Striking Distance

from page 9 workers they have ever met pulled them over on the Polpis Road. Nantucket has never been a hot bed of worker’s rights. It was never Cripple Creek, Lowell, or Matewan. The last thing Starbuck, Coffin, and Macy would have wanted was an International Brotherhood of Whalers. In 1840, a picket line across Straight Wharf would have put everyone off their breakfasts. The mansions on Main Street, just like the ones on Monomoy, Brant Point, and Sconset, were only built by workers. They never lived there.

When Donick Cary and the other WGA writers walk their picket signs down Main Street, the seas part and wonder rides the waves. Most are confused and back away. For some of our vistors, the strikers might as well have borrowed the “big two wheeler” from Young’s and come pedaling out of the Gilded Age with top hats and bustles. For other visitors, the strikers may well have emerged from the Fox News Screen Crawl, complete with horns and inverted crucifixes. For the rest on the sidewalk, the brief picket walk through the waiting-fora-table-crowd should remind them of the power of organized labor. If writers can strike, so can baristas, cooks, waiters, and landscapers. Teachers, cops, and firemen aren’t far behind.

The concerns of the WGA strike feels fairly far off with a $5 drip coffee in one hand and a $7 Nutella Cruffin in the other. I have fifteen shows I mean to watch, and haven’t. Moreover, the audience for movies, shows, and everything else has slipped. We get distracted by shiny things with sparkles and by squirrels.

But the concerns the writers have are concerns that are relevant to anyone who gets a paycheck instead of a dividend. We often see our jobs as something we accept, not as something we chose. We accept the limitations, the assumptions, and the pain that those jobs demand because we don’t see ourselves as artisans joining a project, but as laborers selected for today’s work and grateful for a ride to the jobsite. We fear the power we hold. It’s easier to pretend we don’t.

Conversely, corporate America has seen the future and it drives an Uber. The future doesn’t have a contract, insurance, or a nameplate on the door. It has a carefully tailored opportunity that will pay off sometime tomorrow, if you meet all your “opportunity goals” and get 200 five-star ratings. With AI bursting on all of our screens, “opportunity goals” await all of the other visitors on Main Street. The vice presidents, middle managers, and marketers all need to be looking down the same steep road the writers are walking with their signs. If Law and Order can be written on ChatGPT, so can the Black Rock quarterly reports.

History flatters us with lies. When we walk up Orange Street or Main Street and we let the centuries slip away, we don’t see ourselves as the upstairs maid or a barrel-maker in Hadwen’s factory. No, we see ourselves as Starbuck, Barney, Coffin, and Roche, with boats in the harbor and oil in the warehouse. Those silks are meant for us. As Americans, we tend to see ourselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” instead of proud craftsmen and artisans. We blind ourselves with wishes and lies: the self-deceptions run out just after the paychecks do.

If we were to see ourselves clearly, we would see that we are more like the women pulling weeds from the brick driveway than like the Masters of Industry and their Blessed Children. We are called to our own work, and that work doesn’t pay enough to afford the initiation fee at Nantucket Golf Club. And that’s fine. If one is called to be a weed-puller, let him pull weeds as Michelangelo painted and as Beethoven composed music. But let him have a fair contract—for his labor, for his family, and for his future.

You might have to strike to get that.