Works and Workers: The Anti-Union Origins of Mass Media Awards
Another December means it’s time for a new iteration of “The Keighleys.” It’s the closest thing we have to the Academy Awards! It’s a night of celebration and glamour to congratulate ourselves on a year well done (seriously though, good job! You deserve it). Even though I brought up film awards right away, we like to separate ourselves from our film-making counterparts here and there; we like to be confident in our own craft. But we make the comparison all the time, even if it’s to “Fuck the Oscars.”
If you’re reading this, you’re probably involved with The Game Awards: spectator/advertising target, game developer, show producer. There’s a whole community that looks to these awards as an annual celebration. You’re here, tonight, helping remix the Oscars into our own thing, something better for us. Sure we’re cooler and more fun — we have more trailers — but it’s still a mass media awards show which all have their origins in the Academy Awards. The film industry didn’t invent award ceremonies, that’s nothing new. We’re talking about the specific creation that is the mass media awards show. An award ceremony for mass media, and crucially, is itself a piece of mass media. But where did the Academy of Motion Picture “Arts and Sciences” come from? One might assume it’s an extension of the healthy interaction of awarding good work that’s beneficial to a community, but mass media awards have their origins in a very different, specific purpose: union-busting.
Understanding that the Oscars’s origin is a union-busting tool, begins with knowing about the man that conceived it. Louis B. Mayer became an executive of MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) in 1924 when Metro-Goldwyn merged with his much smaller Louis B. Mayer Productions. It was a far cry from the humble immigration that brought him to America. He lived a hard childhood that turned him into a cynical man. He paid for the exclusive rights to distribute Birth of a Nation in Boston, despite being Jewish and fully aware of the movie’s pro-Klu Klux KlanThat’s why w message. That kind of intuition, his resiliency, and his genuine affection for entertainment led him to a popular and successful film executive. He was praised as a confident, wise, and trusting executive that built one of the most successful and prolific film studios by the 40s. However, during that same tenure he has been accused of groping and harassing a then-teenage Judge Garland. He was an early progenitor of the now rock-solid union between Hollywood big wig and sexual harassment.
In 1926 Mayer and his family decided it was time that they lived on a palatial estate fitting Mayer’s station as a leader in one of Hollywood’s biggest studios. But also, he didn’t want to wait for architects to plan the thing and wait through the long process of…professional builders building a house to spec. Taking great pride in the work others did to make him money, Louis Mayer thought of the set builders that worked for him. MGM Production designers drew up plans for a new home that would be done in a matter of months instead of years. Part of the accelerated schedule was around-the-clock building, three shifts a day. This plan ran into a snag, the set builders had just organized into a union that would become the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (or IATSE, their logo is in the credits of nearly every American film), and part of MGM’s agreement with IATSE required overtime pay for overtime work. His solution to his “problem” was to hire just a few skilled laborers from MGM and what the linked Vanity Fair article calls, “outsourcing cheap labor.” Who knows what this is a euphemism for? Minority or immigrant labor? Unhoused people desperate for work and willing to put up with terrible conditions? All of the above? Either way the answer is dark.
He was upset unions got in the way of his gilded personal life. First Mayer didn’t like that he had to wait just as long as all the other rich people for his custom designed, spacious Westside estate. So he sought to make his workers (whose job it is to build sets, not homes) do the job faster. Imagine any other worker at MGM siphoning off a whole building crew to build a home, how would Mayer have reacted to that? But when he was contractually obliged to pay set builders overtime pay for overtime work, that was too far.
Mayer was afraid of mass labor movements, meaning he knew his laborers collectively held much more power than he did. He was afraid that the recent organization of his builders might influence his other workers: the writers, actors, directors, etc. So he began to think of ways to resolve labor disputes where he still had the most control, and that’s when he came up with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that exists today.
Mayer’s desire to create a platform to resolve labor disputes stemmed from self-interest and protection. He didn’t exactly regard the artists that worked for him with the most regard. His words: “The idea of a star being born is bush-wah. A star is made, created; carefully and cold-bloodedly built up from nothing, from nobody. All I ever looked for was a face.” Mayer believed in manufacturing people, not respecting them.
So where do the Oscars come in? The Academy, which in its early days was just Mayer and his powerful friends, decided who had “merit” (their word). They explicitly wanted competition between filmmakers to drive a wedge in their growing solidarity. That’s it, mass media awards were created to redirect camaraderie into less productive efforts so that the rich could pay their laborers less.
Luckily Mayer failed, Hollywood unionized. Those organized workers in Hollywood have won residuals as a commonplace formThat’s why w of compensation. What a crazy proposition, if you play a role in the creation of a work, you get a portion of its success. When’s the last time you got a residual for a game you worked on? When’s the last time you got residuals from a game that causes the publisher to blast the press about profits and sales? Why didn’t you see a bigger piece of that?
We at the Game Workers of Southern California made The Game Worker Awards to celebrate achievements game workers and our allies have made in their unionization struggles. We want to award the workers, not just the works, and luckily there’s a whole big fancy production taking care of awarding the works because they deserve recognition too. Mayer sought to sow discord between his employees by trying to elevate the work above the worker. We all love celebrating achievement, that’s why we’re paying attention to The Game Awards (trailers are achievements too). However, it should not be at the expense of worker solidarity.
The Game Awards are not some vast conspiracy to weaken worker power. No, they’re made by people who grew up in a culture where the Oscars were one of the most watched television events all year, and why not? It’s beautiful people, wearing beautiful clothes, congratulating each other on the beautiful art they made. It’s a celebration of artistic achievement. It has grown into much more than Mayer’s devious plan, but that core is still there. That same executive-serving center is at the heart of most mass media awards shows, including our own.
So how about our executives? What do you think their take on this story would be? While the “nice guy” executives in the industry might react to this story with disgust, there’s still Bobby Kotick and other similarly evil people we don’t know the names of that would look at Mayer’s story and try to extract lessons in union-busting. To these people (and even some of the “nice” ones too) we are not people. We are ledger items with input (meager salaries) and output (game). We are not people struggling to pay rent, we aren’t getting worn down by long arduous commutes after long hours, we aren’t battling constant anxiety from harassing and discriminatory workplaces. These are not the stories they want, they only want stories they can sell, made by our sweat. And the only way they will respond to our stories is if we make them.
Since we’re the ones that produce the games, we’re the ones that actually generate the money. This is what Mayer didn’t want filmmakers to know then, and what game executives don’t want us to know now, that if we who make the games can organize a united front, we can wield enough power to make the industry into what we want, something for the many, not the few. It is our work that made these awards possible, and if they truly want to celebrate our work, they should celebrate the workers.
Labor Creates Games.
