Oh Yeah Alright Hell Yeah That's Tight
It’s time to stop the world from turning.
"The hungry poor shall weep no more/
For the food they can never earn/
There are tables spread, ev'ry mouth be fed/
For the world is about to turn."
-from "Canticle of the Turning" by Rory Cooney
"They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/
But without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn!"
-from "Solidarity Forever", traditional labor song
"Steadily subtractin' seeds & stems/
Mind cloudy through the wheeze and phlegm/
Numbin' my brain off of that and the Jesus hymns/
If we waiting for the time to fight, these is thems."
-from "My Favorite Mutiny" by The Coup
If you're a certain type of Catholic with a certain political point of view - in other words, if you're The Girl Reading This - you're probably familiar with the 1989 church hymn "Canticle of the Turning", a musical setting of the Magnificat, the song that Mary sings in the first chapter of Luke's Gospel, as she rejoices that she has been chosen to bring Jesus into the world. This particular setting uses the repeated image of “the world is about to turn” to emphasize Mary’s joy in the knowledge that everything is about to change, that the arrival of the incarnate God on Earth is about to upend the world order. Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.
I have been in a lot of church choirs and sung a lot of settings of this particular prayer. I heard a different setting of the same text of my wedding. If you are like me and also a Sicko Woke Liberation Pronoun Critical Race Oscar Romero Gender Marx Socialist Democrat Dorothy Day Mental Illness Left Pete Seeger Red Catholic, you like this text a lot. It is, literally, a prayer for revolution. It explicitly mentions tearing world leaders off of their thrones and replacing them with the lowliest people on Earth; it celebrates, very explicitly, that at some point in the near future, the world’s hungry will finally get their fill while those who have been getting their fill are going to be sent out into the cold, and it does all of this within the context of overwhelming joy at the change that is coming. The world is about to turn.
As I have argued before, I think that Catholics should want the current material conditions of the world to be better than they are, given actual church teaching that bishops wrote down and that you can look up pretty easily. A big part of this is that Catholics should want poor people not to be poor anymore. Following from this, I also think that Catholics have a responsibility to determine what actual tactics will be the most effective for changing those material conditions and making poor people not poor anymore. You can’t just say you want things to be better and then do whatever the hell you want after that; that’s basically what the church said about ending abortion, and look how all of that turned out. You need to look at what works and what doesn’t, and if you would like a crash course on that, I would like to recommend a film that turned 5 years old this month.
I first saw Sorry To Bother You in theaters with my comrades in July 2018. Since I saw the film, the big university I live by saw its grad students unionize (twice) and go on strike. That university has a hospital, and the nurses went on strike, and I brought my daughter to picket with the nurses who delivered her. The other big university that is a few miles away from me also saw its grad students go on strike. My Starbucks became a union Starbucks. I ended up on picket lines with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra of the Chicago Lyric Opera. Public school teachers in my city went on strike (twice) and were joined by their paraprofessional coworkers, on the tail of a strike wave sweeping across public schools in multiple states. It turns out that the message of Sorry To Bother You hit a nerve at exactly the right time.
Sorry To Bother You was written and directed by Boots Riley, who was previously best known for fronting the Oakland hip-hop group The Coup, which provided us with heartwarming songs about executing our oppressors and throwing molotov cocktails at the barricades. I won't go too into the details of the film's plot, but you should probably watch it because it's wildly original and audacious and funny and the cast is stacked with people like LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Yeun, Danny Glover, and Armie Hammer, whose personal life I have not yet had a chance to look up.
The protagonist of the film, Cassius Green (Stanfield), has finally gotten a crappy job at a crappy call center, and soon finds himself rapidly climbing up the corporate ladder, in a heightened and absurdist version of Oakland where the poor and working class are somehow crushed even more than they are, you know, in non-movie America. The problem is that the company that owns the call center appears to be pretty evil, and might actually be about to wipe out humanity completely. What is brilliant about Sorry To Bother You, though, is how wide a range of responses it shows to capitalist oppression. Cassius and his friends, once they realize how dangerous the situation is, try to reason with their bosses. They reveal everything to the media and the company's evil plan becomes public. They get everything in front of Congress so the government can intervene. Cassius' girlfriend is part of a left-wing radical art collective and is out on the streets committing random acts of vandalism. And none of it changes anything.
