unpopular opinion but i think the film and tv industries should have better labor laws even if it makes it harder or impossible to depict certain things

i dont care if it makes it harder to produce game of thrones or whatever, acting should not leave women traumatized

Okay I know this is about acting and people are getting more traction about it (sexuality safety coordinators are a job! yell about them. demand your shows get them) but

Any person who has worked on a set for more than a few years has at least one person they know who died.  

Not usually on set, but afterwards.  Because we don’t have anyone shutting down production for unsafe practices when “unsafe” means 16 hour days.  Or more.  For weeks.  Finishing a day before hour 12 (not including lunch) is considered an early leave.

I had teachers tell us not to, unless we absolutely had to, take music video gigs because they’ll work you for 24 hours and send you to drive home.  And if we had to work that, pull over and nap in our car because multiple people per year fall asleep at the wheel and go over the canyons around LA.

I know you mean acting but please.  Don’t forget the crew.  We have a shockingly high rate of suicide because these working schedules leave us with no sleep, no time outside of work, and it destroys lives, relationships, and families.  Burnout is high.  Chronic illness and broken bodies are common.  Cocaine use in order to get through a 20 hour day is rampant.  Every single one of your reality shows is fueled by cocaine.

The number of days that are scheduled to shoot a feature has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades.  Which means longer days.

Netflix shows are notorious for being poorly organized, understaffed, and long days.

There are labor laws but what they do is levy fines.  Those fines are either factored into budget, people are bullied into not reporting actual hours, or crew members see them as incentive to take those jobs because more money and cost of living is high.  (Also this industry has a crew culture of dick measuring by sticking your wang in a blender and boasting about how many 100 hour weeks you pulled.)

this can be applied for people working in animation as well. Like I know people who work at Pixar and they straight up work 12 hour days and go into work on weekends to meet their deadlines. The incredibles 2 made over a billion dollars and Pixar still cut jobs due to “budget”. The entertainment industry is a business at the end of the day. There here to make money and they are going to do it at the expense of workers because they know no one is going to do anything about it.

This is why I get pissy when people have a go about British TV shows only producing 10-12 episodes per season at most, instead of 24. Do you know why? Because the UK has fucking labour laws.

When I worked on BBC Causalty, as soon as it hit 5pm, everything stopped. The producer/director etc would have a quick meeting to decide if we’d go into overtime or schedule it in later in the week. And I got an extra payslip in the mail for every minute of overtime I did, even though I was paid a weekly rate.

I don’t care if it means producing less content. I don’t care if it means it costs twice as much - if treating your creatives and your crew like shit is needed to make your show, then your show doesn’t deserve to get made.

And that’s aside from the fact that actors are often exploited, neglected, coerced into doing scenes they’re uncomfortable with etc or outright abused by directors for the sake of ~performance.

No art is worth that.

it's always "did you really need to burn down your workplace to prove a point" and never "how was the revenge arson? did you have fun doing revenge arson? were the flames pretty?"

um.

Context for other users:

On the morning of April 7, 2026, a fire was started at the Kimberly-Clark Distribution Center in Ontario, California. It escalated to a six-alarm fire and took nearly twelve hours to extinguish. The facility was completely destroyed and declared a "total loss". There were no injuries or deaths. An employee who was working in the warehouse is accused of arson.

Authorities stated that the employee had shared videos of himself starting the fire on Facebook, saying "all you had to do was pay us enough to live" and "there goes your inventory" while lighting pallets of toilet paper ablaze.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS PAY US ENOUGH TO LIVE

No injuries. No deaths. This was a protest fire. This is why unions are important, to prevent frustrations like these, to ensure people are paid enough to live.

🔥🔥🔥🔥

as someone who has been involved in union organizing through my dad's union since i was literally in second grade, the way that people on tumblr think unions work drives me literally insane

unions do so much more than just strike. unions bargain. unions sit in at meetings with upper management. unions help people navigate benefits. unions coordinate aid drives for disabled members. my union ran a donations campaign for me for the interim between the end of my allotted paid leave and my disability claim

"unionize your workplace" means so much more than "talk to your coworkers about striking." you gotta actively know what a union is and what a union isn't before you can form one. calls to unionize should lead to more people learning their rights and learning how unions work, and coordinating with orgs like seiu and the teamsters and the aft (and if you don't know what those are, look them up).

