Bryan Cranston Tells Bob Iger ‘Our Jobs Will Not Be Taken Away’ by AI in Rousing Speech: You Will Not ‘Take Away Our Dignity’
By Joe Otterson
Bryan Cranston delivered a fiery speech at a SAG-AFTRA strike rally in Times Square on Tuesday, which included a message directed at Disney head Bob Iger. “We’ve got a message for Mr. Iger,” Cranston said from the stage of the “Rock the City for a Fair Contract” rally. “I know, sir, that you look [at] things through a different lens. We don’t expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity! We are union through and through, all the way to the end!”
Watch an excerpt from the speech below Cranston began his remarks by saying that there is one thing that all the guilds and the AMPTP fundamentally agree on: “Our industry has changed exponentially.” “We are not in the same business model we were even 10 years ago,” he said. “And yet, even though they admit that is the truth in today’s economy, they are fighting us tooth and nail to stick to the same economic system that is outmoded, outdated! They want us to step back in time. We cannot and we will not do that.” Cranston was one of a number of stars who took the stage to address a crowd of hundreds of SAG-AFTRA members and union supporters at the rally, with others including Steve Buscemi, Wendell Pierce, Christian Slater, Christine Baranski, Stephen Lang, and Titus Burgess. They were joined onstage by fellow actors Michael Shannon, BD Wong, Brendan Fraser, Jessica Chastain, Matt Bomer, Chloë Grace Moretz, and Corey Stoll, and more. Burgess decided to forego a speech, instead singing a section of the song “Take Me to the World” from “Sondheim On Sondheim.” Baranski told the crowd “We will not live under corporate feudalism” while also praising the background actors on shows like “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” saying that she attended the rally to speak for them and demand they get fair treatment under any new contract. Slater then spoke about how his father, a fellow SAG member, received support from the union after mental illness and later cancer left him unable to work. Later on in the rally, “The Bear” star Liza Colón-Zayas told the audience that she has been a union member since 1994 and “struggled for 30 years to finally get here, only to find that my residuals have dwindled exponentially.” She then paraphrased Snoop Dogg by saying “We the artists, our gripe is that we deliver in high numbers, in major numbers. And yet, where the f— is my money?”
Regarding the AI dilemma I have two questions. How is it different from any other time in history when a worker was replaced by a machine, and given the lessons learned, isn’t it futile to resist?
They want to pay for an actor’s likeness once then own it for a lifetime. Hollywood should take a lesson from their own anti-piracy ads of the 90s. ‘You wouldn’t download an actor.’
As for is resistance futile. Here’s just a few things that resistance has bought us just in Australia (a nightmare capitalist society):
Annual Leave
Paid Annual Leave was first won after a campaign by printing workers in 1936. The Arbitration Commission granted the workers paid leave, which was then gained by other workers through their unions in different industries. Annual leave loading of 17.5 per cent was first won by workers in the Metal Industry in 1973.
Awards
Awards are legally binding documents that set out the minimum entitlements for workers in every industry. The first industrial award, the Pastoral Workers Award was established by the Australian Workers Union in 1908, mainly covering shearers. The shearers had experienced a terrible deterioration of their wages and conditions during the 1897 Depression and decided to take action to protect working people. Since 1904, awards have underpinned the pay and terms and conditions of employment for millions of workers. Awards are unique to Australia and integral in ensuring workers get ‘fair pay for a fair day’s work’.
Maternity leave
Australian unions’ intensive campaigning for paid parental leave ended in victory with the introduction of the Paid Parental leave scheme by the Gillard Labor government. Under the scheme, working parents of children born or adopted after 1 January 2011 are entitled to a maximum of 18 weeks’ pay on the National Minimum Wage.
Superannuation
Prior to 1986, only a select group of workers were entitled to Superannuation. It became a universal entitlement after the ACTU’s National Wage Case. Employers had to pay 3% of workers’ earnings into Superannuation. This later increased to 9% and on November 2, 2011 the ACTU and its unions’ “Stand Up for Super” campaign celebrated another win for working Australians, when the Labor Government moved to increase the compulsory Superannuation Guarantee to 12% over 6 years from 1 July 2013 to 1 July 2019.
Equal Pay for Women
Although there were attempts to introduce equal pay going back as far as 1949, the principle of equal pay for women was finally adopted by Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in 1969.
Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation Workers compensation laws first came into existence in West Australia in 1902. For many years unions agitated and campaigned for health and safety laws which compelled employers to provide a safe working environment. In Victoria, legislation was introduced in 1985 which saw the active role of workers in maintaining safety on the job. Building unions agitated for many years to ban the use of asbestos, finally succeeding in the 1980’s.
Long service leave
Coal workers went on strike in 1949 over a 35 hour week and Long service leave. Long service leave was finally introduced in New South Wales in 1951. Unions in other states followed.
Meal Breaks, rest breaks
Before unions agitated for meal breaks and rest breaks to be introduced, workers were required to work the whole day without a break. In 1973, workers at Ford in Melbourne engaged in industrial action over many issues, one of their demands being a proper break from the production line.
Unfair Dismissal Protection
Unfair Dismissal Protection came from the concept of a “fair go all round”, after the Australian Workers Union took a case to the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission on behalf of a worker who had been unfairly sacked in 1971. Since then, unions have campaigned for laws that reflect that ‘fair go’ principle, which is about having a valid reason to sack someone and that the dismissal cannot be harsh, unjust or unreasonable.
Green Bans
‘Green bans’ and ‘builders labourers’ became household terms for Sydneysiders during the 1970s. A remarkable form of environmental activism was initiated by the builders labourers employed to construct the office-block skyscrapers, shopping precincts and luxury apartments that were rapidly encroaching upon green spaces or replacing older-style commercial and residential buildings in Sydney. The builders labourers refused to work on projects that were environmentally or socially undesirable. They developed a ‘new concept of unionism’ encompassing the principle of the social responsibility of labor: that workers had a right to insist their labour not be used in harmful ways.
Proper unionised workers fighting in solidarity CAN protect their interests through resistance.
But isn’t trying to forbid those kind of deals doomed to fail? What if the digital actor doesn’t look like anybody? What if they scan actors from other countries?
I’m not arguing about the benefits of unionization, my question was about what happens when a machine becomes more efficient than a human worker. Do you think a union could have saved the switchboard operators? How is it any different from this scenario?
I don’t think it’s inevitable that a technology that has an advantage to business is destined to succeed. We’ve been able to ban a number of technologies that are ultimately more harmful in the long run, CFCs, engineered stone, asbestos and even recently the EU banned facial recognition AI. We just need to help people recognise the harmfulness of a technology.
Do you have an example of a technology that is more efficient than human labor, doesn’t have those side effects and was successfully held back just to keep jobs?
I feel facial recognition is more efficient than human labour. But the dangers of its misuse were too high for the EU to stomach. Seems like a similar issue here, but it’s the unions stepping up to force regulation because the government is too weak and stupid to do it itself.
The misuse of unfettered AI actors does pose real danger of unintended side effects not just to jobs but to society as a whole.
The union negotiations could include in the contract that AI generated actors are not allowed when SAG is involved.
That doesn’t completely stop AI, since they could try to use non union actors or no actors at all.
The issue with AI is that it is software, and software can scale very quickly. So large amounts of jobs could very quickly get automated without allowing workers and the economy to slowly adjust over time. Switchboard operator was just a single job in a single industry.
It will also lead to more consolidation of wealth since existing bussinesses stand to make great savings getting rid of people, and the AI itself is privately owned. Funny enough, this could also blow up in their face since that creates inventive for people to vote.
Ok, but if they want to ban all forms of AI then we are no longer just talking about the morally reprehensible example of a studio buying an actor’s likeness in perpetuity. They want AI gone even when it’s used in a more sensible way which is understandable from their point of view but less so for the rest of us.
It’s actually very different. An AI is not something that you just go build and then it’s immediately useful. One an AI is built it needs to be trained in a process where it is exposed to examples of real works (text, image, video, etc) and “learns” how to reproduce similar works. This learning process involves using the real works to fine tune parameters of a large mathematical model. These tuned parameters are what make the AI an AI and not just a useless pile of random numbers. So arguably, the owner of every work used to train the model is as much a contributor to the AI as the AI company itself.
These media companies not only want to use artists’ works to train a model that they will not be given any ownership of, they want to also own the rights to an artist’s image and likeness to be able to reproduce that image and likeness in a potentially infinite number of derived works without needing to compensate the artist.
You forget that we now have the tools to simply erase the biosphere and humanity now. I, for one, am not convinced that we won’t attempt to do so before the end of this century. If/when that happens, regardless of whether it’s successful in wiping out humanity, it will certainly wipe out AI, along with any technology more advanced than a hammer.