All right, welcome back and joining us now is the former political director of
the Teamsters Union, Nicole Brenner Schmidtz, and I wanted to get her on
to talk, especially about what's happening in Hollywood with the writers and the actors
and the sticking point of how artificial intelligence is there. But there's a much
broader issue that is a product of the inflation that we're just talking to Tony
Arnament about, and that is the impact on wages and how do wages keep
up with inflation. So that's why we're seeing this massive number of strikes.
Thank you for joining us, Nicole, appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for
having me. Let's talk a little bit about before we get into Hollywood and
AI, let's talk a little bit about what's going on with UPS. What
is the current status of that. I thought they had changed a new look.
Looks like they've headed off the strike or is that still something that is
in the works. It looks like they've reached a tentative agreement, so that's
great news. Looks like there won't be a strike. Still has to be
a vote amongst the membership, but looks like they've come to a deal and
should be moving forward with that, and of course what I saw put out
with something like a total pay package for drivers or something like one hundred and
seventy thousand dollars, which looks very attractive, but of course, if depending
on what inflation is in a few years, I could look like nothing.
What other aspects of UPS is that I'm because that's just one aspect of people
who work for UPS. What about warehouse workers and other employees? Is that
part of it as well? Well? This was a contract for the workers
who are members of the Teamster's union, so it's probreliminary the drivers. There
are some other workers that could be included in different places. But this is
the largest national contract in the country, which I think a lot of people
don't realize. So many contracts like what we're seeing in LA are really you
know, it's hotel by hotel, and this is national contract. So there
are a lot of things at stake, not just wages. That's what of
course gets the most attention when people are taking a look at contract negotiations and
observing it. But there's pensions, there's benefits, they're safe working environments.
All of those were on the table, and like you said, that's why
there are timelines on these contracts, right, it's a contract for the next
however many years because things change and you need to go back to the bargaining
table and see if this is still a contract that makes sense for those workers.
They're what makes UPS tick and what makes them be able to have such
a large profit margin. Yeah. I've talked to a Darrell Slinty about this
and he said last year this would be the year of labor unions and all
the rest it because of so much inflation that is being cooked into all this
and that has already hit us in so many different ways and everybody is getting
behind. And this are there going to be other ups? Is really big?
We now have an economy that is heavily done by internet purchases and deliveries
and that type of thing. Are there more industries where we're going to see
this? UPS being the biggest one? But are there some others that are
down the line that we're going to see that may result in disruption if they
can't find an agreement like a FedEx or something like that. Well, FedEx
isn't union, so it'll be. But here's what it does do. When
the workers at one company get a certain agreed upon wage and benefits. It
should in fact elevate the entire industry. So that's something that you know,
is really important to remember as to why we have unique contracts in this country
because it does help keep a middle class. It's not just because of inflation.
I mean, certainly there's there's a factor there, but this is something
that workers need to come to the table. They're making sure that they have
working environments that are safe, We're making sure that we have those standards,
and we're making sure that they're being paid a fair wage. You should be
able to work a full time job and not live in poverty. That's not
crazy demand in this country. It's okay to make sure that we're making sure
that what makes this country tick. The people who are cleaning your hotel rooms,
people that are driving your packages can live a nice life with their family,
and they can put food on the table and get a good education for
their kids and go on vacation once a year. I mean, this is
what the American dream is about. And if we continue to allow it to
be just a huge profit margin at companies at the expense of the workers that
are delivering the goods, that's a giant problem for our country overall, and
of course we saw in the pandemic and subsequent parts of that, we've seen
a lot of billionaires made. But in general, when you look at CEO
pay and the multiples of CEO pay to the average salary of the workers,
it really has exploded as well in terms of multiples. Probably nowhere is more
evident than in Hollywood, where there's this concentration there. Let's talk a little
bit about that and about the issues. Earlier in the program, I was
talking about the concerns of Screenwriters Guild in terms of being replaced by Chat GPT.
