In a wide-ranging conversation about the strikes and the recent spotlight on C-suite pay in Hollywood, Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and co-founder of Inequality Media and the Economic Policy Institute, explained how the rise of monopolies and relative disappearance of unions has created market conditions primed to enhance economic disparity.
“The real power with regard to the entertainment industry is in Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta,” Reich explains.
Even as the WGA and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, seem poised to head back to the negotiating table just following the 100th day of the writers strike, many in Hollywood fear a resolution is still months away.
“If you really want to understand how the deck is stacked, or the game is rigged, it all stems from those power setters,” Reich says, adding that doesn’t mean the combined forces of SAG-AFTRA and WGA won’t be able to make considerable gains.
Reich spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the underlying economic factors and market forces impacting the entertainment industry and the country at large.
Number one, those fortunes corrupted democracy, leading people like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to say, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” The second problem is that when you have so much wealth in the hands of a very few people, most of the rest don’t have enough money to buy all the goods and services that the economy can produce.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a wide-ranging conversation about the strikes and the recent spotlight on C-suite pay in Hollywood, Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and co-founder of Inequality Media and the Economic Policy Institute, explained how the rise of monopolies and relative disappearance of unions has created market conditions primed to enhance economic disparity.
“The real power with regard to the entertainment industry is in Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta,” Reich explains.
Even as the WGA and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, seem poised to head back to the negotiating table just following the 100th day of the writers strike, many in Hollywood fear a resolution is still months away.
“If you really want to understand how the deck is stacked, or the game is rigged, it all stems from those power setters,” Reich says, adding that doesn’t mean the combined forces of SAG-AFTRA and WGA won’t be able to make considerable gains.
Reich spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the underlying economic factors and market forces impacting the entertainment industry and the country at large.
Number one, those fortunes corrupted democracy, leading people like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to say, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” The second problem is that when you have so much wealth in the hands of a very few people, most of the rest don’t have enough money to buy all the goods and services that the economy can produce.
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