My union found me a legal expert to help me check over my last redundancy settlement for free, provided private medical cover whilst I was unemployed, and negotiated a good deal on cheap insurance for their members. It is so much more than strikes.

lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.

what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?

pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then

...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.

Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.

I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.

If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.

[Description:

An er doctor that wants to just lounge around does not make me feel confident as a patient

how long and how many days a week do you think ER doctors work. i think they're right to want to just fucking chill. i want a well rested doctor treating me and not one who just pulled a 24 hour shift and then a 12 and another 12 before another 24, with only a few hours of legally mandated breaks inbetween.

Yeah some of us want a 30-hour work week because we've read the experimental research trials. People aren't any less productive and they are happier and less stressed and feel less leisure time pressure.

It turns out that working 40 hours a week is just too much. Full stop, no ifs ands or buts. The tiredness and loss of focus it induces is enough that you're about 25% less productive per hour when you're on a 40-hour work week, and so the extra 10 hours a week cancels out. This effect is a little bit more pronounced for white collar work and a little bit less pronounced for blue collar work, but there's functionally not enough of a difference to care. And people who are working more than that actually become less productive in total.

The thing is that you don't immediately gain the benefits of being fully rested and focused by working less on just one day, or even one week. It can even take months to settle into the pattern of higher productivity per working hour, and that's frankly miraculously quick given that full burnout can take years to recover from. And during that transition you will be less immediately productive. Particularly for people who pride themselves on being hard workers and how much overtime they put in, the notion that working less can get just as much done can feel absurd and even insulting. Because it seems so painfully obvious that you get less done when you do less, and any experiences of being invited to do so feel like they back that up.

But it's true. We are all simply working more than we need to, pointlessly, to no benefit at all. It is an appallingly pointless waste of human life.

Also, I don’t actually care if someone is less productive working 30 hours a week or 20 hours a week. We do not need endless productivity and it’s bad for the earth and bad for people. We would be completely fine if everyone was half as productive. Literally we would be better off. It does not matter that a 30 hour work week is as productive as a 40 hour work week. Reject that framing!

when i am going to the ER for something i want the doctor who sees me to be FUCKING WELL RESTED please

i want that motherfucker on his A-game. i want his ass alert and awake and with energy and attention span to spare. if i'm coming in with something that turns out to be serious, i don't want to end up dead on the floor because the doctor who saw me was on his third consecutive 20 hour shift and barely holding his brain together with spit and toothpaste

you know you're good at your job when every single person tells you "thank god you're back"

Boss makes a dollar You make a dime You read unsanitary pirate slash On company time

Look if you read fanfic on the clock and everyone is still relieved that you're back you must just be that got-dang good at your job

Fam, some jobs are like being a firefighter. 90% of the time you're not doing anything that important, but by golly, when they need you, they need you.

Some jobs, you can fuck around for six hours a day, but you know what you're doing so well that the work you do in two hours would take somebody else ten.

Some jobs, you spend those two hours preventing other people from making mistakes that would take 100 hours to fix if you weren't there to steer them right.

So don't buy into the idea that if you're not working 480 minutes a day, you're not doing enough to get paid a day's wages. That's the capitalism talking.

You're a better employee when you keep your morale up, and sometimes you do that by reading fanfiction on the clock in between putting out your little fires.

there's an actual term for this, it's called "waiting for assignment" and the day I learned it cleared up a lot of stupid guilt I was still carrying around for reading fanfiction on the clock despite being the person no one could live without.

essentially, at some jobs you are "engaged to wait," meaning something may not be happening right now but you are being paid to be around when it does. it's a real federally recognized concept and you are morally, legally, and within the bounds of business norms allowed to kill the protestant guilt tripper in your mind telling you that every minute not spent working is stealing from the company or being lazy. it's not. you're extremely valuable and your time being paid to sit there is worth every cent you're being paid.

also, I learned all of this from Ask a Manager, here's a piece where she talks about it, and if you're not reading AAM you should be, especially if you're job hunting or want to be soon.