I mean we're not just talking again about wages, we're talking about them
completely being replaced, and so there's issues. The actors are concerned about that
as well. But screen Screenwriters Guild said they won't even talk to us about
that, which indicates that they're pretty hardcore in terms of having future scripts being
written by Chat GPT or something like that. Tell us a little bit about
what's going on in Hollywood from your perspective, Yeah, I mean, I
think, just to touch quickly on what you said about COVID, I mean
it also showed us what are the essential workers in this country, right,
we were all applauding them, the grocery stores, the nurses, and that's
who we need to make sure is able to have good contracts and fair working
environments going forward. But Hollywood specifically, they see this AI probably them coming
their way, and they think what happens is a lot of times when people
here Hollywood's on strike, you think of George Clooney and Julia Roberts or maybe
leading myself a little bout who the superstars are, but you think of,
you know, these very wealthy making mega millions per movie. But that's not
the bulk of Hollywood, and it's not the bulk of the writers. For
sure. These are a lot of people who are working hard on show to
show and we've seen, you know, there used to be a pretty standard
you had a comedy it was twenty two episodes, or a drama that was
you know, twenty something episodes a season, and now with Netflix and Hulu,
I mean you get seasons that are eight episodes long. Well that's not
as much writing. So there's a decrease in work per series that you're on
in a lot of ways. And then what you said, which is AI
is coming and we haven't even really even seen the beginning of it yet,
but there is a fear that they are going to use that instead of people
for a lot of this writing, and that would be a shame on the
creativity. The other thing that Hollywood is really looking at is these residual checks,
right, I mean, these things are being streamed over and over and
over now on people's who Lose and whatnot, and they're not getting a real
paycheck from that. I mean, there was an actor that was talking the
other day and he's not an actor who maybe definitely knows isn't a super uber
famous, he's been on some shows and he got over fifty residual checks and
it totaled like eighty six dollars. So this is the conversation they're having at
the table. And now the actors have joined the writers in solidarity because frankly,
that strengthens their position, and the actors know how crucial the writers are
to their craft and their work. So it's good to see the solidarity happening
here. But AI is something we're going to be looking at in a lot
of different industries. Starting to get the attention here, but that's going to
be I mean, we've seen it in grocery stores right to TA get to
that place. How many cashiers are there now? Not as many because you've
got twenty self checkouts that one person watches. So we need to have a
conversation about what are AI replacing and what does that mean for a workforce in
America. Yeah, when you're talking about grocery stores, I think we're gonna
see that escalator. I just saw that when Dixie and another chain were bought
by Aldis. Now all these is not all that big in the United States,
but they're very big in the UK and in Europe. And they have
of course Corbin I forget which one I get them mixed up two brothers,
one as Piers, the others Jeremy. One of them went into an Aldies
and they didn't want him to pay with cash. You don't have to be
actually this, and they've got other things. You know, they're getting very
highly automated where you enter in and you've got biometric ID or something like that,
or you don't get into the store and then it follows you around and
charges you automatically. That's the type of thing with ALDI buying domestic grocery store
chains. I think we're really going to see that proliferate. And so that's,
as you point out, that's going to be another big issue there.
But getting back to the Hollywood stuff, it is and when we look at
this, as you point out when you sent this to me, you said,
there's one point seven million people outside of California. That's the other thing.
You know, people think, oh, you know George Clooney or whatever,
But it's not just the big stars that you see, the multi million
stuff in Hollywood. The film industry, a lot of that is outside of
California. One point seven million people who work outside the state one hundred and
fifty eight billion dollars a year in wages, and so it's a very big
industry, is not limited to one town or one state. Earlier in the
show, when I was talking about artificial intelligence, I pointed out that in
New York, there's a law that's been introduced saying that if you're going to
use AI to replace some of these actors, then you're not going to get
the tax breaks that they used to incentivize people during production into their states.
So there's different things like that, and they're starting to happen. Are we
seeing that in other places as well that you're aware of. I don't know
that we've seen it official in other places, but I think we will see
that a tactic that some states take. There is certainly growing conversation happening in
state legislatures and in Congress about are we going to be able to wrap ourselves
and laws around AI before it's too late, frankly, because this is something
we need to catch them. We're still catching up in some ways on the
Internet at this point. I mean a lot of times you see new laws
can you share certain images of someone and the law says it's okay. We
sort of know intuitively the ick factor and that you know that's not maybe something
that the person gave as what they'd want to share with the public. But
the law hasn't caught up with the fact that we have phones that snap a
picture and send in text and can you know, it just hasn't caught up
to that. So I think we're going to see that be a situation with
AI in many different ways, but in this particular conversation as to the jobs,
but the actors are very worried about can their likeness be used without their
consent in AI? So this is something that we need to stop acting like
is in our future and start having real conversations and discussions and hearings about right
now. Yeah, I talked about about a decade ago. I did a
reference to early in the show. I did report about a movie called I
think it was titled The Congress, but it was about Robin Wright. And
she made this deal with a studio that they could digitize her essentially and you
know, very deeply digitize her entire image, her voice, everything, her
persona, and then they would own her. And it's kind of interesting when
you think about that. We haven't seen that yet, but we're right at
the cusp of something like that being done, and they could kind of see
that coming about a decade ago. When you talk about residuals versus the company's
copyrights, we see that the corporations get their copyrights extended and extended and extended.
