this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
275 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
58528 readers
6744 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So much for labor unions establishing worker's rights.
What should SAG-AFTRA have done differently do you mean?
Represented everyone. When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren't, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.
Essentially, however unions fail to provide for the working class gets exploited by the owning class.
And it's fair if labor unions can't fix everything, but then let us admit that our capitalist system is broken beyond what labor can do to fix it. Let's stop pushing unions as a solution, except as a short-term one that is going to leave some people cold and hungry.
I can't speak for how unions work in the US but over here in Sweden they work because of member engagement. Of course, the opposite is true too: they doesn't work when there is no engagement shown by the members.
If unionmembers don't show up on the meetings, especially the annual one, where the board election take place each year, the board doesn't know what the members want. Furthermore, if members do hint show up on election day they are getting the board they deserve. (The same goes for government and elections)
My experience is that most of the people complaining about the union not representing them, being corrupt and/or being toothless, are people who never visited an annual meeting. They never participated in the election of representatives and they most often think of the union like it's their personal legal team.
Unions are positive and bring good things, not only to workers/members but also to the "area of business", when the members are active in the discussions and understand the issues. Unions are bad, almost cancerous, when members just pay the monthly fee and aren't really engaged...
I don't know if the persons complaining are super engaged in the union work but tweets like "you don't represent me but happily take my money" smell a little bit of "you're the worst legal team I've ever had".
When it comes to the issue here I wonder what the alternative would be? SAG-AFTRA saying no to AI voice overs? Going out on strike?
In what way would that not end up in the companies just use more AI VO AI is an investment and a recurring cost you can calculate. Human labor is not. There is all sorts of unknowns connected to human labor and AI never make threats about going out on strike (yet!?)
So, a little more in detail, what do you think will be the result of what they did here? What should they have done differently and what result would they have gotten then?
This is a very unusual union, though. It's more like a chamber of commerce. A normal union represents employees who expect to work for years and decades in the same job and mainly rely on an hourly wage, right? IDK how many employees like that are in SAG-AFTRA.
Many people represented here function more like independent trade people. They take on specific jobs for a negotiated pay. The big names, mainly screen actors, function more like capital owners. They have fame and fans, which they rent out for money. By licensing their voices they can do exactly that. It gives them an additional source of income, without having to do extra work.
Basically, I want to say that you can't judge what's happening here in terms of Swedish union politics.
Which workers rights are being infringed here exactly?
Voice actors are likely to lose their entire industry because screen actors are going to eat their jobs. Why pay voice actors when you can just pay for a cheaper AI voice pack of any famous actor you want?