That's what makes Sorry To Bother You a labor film that is going to stand the test of time: Boots Riley shows us all of these different tools with all of their different inadequacies, but the only thing that has any impact in the fight against the bosses is when Cassius' former coworkers stop showing up. The only thing that starts turning the tide, the only thing the bosses even notice, is when the call center employees, the ones on the absolute bottom rung of the economic ladder, go on strike. Boots Riley is an outspoken Communist, which is the best kind of Communist, and in an old interview promoting the film, he laid it out pretty clearly:
"I think that’s something that’s put forward in my film as a tool that we need to use. I believe that since the beginning of the New Left, progressives and radicals have turned more to spectacle and gone away from actually organizing at the actual point of contradiction in capitalism, which is the exploitation of labor, which is also where the working class has its power. And we’ve gone in favor of demonstrations, that don’t necessarily have teeth, but they show where our head is at. And I feel like we have to put—give these demonstrations more teeth, by being able to affect the bottom line and say, you know—and say, “You can make no money today, or you can make less money and give us what we want.”"
For Riley, taking on the corporate giants who poison the Earth and gouge customers and work people to death is not a matter of "persuasion" or "shame". It is a material conflict between two groups fundamentally opposed to each other: those who work, and those who own. Those who work make their money by clocking in and doing a job and collecting their wages; when they stop working, they stop making money. Those who own, well, they make their money when those who work keep working, and they can just collect the profits. As long as the wheels keep turning and the world keeps spinning, the numbers will keep going up, and it’s in the interest of those who own to make those who work bust their asses as much as possible to keep their own numbers going up. Those who own still make money no matter what, and the only way to even get their attention is to stop the numbers from going up. One of many great lines from the labor anthem "Solidarity Forever" is "They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn!" That's the conflict in a couplet. Those who own need those who work, and if those who work withhold their labor, those who own start sweating real fast.
Bluntly: we are on the side of those who work. Theologically, we are on the side of those who work. Our faith tells us that we are. The Gospel of Luke has plenty of condemnation of the rich and those who mistreat the people below them, delivered not only by the mother of God but by God Himself (and it’s not the only place in scripture that you can find that; if you want the real good stuff you should read the letter of James). When I say that we should care about workers having dignity and about our practicing solidarity with them, that’s not something I made up, but something that the bishops (on paper) teach very explicitly. Jesus considers people blessed not if they find a sweet passive income stream, but if they hunger and thirst for righteousness, if they literally need things to get better so they can survive. So we are not on the side of those who own, of the ones who are trying to make the wheels turn as quickly as possible, to extract as much from workers as possible. But more bluntly: we are on the side of those who work because that includes us, too. Labor reporter Hamilton Nolan just wrote a piece that is essential reading for this era, and it's worth quoting at length:
Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants’ union, often repeats this Mother Jones quote when she gives a speech: “The capitalists say there is no need of labor organizing but the fact that they themselves are continually organizing shows their real beliefs.” Trillion dollar corporations are the most highly organized things on earth. Their real vulnerability is not government regulation—political protection is just another investment for them, and in America that investment is very effective. The lone true vulnerability to this sort of enormous corporate power is labor power. They don’t operate without workers. (Although they would love to, and that is what the underlying battle over AI is really about.) It can feel a little ridiculous, to the knot of sweaty people walking a picket line, looking up at the sheer glass facade of the Amazon headquarters, or the blank and chilling walls of the endless fulfillment center, to imagine that we are responsible for controlling an institution big and ubiquitous enough to build these monuments to capitalism. But we know that is true. How do we know? Because the companies know. That is why they themselves are continually organizing against us. If they didn’t fear us, they would have given us what we want a long time ago…I write about organized labor because it is at the center of everything that will make or break the future of America. It is wrongly perceived as a niche topic. That is what the companies would like you to think. Only six percent of private sector workers have a union, and if you are not part of those lucky few, America would have you believe that “labor” is an alien concept to you, safe to ignore. Meanwhile, the trillion dollar companies are organizing and growing, organizing and growing. No matter who you are, or where you live, or what you do, the question of whether the Amazon Labor Union can successfully win a contract and go on to organize dozens more warehouses is of vital material importance to you and the future of your country. No matter what your job is, or how much you despise the wanton elites of Hollywood, the outcome of the writers and the actors' strike matters to you. And if you are the richest and most famous Hollywood actor, ensconced comfortably in a mansion, I am here to tell you that you should be doing everything that you can possibly do to see to it that more low-paid retail workers selling iPhones at Apple stores are able to unionize…this battle is going to continue as long as you are alive. Presenting you with the illusion that these battles are isolated, or that the organizing of people very different than you is of no consequence for you, is a central goal of capital’s project to expand its own sphere of power until it covers everything.