I swear, some of you people somehow manage to possess all of the three most unfortunate character traits someone can have: a) kinda stupid, b) obnoxiously contrarian, c) deeply annoying.

stuff you say when you don’t give a fuck about women quite frankly

Hence the not-uncommon adage that the washing machine did even more for women's liberation than the birth control pill

Second half is even better

#okay now join the IWW and train to be a Salter 🤞🏽🤞🏽🥺🥺

Nah besties, don’t keep this one in the tags, how many people on this hellsite even know what a salter is?

Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.

A ceo leaves for a week, very few people notice.

The custodial staff leave for a day, everyone notices.

Sanitation and custodial workers deserve far more money and respect than they generally get.

I don't think people understand the degree to which society is kept alive by the labor of the least well-regarded professions. If sewage technicians and sanitation workers and their expertise and knowledge were to disappear tomorrow, the streets would pile high with bodies in every city. We live in a world where we get to be blessedly ignorant to just how fast, how brutally and how violently cholera can rip through a community. How many babies it can kill. How many elderly bodies it can devour alive. You've never seen what it's like when typhoid takes root.

"Oh but we have modern medicine" if you don't have clean drinking water and a way to dispose of your piss and shit and trash you are going to fucking die. No if or but or maybe, you are dead, and so are half the people you know.

People hear "modern medicine" and they think about medical doctors with six-figure salaries. They don't think about sanitation workers, or custodians, or drug store clerks, or usually even nursing assistants. But "modern medicine" is a product of all these people's work and more.

To pick an obvious example: London didn't stop having cholera outbreaks because doctors go to every sick person and heal them before their crap infects other people, but because we figured out that cholera is caused by contaminated crap getting in the water supply. Sure, that discovery can be traced to a famous doctor, but John Snow's work means nothing if there aren't thousands of people working to keep crap out of London's water. And doctors don't do that!

it exists to divide the working class. All labour is skilled labour. Yes including that one. Yes, including that one too.

Do you know what's unskilled labour? Owning capital. There's no labour involved, thus requires no skill. And you can tell because people can be born into owning capital.

This is privilege. My partner had an "essential job" all through the pandemic. He was not allowed to work from home either. If he'd pulled this he would've been fired.

Well, yeah. But if people who have enough privilege to take a stand against workplace exploitation do take a stand, that helps slow down the ongoing creep of how much they're allowed to dick you around at work.

Make no mistake, by "not allowed to work from home," this employer meant "you will not be paid for work you do at home," while clearly expecting the employee to do work (such as answering work emails and taking work calls) while at home. (If the employer didn't expect that, then they wouldn't have noticed when the worker stopped doing it.)

If you're expected to respond when the boss summons you outside of work hours, you are on-call. If you're on-call, you should be paid.

Expecting white-collar workers to be on-call for no extra pay is wage theft, no different from if a retail or food service employee is told to, "Clock out before you clean up/close out your station, so you don't go over your hours."

(And yes, this example happens a lot. If it happens to you, in the US, you should report it to the Department of Labor. It's confidential; your employer will never find out it was you who turned them in.)

We need to stop saying anyone who has the power to do absolutely anything is privileged, because it isn't as easy or as clear cut as it seems from the summary. You also don't know how this worked out for the employee! You don't know if they were fired for this! Every worker has power to push back against unfair and illegal working practices. Every worker also takes a huge risk when they push back because workers generally do not have much power on their own.

It is still putting their livelihood on the line to make a point, not just for their position but any other worker in their position.

A lot of folks who do this put their jobs on the line by making this point. Workplace retaliation can still happen even if they can't directly fire you for it. Reduction in hours, meticulously going through your work for any non-dotted is or crossed ts, it's getting your work examined with an extra fine toothed comb so that they can use anything as an excuse to fire you - because if they can't legally fire you for working to rule, they will use every bullshit rule to fire you instead.

