Essay: The Great American Sweatshop
By Brennon Jones
Posted On February 07, 2006

From the disturbing dregs of early twentieth century industry emerged a revolutionary idea that reshaped American business. The unalienable rights of equality, fairness, life and independence declared by Jefferson as possessions given by the Creator to all men for the first time included child workers, enslaved laborers and the entire working class. Unions formed, minimum wages were set, a forty hour week became standard and employee safety improved. America again set a precedent of decency that the world followed.

While many tyrannical moguls fought change without success, a new born industry developed its own rules. One century later, this modern force that reaches the lives of every American ignores ethical and legal standards while exploiting the very minds that keep the cash rolling in.

This is not about Indonesian workers earning pennies a day for sneaker companies or the underpaid, health insurance lacking Chinese laborers that steal American jobs as Wal-Mart steps over their hunched backs on the way to the bank. The Great American Sweatshop exists within our borders and is no less horrific.

Blinded by beautiful faces, modified bodies and absolute fakeness, the public views this industry as nothing less than spectacular. An entire culture of misguided souls wish for a place within its elite ranks. In the days after Enron and WorldCom, few imagine that worse situations rage on, especially beneath a politically active industry that prides itself on tolerance, political correctness, environmental concern, human rights and whatever other good sounding cause that reaches the public. Welcome to Hollywood; The Great American Sweatshop.

Without the influx of slave labor, Hollywood could not survive a day. The film industry is saturated with talent from all across the world, each one pursuing happiness, success and creative freedom. When given the choice between no job at all and a contract that pays half of minimum wage while demanding seventy hour work weeks, the truly ambitious sign the paper, ethics be damned.

For every hard bodied, brain dead actress the country lusts after, dozens of neurotic writers sit alone at their computers typing with clawed fingers idiotic scripts they’ve been hired to write for pennies by arrogant producers who insist on creating their own thoughtless concepts before they would ever let the help embrace innovation, creativity and ownership.

Many producers, particularly within independent film, have no experience managing a film set let alone a business. Their creativity exists only in their ability to list ideas. The fact that their redundant, unworkable premises are trains speeding on warped tracks never enters the equation. After all, they are the elite, ingenious producers. The doomed passengers are puny cogs, dirty laborers, stubborn writers and whoever else signed their life away on a company deal memo.

They promise writers a share of the profits, but production incompetence caused by sheer oblivion routinely prevents most independent pictures from ever getting made, let alone make a profit. No profit. No paycheck.

Unions were created for the purpose of protecting labor from management. The Writer’s Guild, however, will not send you an application for membership unless you have written a script under union rules. If it is not union it does not exist. The gap between the minimum union salary for a script and the average non-union writer’s contract is a vast abyss. The struggling, hard faced screenwriters have no protection from the parasitic plantation owners whipping their backs. In the Hollywood Sweatshop you either pick the cotton without complaint or you walk away with a few embarrassing credits and a back covered with scars.

The Hollywood Sweatshop embraces Michael Moore, who is notorious for short changing writers. It parades across red carpets genetic flaws worshiped by civilian drones who dream of either being the stars or screwing them. If a sympathetic cause passes by, the Hollywood Sweatshop joins in, they’re not just pretty, rich and snobby, they’re smart, too.

The Screen Actors Guild collects dues like a priest carrying a silver collection plate in one hand, a gun in the other. It financially punishes those caught working non-union shoots and makes sure that every meeting for the two hundred plus board members gets fully catered by the trendiest hot spot in 90210.

Does it matter that less than five percent of SAG actors make enough each year to live above poverty? What about those who lose health care because they earned less than the minimum annual sum as defined by SAG guidelines? The Hollywood Sweatshop contains no middle class. Either you are broke, counting pennies, waiting tables, thinking about welfare or you own a mansion in the hills, drive a luxury sedan, party with Paris and eagerly flip through US Weekly hoping you’ve finally made it.

The idea that independent film is the source of all original, groundbreaking cinema ignores the stockpile of low budget, non-union productions guilty of labor abuse. The studios encourage this behavior each time they acquire the few marketable independents produced each year. Rental chains play dumb so they can fill shelves.

The Hollywood Sweatshop has wealthy friends in high, corner offices. Like confederate cotton fields, the Hollywood Sweatshop runs on the agony, sweat and desperation of countless names you’ll never hear, leaving behind piles of rotting corpses who died when every last ounce of life, love and talent was poisoned by management.

Almost every independent film is a product of slave labor, the exploitation of resolved ambition; punishment against those who have a purpose, a talent and the rock hard guts to attain the American Dream. All this in a city ruled by liberals.

Brennon Jones is a screenwriter in Los Angeles.

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