These things have gone longer and longer and longer. Used to be that
it was tied to the person's life, and then a little bit beyond that
for their errors and that type of stuff, and now you know, they've
extended it quite a bit below beyond that. But this is all something that
is really being done to the benefit of the corporations, not so much to
other people. And as they own these types of things, own people's images,
just like they have done with copyright music or copyrights of film and that
type of thing. We're going to see that to an increasing degree. And
I think it's kind of interesting as you're talking about technology, how it is
rapidly advancing and people are kind of on their back heel in Hollywood in terms
of the writers and the actors. You know, how do we how do
we keep from all this stuff accruing to the corporations. We're not getting our
residuals, but they're getting their copyright residuals, if you will, extended into
perpetuity. But you know, you've got streaming, which is out there,
You've got and that's changed things quite a bit. And then you've also got
kind of the death of cable and even broadcast linear TV is really collapsing,
so the distribution channels are really changing rapidly as well. All of this is
in a state of flux, you know, whether you're talking about residuals and
copyrights or the way that people are viewing the information as well. Then as
people, actors and writers being completely replaced by artificial intelligence. How far away
are they from reaching an agreement. There's so many different issues here. It
doesn't sound like they're really close yet coated. But you might even see more
people sort of join the solidarity, different production crews. We'll see what Broadway
does. I mean, they could even grow this. There's radio that's not
that it is represented by unions, but not on the strike right now,
like at NPR and places, So we may see it grow. Dad could
force the hand a little more. We may see them start to make some
gains at the negotiating table. I do think it's great that a lot of
the quote unquote mega stars have given funds to the strike fund. A strike
fund is absolutely key to if a union is able to stand up and stay
on strike because a lot of these people, again like they're not getting their
benefits. They're obviously not making a salary, and the strike fund is able
to help sustain them and their families through this time. Yeah, that's been
one of the practical issues about strikes, the fact that you know, if
it's an extended strike, even if you get some gains that may have been
wiped out by the amount of time that you're out when you when you look
at how we move forward with us. This has been a big agenda for
a very long time. And I've been talking about this for a very long
time, universal basic income and the statements being made by a lot of people
in the tech industry. But even when Michael Bloomberg was running for president,
he made those statements and everybody, so, look, he just call farmers
stupid. Well, he didn't really call farmers stupid. He was talking about
how farmers were replaced and they went to factory workers, and he said,
and the factory workers have their thing, but we can replace the farmers.
We can replace the factory workers. And he said, right now, we're
looking at how we're going to replace everybody. When you start talking about solidarity
with other groups, he said, we can replace everybody. Our only issue
is how do we keep that pacified so they don't come after us with guillotines.
So that's what he said. And so this has been a process where
you look at Bloomberg or you look at Elon Musk, they've talked about massive
unemployment. I remember about a decade ago there was a South Korea survey and
they were talking about how much unemployment would happen with artificial intelligence replacing doctors and
lawyers. It was up in sixty seventy percent range for transportation workers that we
were talking about earlier. You know, that's a I don't know if that
was a part of the UPS strike, but the issue of self driving delivery
vehicles or drones or anything like that, that is also something that has been
on the horizon, and they've had a target on pretty much every industry where
there's transportation, where there's white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, they're looking
to replace everybody with artificial intelligence and robotics. So I am wondering if this
was going to be the part of something that is much bigger. Did the
self driving issues and drone things come into play in the UPS contract as far
as you know, I don't know if they were part of the contracts.
I wasn't in the negotiations, but it's certainly something that every transportation union,
from the pilots to TWU to be to you are concerned and working on and
having conversations about. There is a concern they've tried to congress, for example,
is trying to make trains only have one man one person in the engineer
seat, right, and there's a build like calling making sure that there's always
a two man crew because there is a safety element to this, is there.
It's a concern across the board, right. I mean it's also so
long till I think they're going to try and tell you, well, let's
have robots serve the coffee on the airplanes. Well let's let's talk about this
when they when the robots think it's a good idea to open the door.
