SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s strike announcement speech
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you. Thank you everyone for coming to this press conference today. It’s really important that this negotiation be covered because the eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labor are upon us. What happens here is important, because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor. By means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run. We have a problem. And we are experiencing that right at this moment. This is a very seminal hour for us.
I went in, in earnest, thinking that we would be able to avert a strike. The gravity of this move is not lost on me, or our negotiating committee, or our board members, who have voted unanimously to proceed with a strike.
It’s a very serious thing that impacts thousands if not millions of people, all across this country and around the world. Not only members of this union, but people who work in other industries that service the people that work in this industry. And so it came with great sadness that we came to this crossroads, but we had no choice. We are the victims here; we are being victimized by a very greedy entity.
I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with, are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly. How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they are losing money left and right while giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.
We stand in solidarity, in unprecedented unity. Our union and our sister unions and the unions around the world are standing by us, as well as other labor unions. Because at some point the jig is up. You cannot keep being dwindled and marginalized and disrespected and dishonored. The entire business model has been changed. By streaming, digital, AI. This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth. If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble. We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business who cares more about Wall Street than you and your family.
Most of Americans don’t have more than $500 in an emergency. This is a very big deal, and it weighed heavy on us. But at some point, you have to say no. We’re not going to take this anymore. You people are crazy. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Privately they all say we’re the center of the wheel. Everybody else tinkers around our artistry, but actions speak louder than words. And there was nothing there. It was insulting.
So we came together in strength and solidarity and unity with the largest strike authorization vote in our union’s history. And we made the hard decision that we tell you, as we stand before you today. This is major. It’s really serious and it is going to impact every single person that is in labor. We are fortunate enough to be in a country right now that happens to be labor friendly. And yet, we are facing opposition that was so labor unfriendly. So tone deaf to what we are saying. You cannot change the business model as much as it has changed and not expect the contract to change too.
We are not going to keep doing incremental changes on a contract that no longer honors what is happening right now with this business model that was foisted upon us. What are we doing? Moving around furniture on the titanic? It’s crazy.
So the jig is up, AMPTP. We stand tall. You have to wake up and smell the coffee. We are labor and we stand tall and we demand respect. And to be honored for our contribution. You share the wealth because you cannot exist without us. Thank you.
Omg so many additions since I last saw this post! 😂😂😂
It’s funny but incredibly telling how entitled/ignorant/insensitive some of these people are… idk if it’s an education gap or purposeful ignorance.
The really bewildering thing to me is that I remember when you needed to get up and pull a dictionary off the shelf, or visit a library to look up the facts you needed. Now people have all kinds of information literally at their fingertips and they can’t be bothered to use it.
Oh dear gods, it’s gotten worse
When you know politics but no facts
don’t take people too seriously on the internet
This hits different when combined with that “Americans don’t learn other countries exist till they’re in 5th Grade” post from the other day.
Demily recently got another one lads
Also, I love that, in the sign language one, it seems like the last image might’ve been a gif of “fuck you,” screenshot at the perfect time to let you know they were about to sign “fuck you”
As a romanian person I gotta add this one too
This is my favourite post on this website
I have literally had people tell me that I’m a gross appropriator for learning sign language while not deaf.
I sometimes cannot speak, but leaving that aside, what the FUCK lol
I still remember the guy who got mad at me because I spoke about the cultural role of the Norse gods in my life and my culture and insisted that I should be “proud of my Christian heritage instead” and quite simply would not believe me when I told him I was from Scandinavia because “that doesn’t exist anymore.”
someone please edit that map of europe with the spain void to also have a void for the whole of scandinavia
Every now and then I just have to reblog this.