If you want the world to become more just, if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, if you want poor people not to be poor anymore, I would offer this: "the world is about to turn" is a good image, but a more helpful image right now may be a large group of people that can stop every wheel, and truly the world itself, from turning at all. If only there were extremely visible opportunities to witness that in action right now.
As I’m writing this, SAG-AFTRA, the main union for film and television performers that represents 160,000 workers including "actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, voiceover artists, and other media professionals", has just announced that they will begin a strike at midnight. This is their first strike in over four decades. It is their first strike in over six decades that will coincide with a strike from WGA West, which is the main union for film and television writers, and whose 11,000 members have already been on strike since May. To give you an idea of how different a world we had during that 1960 strike, television barely existed and the union president who led the actors through that strike was Noted Labor Hero Ronald Reagan.
The SAG-AFTRA strike, especially when combined with the WGA strike, is perhaps the largest and most visible strike you have seen in years. Not only will the combined absence of writers and actors scramble and delay film and television release schedules further down the line, but all promotion that actors do for film and television projects - and promotion is a big part of the job - has also ceased. Stars will not go to movie premieres; the cast of Oppenheimer already walked out of their own premiere. They will skip the Emmy awards. They will not do interviews with Fallon or Colbert. Other unions in Hollywood that represent stagehands or set designers or drivers won't cross the SAG-AFTRA pickets so their work will come to halt as well. Chances are good you will see a commercial with no actors or voiceover, and instead just a still image with a robotic voice reading "you won't last thirty seconds eating this yogurt". Strikes are easy to miss in America, given our low union density and the invisibility to which we tend to consign the working poor. But you will notice this strike.
And to be clear, we're not talking about just movie stars here (or famous writers); the overwhelming majority of SAG-AFTRA and WGA members are not millionaires or stars or even household names, but working people trying to get by. Some of them worked on one of the most successful shows of their era, but still had to tend bar or go on food stamps because studios wanted to pay them as little as possible. Some of them worked on another one of the most successful shows of their era, but their boss was such a racist piece of shit that they couldn't feel safe on the job. Those are just the stories we’ve heard in the past two weeks, about people we’d consider “successful”. In one sense, SAG-AFTRA’s fight is about a world where everyone, not just the independently wealthy, has the chance to make a reliable and stable living working in the arts, which has become extremely difficult to do in the post-streaming era.
And in another sense, this strike, like all strikes, is about who we want working in jobs like these and how we want them to be treated. If a person works in a job, do they deserve to do that job safely, to have a reasonable workload, to support their family with the wages and benefits of only that job, to know that they won't suddenly be laid off, to retire at a good age? Let's ask the question differently: do you want to go to a hospital where every nurse is overloaded with patients, overscheduled to the point of exhaustion, and worried about getting axed when the hospital needs to cut costs? Would you send your kids to a school where the teacher did not make enough money to buy meat at the grocery store, and was always half-asleep because she also had to tend bar on the side to make rent? Do you think the only people who should be able to do these jobs are ones who already married rich? And as for arts workers, well, a question like "do orchestra musicians deserve a good full-time wage and benefits?" is always tangled up with questions like "should everyone have the chance to hear live symphonies?" Should we be able to enjoy art that sustains us, made by people who love their craft and work hard at it and learn from others working at that same craft, or do we just want corporate flacks to feed a thousand old scripts and a thousand old headshots into ChatGPT and stick us with whatever the computer shits out? I know that plenty of movies and TV feel like that already, but I still want to live in a world where people can work together to create brilliant unpredictable things like First Reformed and Mad Max: Fury Road and Better Call Saul and American Vandal and Eastbound and Down and, you know, Sorry To Bother You. I want people to watch these things and feel and think differently because of them, and I want people to find their way to careers, sustainable and stable careers, where they can make and work on projects like those.
