Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1948)

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Michigan Ave., Chicago 16, Illinois What The Hollywood Strikes Mean ( Continued from page 28) Allyson, Jane Wyman, Alexis Smith and Walter Pidgeon stepped aboard planes winging to the midwest; when Edward Arnold addressed that vast and powerful labor convention at its own request; when Jane Wyman and June Allyson and Alexis Smith met with union committees of the conflicting IATSE and CSU in smoke-filled rooms at the Morrison Hotel; when the star committee came back to Hollywood and called a meeting at which representatives of forty-seven unions met in the council room of the Screen Actors Guild and listened to a telephone hook-up to eastern labor leaders to pave the way for the settlement of the strike itself; when that happened, Hollywood actors took a leading place in the labor-management picture which has become the major issue in the lives of Americans, in the lives of people everywhere. To understand a little of what these men and women, backed by their Guild membership of 8500, have done you have to know a little about the strikes which have filled front pages for almost two years, and the general labor disputes in the motion-picture industry. “What’s it all about?” is the question most frequently asked. “I can’t make head or tail to it myself,” is said even by people right in Hollywood, who are directly affected by it all. IT would take a book, it would take weeks, to go into the incredibly complicated and technical details, to even outline the thirty-year-old history of these inter-union labor disputes, in which at one time or another everybody has been wrong and everybody has been right. As briefly as possible, I’ll try to sum it up for you as the actors saw it and why they saw it that way after careful study and first-hand investigation. They came to one over-all, vital conclusion; the Hollywood strikes have been and are jurisdictional. That conclusion has motivated all their moves. As Bob Taylor put it, when I asked him just how he felt about it all, “It is, basically, because there is too much overlapping of jobs in the picture business, more than in any other industry. The industry grew so fast and no decisions were made along the way, so that as new jobs and more technical work came with the expansion of picture making, the overlapping got worse and worse. “On the plane going to Chicago, Gene Kelly and Alexis Smith and Eddie Arnold and I talked a lot about this. We had a lot of time to talk because we were supposed to make only one stop, to refuel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but we were down with engine trouble, flying around with flaps that wouldn’t work, waiting in airports for them to fix up new ships. We talked about how painters, set designers, set decorators, set dressers and even probably plumbers and electricians all work on the same little job. Prop men make props but can’t put ’em on the sets. All kinds of unions — over fifty of them actually —find themselves doing work which crosses back and forth often over a line so fine nobody can figure it out. But somebody has got to — and the only somebody who can is the American Federation of Labor, to which all of these unions belong. That’s why I went to Chicago when I would much rather have stayed home with Barbara. It has to be wrong, any way you look at it and on any number of grounds, to throw large numbers of people out of work because of interunion controversies.” The strikes of 1945 and 1946 are only the latest battles in a struggle that has been going on in Hollywood for thirty years. Today, in the picture industry, there are two labor organizations, both within the AF of L but bitterly opposed to each other. These are the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the Conference of Studio Unions. George Murphy, long president of the SAG, put it pretty clearly for me. “The fundamental difference between the opposing groups is that while the AF of L originally and primarily was a federation of craft unions, IATSE is a semi-industrial union of theater and studio employees, which cuts across a number of crafts, most powerful of which are the carpenters, painters and electricians. It is the position of the IATSE that craftsmen, such as carpenters, painters and electricians, working in picture studios, are in basic fact stagehands, who therefore should come within IATSE jurisdiction rather than that of the building trade internationals. The Conference of Studio Unions, therefore, is actually a local federation taking in all local unions which belong to the big building trade internationals and not to IATSE. This makes two powerful groups at each other’s throats — and something has to be done about it. The talent guilds — actors, writers, directors, do not belong to either of these groups. That was one reason we, supported by both the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Directors Guild, could hope to act as neutral mediators against all such jurisdictional disputes.” THE Conference of Studio Unions came into existence about four years ago, under the leadership of Herbert Sorrell. Up to that time, certain powerful local unions, who as members of the big internationals did not and never had belonged to the long established International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, had operated as separate units under the American Federation of Labor and the Central Labor Council at Los Angeles. From 1942 onward, Sorrell’s own painters, carpenters, electricians, machinists and others outside the IATSE, were bound together in the local association known in Hollywood as the CSU and functioned as a united body. Before the strike this fall this group attracted the attention of many of Hollywood’s liberals by its militant, often belligerent, attitude as it fought for what it claimed was the best interests of the workers themselves. Johnny Garfield, regarded in Hollywood as pretty much what is called Left Wing, as a leader of the very liberal group, put it this way to me, “The human element is tough. It’s got to be tough. There are guys on that picket line I’ve worked with, all kinds of people are mixed up in this, the kind of people I love. There’s tragedy right in front of you all the time, they’ve got wives and kids. But that’s why in the end I had to support my Guild, because it’s taken the most concrete and constructive action of anybody trying to figure out ways that these things can’t happen in America. It’s like our President, Bob Montgomery, said, ‘The strikers and non-strikers are not fighting over a question of wages or hours. They are fighting because two international presidents of AF of L unions cannot agree on which union should have jurisdiction over about 350 jobs.’ Bob said, ‘Because of an argument over those 350 jobs the livelihood of 30,000 American workers, all members of the AF of L, is endangered and an entire industry thrown into chaos and confusion. The present Hollywood strike is symptomatic of a condition within the American Federation of Labor which has existed for forty years 92