(while particularly loving: “Gender of the Day: Wales”)
When Tina Turner left her first husband - who was also her boss, captor, and brutal tormentor - she snuck out of their Dallas hotel room with a single thought in her mind: “The way out is through the door.” From there she fled across the midnight freeway, semi-trucks careening past her, with 36 cents and a Mobil gas card in her pocket. As soon as she decided to walk out that door, she owned nothing else. When she filed for divorce, she made an unusual request. She didn’t want anything: not the song rights, not the cars, not the houses, not the money. All she wanted was the stage name he gave her - Tina - and her married name - Turner. This was the name by which the world had come to know her, and keeping it was her only chance to salvage her career. Things could have gone a lot of ways from there. She could have labored in obscurity for decades, maybe making records on small labels to be prized by vinyl connoisseurs in Portland. She could have stayed in Vegas, where she first went to get her chops back up, and worked as a nostalgia act. And, of course, given what she had been through, she might have … not made it. What happened instead is that Tina Turner became the biggest global rock star of the 80s. I’m old enough to barely remember this, but if you aren’t, it was like this: The Rolling Stones would headline a stadium one day, and the next day it would be Tina Turner. A middle-aged Black woman - she became a rock star at 42! - sitting atop the 1980s like it was her throne. She managed this because of whatever rare stuff she was made of (this is a woman whose label gave her two weeks to record her solo debut, Private Dancer, which went five times platinum); because she decided to speak publicly about her abusive marriage and forge her own identity, and in doing so give hope and courage to countless women; and also because - in a perhaps unlikely twist for a girl from Nutbush, Tennessee - she had her practice of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, to which she credited her survival. She remained devout until the end. Tina’s second marriage - to her, her only marriage - was to Edwin Bach, a Swiss music executive 16 years her junior. Of him, she said, “Erwin, who is a force of nature in his own right, has never been the least bit intimidated by my career, my talents, or my fame.” In 2016, after a barrage of health problems, Tina’s kidneys began to fail. A Swiss citizen by then, she had started preparing for assisted suicide when her husband stepped in. According to Tina, he said, “He didn’t want another woman, or another life.” He gave her one of his kidneys, buying her the remainder of her time on this earth and perhaps closing a cycle which took her from a man who inflicted injury upon her to a man willing to inflict injury upon himself to save her from harm. Born into a share-cropping family as Anna Mae Bullock in 1939, she died Tina Turner in a palatial Swiss estate: the queen of rock ‘n roll; a storm of a performer with a wildcat-fierce voice; a dancer of visceral, spine-tingling potency and ability; a beauty for the ages; a survivor of terrible abuse and an advocate for others in similar situations; an author and actress; a devout Buddhist; a wife and mother; a human being of rare talent and perseverance who, through her transcendent brilliance, became a legend.
I think that more fanfiction should be written with the aim to tackle the original meaning of hanahaki. Because when the concept of hanahaki disease was originally created, it was intended to be a metaphor for suppressing one’s feelings.
Your feelings are this beautiful garden of flora inside of your chest. When you express how you feel honestly, you allow for it to grow freely. But when you hide how you feel out of fear of rejection, and try to make it smaller and smaller, the flowers become cramped inside of you, until you choke on your own feelings. Every flower you cough up is something you’ve felt, but refused to say.
The whole “dying” thing is intended to be more symbolic especially. You’re killing off bits and pieces of yourself and how you feel, because you’re afraid to express yourself.
It’s not really supposed to be, “The one I love doesn’t love me back, and I’m dying from it.” Rather, it’s more along the lines of, “Repressing your emotions is bad for you, and it’s better and healthier to express them freely, even when it’s scary.”
Which is to say that, one, the cure for the disease should be telling the person that you are in love with how you feel. How the other person feels about the person afflicted should have nothing to do with it, as the trope is meant to be about feeling your emotions unapologetically.
And that, two, it’s not an inherently romantic trope. Obviously, it has romantic applications, but it can be written for any situation where a character is hiding how they truly feel. This can include a refusal to address a specific trauma, a desire to indulge in something that they’re ashamed of, and even really practical things, like wanting to ask one’s boss for a higher position.
Although (as an aromantic person myself) I don’t agree with this conclusion about the trope, this application would also avoid people calling it arophobic. When the thing killing the character is a refusal to be honest with themselves, rather than an unrequited love, it’s on nobody’s hands but their own to save their life.
There are a ton of ways that this interpretation of the hanahaki disease could be applied in new and interesting ways in fanfiction, and I’d love to read what things people could come up with!
