‘Culture crash’ in America: Can unions save the creative class?

They’re just for hard hats. They peaked around the time Elvis was getting big. They killed Detroit. They’ve got nothing to do with you or me. They’re a special interest – and they hate our freedom.

That’s the kind of noise you pick up in 21st-century America – in politics and popular culture alike – when you tune your station to the issue of trade unions. Union membership, and ensuing muscle, have been in steep decline in both the public and private sectors. Just look at Wisconsin’s “right to work” push, the anti-teachers union “reform” movement, corporate union-busting, PR “messaging” firms hired by management to smear striking workers, hostility from the Republican right, and indifference from a Democratic Party that’s reoriented itself around professionals and Silicon Valley.

Also in decline: America’s creative class – artists, writers, musicians, architects, those part of the media, the fine arts, publishing, TV, and other fields – faced with an unstable landscape marked by technological shifts, a corporate culture of downsizing, and high unemployment.

So is it time for artists to strap on a hard hat? Maybe unions or artists’ guilds can serve and protect an embattled creative class. With musicians typically operating without record labels, journalists increasingly working as freelancers as newspapers shed staff, and book publishing beginning what looks like a period of compression, unions might take some of the risk and sting out of our current state of creative destruction.

“Musicians are trying to negotiate this changing landscape,” says Kristin Thomson, once a guitarist for the band Tsunami and an owner of indie label Simple Machines, now a director of the Future of Music Coalition. Many musicians ask the group how to deal with today’s complicated mix of outlets and platforms, or what to expect from label support. “Others saw their mechanical royalties falling off a cliff. There are revenue streams out there, but they’re all changing so fast. This is a difficult time for artists trying to understand it all. And there’s a lot more competition because the barriers to entry are a lot lower.”

To their partisans, of course, unions don’t just help the workers at a few companies; they can have a transformational effect on society as a whole. Supporters credit them with the forty-hour work week, the weekend, fair wages, safe working conditions, overtime pay – much of the edifice that built the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century. Unions often set wage standards across a field, even for people who don’t belong to them; uncounted artists, writers, and musicians can pursue their craft because their spouses have union-protected jobs, like public school teachers.

And it’s because of the decline of labour that these things are going away,” says Thomas Frank, best known as the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? “If you’re worried about inequality in this country, which is just galloping along, the main cause – even bigger than the skewed tax code – is the decline of unions.”

The journalist and author Scott Martelle has seen the issue from several angles. While working at the Detroit News, a Gannett paper, he served as a union activist during the 1995 strike, and rather than cross a picket line to work, left for the Los Angeles Times two years later. The locally owned Times, by contrast, still retained a whiff of old-school corporate benevolence: for some of that decade, the paper had employed a staff doctor on call for the newsroom and sometimes sent writers on first-class flights to cover stories. We never formed a union, its staffers sometimes told each other, because they treated us well. (Disclosure: Martelle was a colleague of mine at the Times.)

But the good times didn’t last. When private-equity mogul Sam Zell leveraged a buyout of the Tribune Corp – owner of the Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, and other papers – and drove the company into bankruptcy, waves of bloodshed for the newsrooms began. In the summer of 2008, something like 300 reporters and editors at the Times alone lost their jobs. Martelle was one of them. The next batch of firings came in October, and there was still no union to make the process more humane: Staffers were told they had until 5.00 pm to clean out their desks, and security was standing by for anyone who dawdled. (By contrast, the Tribune executive who steered the doomed sale to Zell, Dennis FitzSimons, walked away with a golden parachute in excess of $40 million.)

“In a lot of ways, the newspaper industry went along thinking it would be rich and fat forever,” says Martelle, who last year published the book Detroit: A Biography. “And the journalists were in the same situation. So when the Tribune Corp blew up, it was too late to organise. People get motivated to join unions because they are frustrated or scared. And ten years ago, no one was frustrated or scared.

Trade unions and artists’ guilds – various bodies in which creative types collaborate politically—date back at least as far as the first stirrings of the market economy. Mason lodges, common in the Middle Ages, operated like a cross between movie studios and architecture firms. As early capitalism became a force nearly as important to artists as the church, artisans and artists joined guilds, which were less hierarchical than the lodges and worked in some ways like contemporary unions. They asserted rules for training, apprenticeship, and journeymen, not radically different from a blacksmiths’ or saddlers’ guild.

“Guilds in the Middle Ages arose whenever an occupational group felt its economic existence threatened by an influx of competition from without,” historian Arnold Hauser wrote in his definitive The Social History of Art. “The object of the organisation was to exclude or at least restrict competition.” These guilds could be illiberal in some ways, but they also “marked a decided step forward in the artist’s freedom.”

This conflict between those inside and outside the guild exerted itself frequently in these years: Itinerant entertainers like jongleurs and wandering minstrels often enraged guild groups like watchmen or town musicians, who typically held a monopoly on performing at weddings and funerals, and were beaten back by established players. Stage actors experienced similar conflicts: Some were connected to a local guild, others wandered from inn to inn to perform for a passed hat, while some, as permanent theatres began to be established in Shakespeare’s time, joined standing companies and resented those who didn’t.

Guilds were hardly perfect – the Meistersingers were almost comically Teutonic in their earnest love of musical rules, and guild traditionalism sometimes put them behind artistic developments. But they were important to keep amateurs from stealing material – songs, for instance – in these days before copyright or contemporary notions of intellectual property. The nature of art means that these guilds did not function as smoothly as, say, blacksmith guilds. “There never was a period in their history,” British music historian Henry Raynor wrote, “when the town musicians were not engaged in a bitter struggle to preserve their monopoly.”

When the culture of the Renaissance told artists that they were individuals – even, in some cases, geniuses – that their talent was inborn, and that their role was to liberate the human spirit, many painters, sculptors, and others decided they did not need some musty old medieval guild, with its years of training and numerous restrictions. But because artists have little power and influence in isolation, they found themselves soon migrating into academies of art that were more conservative and hidebound than the guilds. In 17th-century Holland, similarly, a formidable group of painters emerged – Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer among them – but because artists fell on the wrong side of the supply/demand curve, and there was no guild to protect them, even the best artists struggled, some selling tulips to pay the rent, some just going broke.

Excerpted with permission from Boom Times for the End of the World, Scott Timberg, Hachette India.