scenes war -- refereed by a federal judge -- they wage hostilities over who will get what crumbs from a disintegrating corporate cookie; whether that business can and should be resuscitated; the degree to which fabulous pension plans are anachronistic; whether promises made in collective bargaining ought to be sacrosanct; and just how important it is to save 15,000 union jobs. "There aren't great options here," former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt told Fortune. Gephardt is now a lobbyist and consultant with connections to Hostess and the Teamsters. "People will have to pick the one that's a little bit better."

For me, Obama's whole tenure will be a ridiculous success if he does nothing else in the next four years but get our thinking turned around on how to bolster the fortunes of American labor while not flipping over into full-blown Protectionism.