I saw a website about the writers' strike

Context
As a big fan of filmed entertainment, I've been paying a lot of attention to the WGA West strike. I get a lot of my information from whedonesque.com, because of both my admiration for Joss Whedon himself and my respect for this particular fan community. Whedonesque, in its turn, led me to fans4writers.com, which details actions fans can take to support the striking writers.

Commentary
I am wildly ambivalent about unions. On one hand, I recognize that the right to collective bargaining is an important weapon against poverty, injustice and oppression. On the other hand, I don't like closed shops and resented the fact that when I worked as a public school teacher in Texas I was forced to join the teachers’ union. I guess I feel like in a perfect world individuals would make up their own minds about appropriate working conditions and not take jobs that didn’t fulfill them. However, I am nowhere near naive enough to believe this is a perfect world.

Contributing to my confused stance is my recognition that in 21st century America, well-established labor unions can actually benefit employers who think in the long term. They prevent disruptive wildcat strikes and allow enterprises to use standardized contracts for classes of workers, rather than negotiating new terms for each new hire.

So how does this affect my feelings about the writers’ strike? Well, for one thing I’ll say that this seems like one of those circumstances where studios and entertainment corporations ought to be overjoyed to be able to negotiate with one entity, rather than having to work out a payment scheme with each of the thousands of writers they employ. Moreover, because I love writing and writers, I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t get a reasonable percentage of the profits created by their efforts, regardless of the medium.

The upshot is although I’m wildly ambivalent about unions, I’m foursquare behind the WGA West on this particular action. So I’ll be taking some of the actions proposed by fans4writers.com. No visits to promotional websites and no downloading of filmed entertainment until the strike is resolved. Possibly even a phone call or two to network executives.

What did you see today?