Picket lines aplenty across the U.S.A.

So how do we support the lesser known strikers?

Workers struck the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper in October over wage and benefits and job cuts affecting journalists and others. They remain off the job. Graduate workers at the University of Michigan walked off their jobs in April, demanding higher pay and better workplace protections. There have been strikes at Starbucks, hotels in Southern California, McDonald’s and even a group of Waffle House workers walked off the job for three days.

Now well known and unknown actors are walking picket lines, or pausing filming and promotion, as they face off against Hollywood studios and streaming companies. They join striking writers, who work for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and many other shows, who have been writing only picket signs and social media posts since May 2.

The actors strike, with some 160,000 performers, is the second largest U.S. strike since 1993, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is larger than two strikes the United Auto Workers staged against General Motors years ago and almost as big as the 180,000 Teamsters walkout against United Parcel Service, or UPS, in 1997.

And it has larger personalities involved, from Viola Davis to Jennifer Beals to actors union president Fran Drescher, who starred in the 1990s hit “The Nanny.”

“What happens here is important because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor, when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run,” Drescher said in announcing the actors strike. See her fiery speech going viral in The Guardian article here.

I believe in collective power for workers and others, and I spent more than a year on a picket line in Detroit. Yet I cannot help but wonder and worry about these strikes and strikers and how they will be resolved. Strikes are scary and surprising events and workers sometimes get run over, relegated to recycling bins and financially ruined in them.

I worry most about the baristas, the journalists and the cleaning people at hotels, whose lack of resources and star power quickly move their battle for a better living standard away from the public’s eye. Their strikes and their work are every bit as important as the Hollywood actors.

So everyone who says “Solidarity” today with a sit-com or movie star, please follow up by contributing to a strike fund for a lesser-known walkout or buying a meal for a striking worker closer to home.

Here’s a list of three strike funds for groups that have been on strike for a while:

Pittsburgh newspaper strikers fund directly benefits workers with financial hardship from the strike against a powerful newspaper family. Give here.

Graduate employees at the University of Michigan face an uphill fight for higher wages in high-cost Ann Arbor, MI. Donate to their strike fund here.

The Hollywood and television writers have a worker support / strike fund.

And if you’re in management or run a small business or are an influencer, your money to support striking workers still will be welcome. The ending to this worker uprising script will be written by all of us.

I will gladly add other union strike funds to this list, after I’ve reviewed them. Please drop them in the comments or send them to me.

© Vickie Elmer, 2023

Photo credit: Ken Whytcock / Unsplash, shows workers in Niagra Falls protesting