I once had a functional ability assessment, which was supposed to protect me from doing things that would injure me further while I was injured at work. But instead, because it said "bending and lifting" were against the FAA, they pressured me to sign something that said if *I* violated the FAA they could fire me (without notice, without pay in lieu of notice et all), because technically I was the one who was violating workplace safety by not following the FAA. I had to duck into the back room and away from any eyes to tie my shoe because they would count it as "bending" and be able to fire me on the spot.

And all I wanted was a chair to sit on while I did cashier work on cement floors with a spinal cord injury and instead they made my life a living hell in the job.

You cannot call a worker taking initial action against unreasonable and/or illegal work practices and call it a privilege. It is not a privilege to be put into the position where you have to take action for your worker rights.

Especially without knowing the outcome of the action. This person could have been fired after taking action for all anyone here knows. No one knows if this person has a safety net, or a support network to catch them. We don't know their situation other than they had had enough of unfair workplace practices.

Being able to take a stand against your employer's unreasonable or illegal work practices is a form of privilege.

However: Using your privilege is not always a bad thing! It's bad if you do bad things with it and good if you do good things with it. Being privileged is not innately bad, any more than being physically strong or having perfect pitch is, and criticizing people for being privileged is some Harrison-Bergeron-strawman nonsense.

"If stuff was just handed to me I'd have no motivation to do anything! That's human nature!" No, babe, that's depression. Psychologically healthy people are still motivated to do things even when their survival isn't being actively threatened.

[Image description: tweet by Roxi Horror @roxiqt on March 30, 2022 at 11:13 AM: “’Oh, so you think everyone should just be handed enough money to live?’ lol. lmao. yeah.”]

okay so like, we all know that housekeeping in a hotel is a Shit Job, right?

I worked with a woman who was independently wealthy. But she liked working housekeeping. So she did. And if the manager got bitchy with her, she’d just shrug and be like “Okay, I can quit.”

Like the manager treated her like a human being because she knew she had to because otherwise she’d lose one of her best workers.

Yes, everyone should be just handed the money to live.

I worked with a lady who’s husband made more than enough to support them both.  She just did the retail to have something to do with herself part-time.

There’s a lot of people who’d happily do the same sort of thing.  Honestly?  A lot of the jobs we consider “shitty” jobs?  Are shitty because the employees are treated like garbage.

If employees weren’t being screwed over by people higher up the chain constantly or being forced to kiss the asses of customers currently shitting all over them, those jobs would by and large be a whole lot more bearable, and appealing to more people!!

Plus rich people are just handed a lot of money, whether they earn it or not, and no one questions that. Only poor people getting money gets interrogated over and over and over again.

I’d like to add a footnote to this thread that the US gives more money (by way of the income tax reduction) to homeowners than it does to poor people who need subsidized housing.

My best teacher in high school was the guy who had previously made a ton of money that he could’ve retired at like 30. Man just wanted to teach teenagers.

If people as a whole were handed enough money to live on, maybe more people like him wouldn’t be put off by the poor salary teachers make. (also teachers should be paid a lot more)

There's also this assumption that if people were just handed enough money to live that they'd do absolutely nothing, as if they'd be satisfied being completely bored all the time. They'd still buy food. They'd still buy video games. They'd still go out and get coffee and put money into the economy even if they didn't want to work because they still want to LIVE. They'd buy movies. They'd go DO stuff. I review comic books on the internet and I love doing it, but I often have to compromise on some things because I just can't afford to do otherwise and I stress out about stuff because I need to earn money.

"Psychologically healthy people are still motivated to do things even when their survival isn't being actively threatened."

Speaking for myself, I would be even MORE motivated to do things if my basic needs were guaranteed met. IJS

👆🏾👆🏾👆🏾👆🏾👆🏾

Imagine if people had a disposable income again to buy shit they could enjoy in their free time instead of a perpetual grind of just working and sleeping like a fucking robot