Reagan the Actor had very different politics than Reagan the Candidate.
Check out his stump speech for Truman[1]. Quick highlight quote:
“Remember that promise: a real increase in income for everybody. But what actually happened? The profits of corporations have doubled, while workers wages have increased by only one-quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as much as wages, and the small increase workers did receive was was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings” - Somehow Ronald Reagan
It's almost as if people will advocate for their own interests, and if their interests change, so too does their advocacy. As the SAG leader, he would obviously advocate for more money for himself and his fellow actors, saying whatever rhetoric he needed to, and when he was president, he would similar advocate for whatever keeps him further in office.
So he got smarter on economics as he aged like most people? His economics advisors were at the top of their fields, including Nobel laureates. It is not highly shocking that he changed his views.
> On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.
There’s an enormous difference between Hollywood actors striking and air traffic control.
Air traffic controllers weren’t even allowed to strike given how critical their jobs are and could have paralyzed the entire country. Comparing that to actors is nonsensical.
The uneven comparison is sort of the point: If air traffic controllers are so essential to the country's operation, why didn't the Reagan administration just avoid the strike by giving them what they wanted, like he was able to get personally in 1960? Is the idea that we can only give non-essential workers what they want (because they have the luxury of striking and not screwing over the country) and everyone else can get bent? That's the idea that's nonsensical to me and discordant between Reagan the actor and Reagan the president.
> why didn't the Reagan administration just avoid the strike by giving them what they wanted, like he was able to get personally in 1960?
His administration actually made some pretty generous offers in the negotiations. Part of the reason the negotiations broke down is because PATCO's radical wing, which believed that getting the best deal required striking first, ended up in control by the time the Reagan administration came to power. That soured Reagan's position since he felt, despite the generous offers, that the negotiations were being handled in bad faith.
Yep, I consider Collision Course to be the definitive history: https://a.co/d/18t0JmK which traces air traffic controllers in the US from long before PATCO, up to the fateful Reagan termination, and the fallout afterwards. Fascinating, even-handed between labor and management, couldn't put it down.
They asked for a $10k raise and a 32 hour workweek due to burnout, hard to argue that this was an unreasonable ask.
This was the exact same paradox that essential healthcare workers faced during the pandemic. Too important to give time off, but not important enough to properly compensate.
That's what I don't get about these demands. If Hollywood wants to scan background actors and reuse them instead of paying them a day rate, then surely almost anyone can be scanned and used in such a process. At that point they aren't even actors, they're just sources of pretty faces for the VFX team. And that isn't even necessary is it because GANs can imagine pretty faces for years now.
Presumably if actors pick this as a hill to die on, well, suddenly there'll be even more surplus supply of actors to demand because the easy roles are VFX, and at that point Hollywood can just break the unions with scabs.