Also, they're not a waitress in the air. They are a safety element
to your flight as well. But we're continue to see this and you know
you mentioned it's I think people really place it in blue collar, right.
They think of the factories, they think of farmers, and that's true,
but it is a probably there's a possibility that it's the lawyers and they're having
robots right the bulk of the briefs, you know, if they're gonna if
the doctors have become basically a lookup table for a pharmaceutical drug, which is
a lot of them operate. You know, you come in, you got
ex symptoms. You know, you could easily have a AI that's going to
do as good a better job than the doctor is going to do of that.
And that was the thing that surprised me when I saw it a decade
ago, the fact that for a lot of white collar jobs, they saw
that as and now we're starting to see that with the writing and other things
like that, they saw them as more vulner bowl than the blue collar jobs
to being replaced. And so it is going to be a major disruption in
our society in addition to what we're seeing with inflation. That is I think
the bigger issue, and that is the artificial intelligence thing. And they have
been looking at this for the longest time. I remember when Nuber was in
its early days and you had Travis Kalownik was still the CEO, and he
said, the reason our cars are expensive is because of that other dude in
the car with you, and we're going to make him go away. So
they got people who are you working as a gig job and supplying their own
car, maintaining their own car. Meanwhile they're working on how they're going to
slip that person's throat. But we've seen some really bad results. As you're
talking about the robot serving coffee on the airplane, we've seen some really horrific
things already with the self driving cars, and they just had a big traffic
jam I talked about yesterday in San Francisco. The people there hate those driverless
taxis. They're creating safety issues around fires and other things and creating massive traffic
jams going particular places and just stopping and none of them will move. And
so there's a lot of issues with that, besides replacing everybody and just putting
us all on some kind of a government handout welfare check, which people don't
want right exactly. It's complicated, and we can't keep putting our heads in
the sand and ignoring it. It has to be something that we're taking a
look at, and we have to look at it with an imagination what could
be in ten twenty years, because there are a lot of safety and danger
concerns when it comes to this too, because they don't they know how to
set it up so that it starts learning. But even the scientists building it
are not completely clear on what point it starts to teach itself more and what
exponentials that happens. And we don't even know how it's doing that. You
know, it's like it sounds like a sci fi movie, but it's not.
It's like, at what point do they does the the AI thing,
the robot or whatever, say oh, well, this is the danger and
it's the people. And when it does with that and can we control it?
I mean, I know that sounds like an insane Hollywood movie, but
we're closer to that than I think people really realize. Well, you know,
we saw that already happened in the last couple of years. You know,
we gotta we gotta here's our here's our problem, and we're not sure
the solution, but we gotta it really quiet quickly. We gotta do it
at warp speed. We don't know if this thing works, we don't know
if it's dangerous, but we gotta do at warp speed. And you wind
up having some people who make a tremendous, obscene amount of money and other
people who get hurt. And this, I think is is being played out
in this You know, we have all these different nightmare scenarios that people have
always talked about about runaway technology and about you know, the terminator type of
technology, Skynet becoming self aware and coming after us. I just talked today
about some new information that shows that it might just go the opposite direction.
If it starts the more content that it puts out on the Internet that is
synthetic, as it starts to read its own content, it within about five
generations of synthetic stuff. It's kind of like cannibalism is kind of like the
Kreutz failed Yakov disease or mad cow disease. It's feeding on itself and it
just becomes incredibly stupid and instead of becoming incredibly smart, it becomes incredibly stupid
and useless. So that was a hopeful bit of information. Maybe this thing
isn't going to become super intelligent. Maybe it's going to become super stupid.
And in the interim of either two of these scenarios fulfilling themselves, you're going
to displace people out of jobs. You're going to create an economic problem in
situation where there aren't these middle class jobs to have. So we really need
to have the leaders of this country and people pay attention to this and figure
out how are we ensuring that we have an economy that's going to keep running
and that's a strong middle class. I mean, that's the backbone of the
US. And when you've got strong union representation. It helps keep a strong
middle class in America. And talk a little bit about the extent of this
outside of la and outside of Hollywood. I mentioned some of the numbers at
one point seven million people, fifty eight billion dollar industry. How is that?
