Chapter Twenty-Six: Labor Days and Company Culture

At the beginning of this month, over America’s Labor Day weekend fittingly enough, two news stories broke that highlight the potential danger lurking behind our modern company culture. While people began to move away from this mindset during the COVID-19 pandemic, devotion to the job, to the company, to the workplace still has quite the hold on many employees. It’s a habit that in and of itself takes a lot of work to break.

There is a stark difference between being committed to one’s career and being committed to one’s employer. In some situations, these two can even be the exact antithesis of each other. Devotion to a company can be all well and good, as long as perspective remains clear. At the end of the work day, that devotion is not going to be reciprocated. Company culture can be a sparkling misdirection, but under closer scrutiny, who is really benefiting?

What’s the Opposite of Team Building?

When an employee at Beazley, the global insurance firm, joined his coworkers for a hike on Mt. Shavano in Colorado to raise money for World Central Kitchen, he couldn’t have known that he would wind up trapped on the 14,230-foot summit overnight during a freezing rain storm. To be fair, that could hardly have been his coworkers’ plans either, but still, when they trekked back down the mountain, they failed to realize that they were missing a member of their group, and that this person was in danger of losing his life.

Chaffee County Search and Rescue–South, the group that eventually saved the lost man the following day, made a quip about some inevitable awkwardness awaiting everyone at the office watercooler later to the media. In all seriousness though, how exactly is one supposed to behave if or when they return to the office after an incident like this? How do we work with people who we can’t trust to have our backs?

Is Return to Office Really Required?

When a Wells Fargo employee clocked in at the office in Tempe, Arizona on a Friday, her body was not discovered in her cubicle until the following Tuesday. While the company released a statement attempting to explain how both security and any other workers or managers in the office had not noticed their deceased coworker for so long, the union, Wells Fargo Workers United, released an outraged statement highlighting the hypocrisy of the company’s electronic monitoring and in-person work policies.

How can the argument be made that a return to in-person work is vital for employee productivity and company success when an employee could lie dead for multiple days in the physical office with absolutely no one noticing? How do the remaining employees arrive to work with a positive attitude when they know they could literally die on the job, at their desk, and it wouldn’t make a difference to the office operations, that their presence is vital, even when their lives are not?

It’s fitting that these stories broke over Labor Day weekend. These real-life examples, as horrible as they are, highlight what the unions and workers of the past already knew: we cannot rely on our employers to care about us. We have to prioritize our own physical safety, mental wellbeing, upward mobility, and personal values. As the month of September comes to an end, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important to us in the end of year rush and striving for Q4 goalposts.

When companies refer to themselves as a family, this must be considered a red flag to employees or potential employees. Our families are our families. Our coworkers are our coworkers. If the company culture provides a proper work/life balance, then there should be no reason to blur the lines between the two, because they’ll each have their fair share in our lives. The workday can feel long, but life is short. How do we want to spend it?

Chapter Twenty-Five: Pencils Down

For exactly three months now, we've heard powerful stories from the picket lines on both coasts of a union strike that has been in effect since May 2, 2023. At first, the strikers consisted of about 20,000 screenwriters of the Writers Guild of America (WGA). They have since been joined by approximately 160,000 actors of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). The pencils are down and the cameras have stopped rolling, but what is everyone striking for? Only the very future of the entertainment industry and intellectual property itself.

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The Strike is On

Visual artists were arguably the first to sound the alarm bells that artificial intelligence (AI) would be coming for all the creative mediums, someway, somehow. They saw how their artistic styles were being utilized through AI to manipulate imagery that could then be sold for a profit by someone who really had no hand in creating it. Now, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents some of the biggest and wealthiest entertainment corporations in the world, including Amazon, Apple, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros Discovery, are attempting to cut corners in the creative process in much the same way. A large portion of this strike revolves around the studios’ determination to use AI in place of real writers and actors. One could see why those real writers and actors, those whose writing styles and physical forms would need to be “borrowed,” would take issue with this course of action when they don't see the payout.