The writers and actors have tried asking nicely. They have tried negotiating. They have tried talking it out. The studios have openly stated that their main negotiation tactic is to stonewall until writers and actors start getting evicted from their homes and come crawling back to the bargaining table. In response, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher’s barnburning speech kicking off the strike called the entire labor movement “the essential contributors that make the machine run” and by the end the speech basically turned into the part of that MCR song that goes “Stand up fucking tall, don't let them see your back/And take my fucking hand and never be afraid again.” In Drescher’s speech, it’s pretty easy to find the demands for respecting the dignity of work and for solidarity, and it’s pretty easy to find a hunger for righteousness. That should tell you a lot about whose side you are on.
There is no other option for these unions, there is no other option for a world that needs real art and real expression to sustain and understand itself. Those who work are fundamentally pitted against those who own. The Gospel and the teachings of the church tell us, when it comes to those who work and those who own, whose side we are supposed to be on. Those who work have tried everything else in their power to improve their material conditions, and those who own don't care as long as the world keeps turning and they can keep making money. The only option left is to stop the world from turning. Now, Hollywood is shut down, and this is the most visible strike we may see in our lifetimes. Except for the other one coming in August.
The largest private sector union contract in America is between UPS and 340,000 delivery drivers represented by the Teamsters. But that contract is about to expire, and negotiations on the next contract aren't going well, and if there isn't a new contract in place by August 1st, every UPS delivery driver in America will stop working.
UPS was the company that provided essential logistics and delivery services throughout a global pandemic, the company that we all relied on to get our stuff safely, so we’re going to notice this strike too. From 2019-2022, the company grew 35% in revenue to the highest take in the company’s history; UPS is doing just fine. The problem, of course, is that the people who got most of that money were folks like UPS' CEO who makes $19 million a year for sitting in meetings that are just people saying "choiceful" in different intonations. Very little of that money went to the actual drivers, who die of heatstroke in delivery trucks because the CEO isn't "choiceful" enough to put AC in the trucks. The drivers are those who work, and their work keeps us alive. Those who own UPS try as hard as they can to pay those who work as little as possible; where they can, those who own UPS hires them to work part-time, so UPS can avoid giving those who work impractical luxuries like healthcare and sick days.
The drivers who do the work that keeps us alive - and the artists who make the work that nourishes us as we try to stay alive - deserve to do their jobs with dignity, live in comfort, provide for their families, and retire with some stability. Everyone deserves that. But there are very rich people, those who own, those who make money without driving the trucks or sitting in the writers room or showing up on set at 4am to be in the background of the scene, who want to keep making as much money as possible without any interruptions, who want the world to just keep turning and the numbers to just keep going up, and God forbid they spend any of that money on those who work. So those who work may have to stop working in two more weeks, and since no other American logistics company has anywhere near the capacity needed to pick up the slack, the world is really going to stop turning. It has to stop turning, and the numbers have to stop going up, because that is the only thing that those who own can understand.
All I really want to say is this: we are living in a unique historical moment that allows us to witness, and maybe even live out, an important teaching of our faith, on a scale that we have not seen in decades. There will likely be over half a million Americans on strike simultaneously come August 1st, and that hasn’t happened in my lifetime. In a few months, they strikers could very well be joined by 150,000 auto workers1. We are seeing the lowly working together to cast down the mighty, as Luke's Gospel sings. We are seeing the irruption of the poor into our history, as Gustavo Gutierrez writes. We are seeing a just cause that requires the support of the full power of the Gospel, as Oscar Romero proclaimed. We are seeing "the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted", as Gaudium et Spes teaches us. This is a chance to grow "a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker…a time for pressure groups, for direct action, and radicalism," as Dorothy Day remembered. And we are seeing these workers use the only tool left that is going to work. If you want to develop a deeper understanding of your faith, I would encourage you to learn about, learn from, and materially support these workers any way you can. If you can join a picket line and stand with and talk to the striking workers, do that. If you can give to a strike fund, do that. At a minimum, you should look at the people brave enough to take a collective risk and stop the world from turning, you should feel the same overwhelming joy and anticipation that led Mary to burst into song, and you should say to yourself, in the words of Boots Riley and The Coup, "oh yeah, alright, hell yeah, that's tight".
You can donate to support striking SAG-AFTRA and WGA members experiencing financial hardship here or here or here. I got these links from this article and also Adam Conover says it’s good.
But I would say that any UPS strike is likely to be very short, given, you know, that UPS is going to start losing about $200 million per day of the strike. The last UPS strike (in 1997) ended in two weeks.