You know? I know when I was living in North Carolina, they
had offered a lot of subsidies to film companies to film there, and so
they were making a lot of films there and there were a lot of people
who are working in the industry. How is that looking now? How is
that distributed? And there's still a lot of films being made in a lot
of different places. Georgia has a great deal, New York, Illinois,
Washington States. There's a lot of the industry that's around the United States,
and some because states very specifically, like you said, in North Carolina pass
maybe different tax credits or other incentives to have the filming come there and other
places because they're just so geographically perfect for so much of what they're making that
it's it's a place that makes sense. We do see a lot go to
Canada as well. I think there's a lot of desire for the US to
keep that in country, but we do see a lot of filming that that
happens up there for the same sorts of reasons, So you know, it's
something that's going to affect states outside Like you said of California, it's it's
a real problem for some states now because of how much they've grown the industry
there are taking a big hit on the economy. Yeah, yeah, gonna
affect a lot of people. The Illinois Nurses Association is involved in some labor
strikes also. What's going on there. It sounds like there is some dispute
about the working environment and the safety and I think we have to remember that
a lot of times what the demands are for hours and those sorts of situations
arise that these workers need to be sure to have a working environment that is
safe for them. And particularly if you're thinking about your nurses, you don't
want them to be walking around overtired or in a possible safety issue, because
that's not good for any of the patients either. I believe they went on
a two day strike, so it's sort of a warning strike, and this
is you know, showing what the problem could be and what they'd have to
deal with if they were on a full strike and that's often what we see
with hospital workers and whatnot. But yeah, this is not Again, it's
not just about the pay. It's more about their working environment. Well,
I ask you, is it Does it have anything to do with some of
the mandates that happened in terms of vaccines and stuff like that, because I
know that was a real sticking point. A lot of people left their employer,
left some of the hospitals that were doing that type of thing, and
went somewhere else. Is that a factor in this Those kind of mandates haven't
come up in this particular strikes as a factor. But you know, the
medical workers, much like our army and our navy and whatnot, have had
a lot of vaccine requirements for their entire job. I mean that sort of
comes with entering that industry. That was not simply a COVID mandate. There's
a whole host of vaccines that they have to have to be able to work
in that particular environment. So that's nothing new for for a healthcare worker.
Yeah, I was just wondering if maybe it was a new concern for them
and it's going to start taking place there. But that was that was throughout
Illinois. Are there are other things like that happening in other states that you
know of in terms of the health industry. I haven't heard of a new
one in the health industry right now, although you know, stuff pops up.
I know the nurses in Buffalo how to strike a couple of years ago
and successfully met that. But we are seeing possibly UAW and workers in Michigan
putting together the union made cars. They might be on strike soon. There's
discussions about that. We obviously have the hotel workers and strike in in Los
Angeles, and we're seeing a lot of organizing, you know, I mean,
that's the other element of this. It's not just those who have it
and are striking, but we're seeing a lot of new organizing happening and people
working to see if they can form a union and join a union. And
you know, just for viewers to know, like that's a process, it's
there's there's cards that have to be signed, there's lots of paperwork that's submitted,
there's votes that happen amongst the workers. So it really has to be
that a large majority of the workers want to join a union, and it
means that they've met with a particular union, they've talked through that they understand
what sort of the demands that they may want to make on the employer.
And it might be that they have already have other places that belong in that
industry, belong to a certain union, it may be a fresh new one.
So we are seeing a lot of organizing happening across the country right now
too. Yeah, and I think they're going to see the kind of disruption
there. Maybe not as many different factors as you see in the entertainment industry
in terms of all the distribution and the manufacturing, and you know the involvement
of technology, but certainly technology and this push for electric cars is going to
be very disruptive. They're going to be simpler, they're not going to require
as many people, and they're moving the power plants out of the heavily unionized
states into the non unionized states as well at the same time, and I
think they're looking at lower volume. I think most of these automotive companies are
now looking to be mobility companies, renting cars by the ride, you know,
getting back to the crews and the driverless cars and stuff like that.
I think that's really their focus. Whether they can make it work and what
kind of a timeframe they can make it work. That's going to be another
issue, but I think that they'll waive the regulations and get this push for
them one way or the other. Well, it certainly is an amazing topic
and it has so many different aspects to it. Just in Hollywood, it
does. But we're going to be seeing this type of disruption, some massive
time of economic disruption, and it's going to be very challenging for everybody as
this rolls out. Thank you so much for talking to us. Again,
we're talking to Nicole Brenner Schmitz about the labor strikes that I think are going
to continue to proliferate in this kind of an economic environment. Thank you so
much for talking to us. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
All Right, folks, we're going to take a quick break and we will
be right back analyzing the globalist next move. And now the Deevid nutshell