On the subject of payout, residual payments are another major sticking point with this strike. For decades, the cable model allowed writers and actors to make a living wage based on the popularity of their shows and films, depending largely on reruns. The streaming model, however, has interrupted earnings. No matter how many times something is viewed on a streaming platform, even if it's in the billions, the people who created it don't financially benefit. With most every other product on the market, money is earned based on consumers choosing that product, with popular products obviously earning top-dollar. Here, the creatives responsible for the product in the first place are cut out of the profits almost entirely after the initial sale, and that's usually after years of unpaid development work.

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The Future is Here

Churning out content that prioritizes quantity over quality may be in the nature of a billionaire studio executive, but it is not the nature of a creative. Art takes craft, especially when the expectation is that other people will give their time and money to experience it. To subject audiences to subpar material for the sake of saving a few bucks is insulting, especially when it's well known that these studios have the money to pay the real artists what they deserve, as evidenced by the salaries, bonuses, and stock options the higher ups are touting.

What industries are next? These strikers are leading the path forward that one day, in the not too distant future, many other professionals will have to walk themselves, fighting for the right to their own intellectual property and their livelihoods in an ever-changing output machine, industry by industry. Precedents must be set now, otherwise we can bid farewell to professional crafts of almost any kind.

Noteworthy Communications is firm in our stance on the importance of storytelling. It's right there in our mission statement. Original thought, and the means to communicate those thoughts effectively and meaningfully, is a skill that must be honed over time. Not everyone is a storyteller and not everyone needs to be. After all, that's why we offer our services. Even still, respect for the skill and the creativity is something we should all be able to offer graciously.

For those who scoff at the workers' strike, who wrongly assume that if someone works in the entertainment industry, they must automatically be among the wealthy elite, and as such, a strike is merely evidence of their petulance, we suggest they refrain from absorbing any of their favorite content moving forward. This would of course include films, television shows, music, podcasts, stand-up comedy, novels, plays, short stories, poems, or comic books. After all, someone had to create those stories. Someone had to feel those stories brewing inside of them and then, the really hard part, they had to sit down and bring those stories to life so we could experience them too. That is what is at stake. That is why so many people are standing up and shouting out, because quality storytelling is worth fighting, and paying, for.

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Art Versus the Artist

There's been a lot of debate over the past few years about the right way to react when an artist or creator says or does something widely viewed to be problematic. Now, of course, when placed under a microscope, it's doubtful that any person on this earth could be deemed one hundred percent unproblematic, but human fallibility is not the question here. The question is, where does that leave the art that person has created?

Sometimes, the reaction to finding out certain things about an artist is visceral. It can't be helped. The art can no longer mean what it once did to the consumer. It's tainted. Other times, the reaction is more conflicted, more nuanced, less black and white. This is where there's room for creative solutions and, if we're open to it, perhaps even a deeper understanding of the art itself.

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Rewriting History

When it comes to tampering with existing material so as to gloss over its problematic aspects, most consumers won't have it. For instance, the Roald Dahl Story Company, and the publisher Puffin Books, enlisted sensitivity readers to evaluate Dahl's work. This is a common enough practice for new works in publishing today, but this team made the choice to rewrite entire sections of some of Dahl's classic works to remove potentially offensive language regarding weight, gender, and race. Given the many amendments and sizable portions not written by Dahl, there was a public outcry, especially considering the author is no longer alive to approve of such editorial liberties to his work.

On the other hand, Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to no longer publish or license six of his works due to racist depictions. Rather than attempting to rewrite well-known books, the company decided to pull them entirely, and instead focus on the remaining, and still vast, catalog of work by the author. Largely, this move was applauded for its acknowledgment of both the issues with the original content, and the idea that standards can evolve, and it's reasonable to say something no longer aligns with those standards.

Another perfectly valid solution to address evolving standards is to include a preface note providing historical context. We saw this approach from The Walt Disney Company, when they included a message at the beginning of some of their older films as they made their way to streaming on Disney+. HBO Max also utilizes a disclaimer on the streaming site that appears prior to the start of Gone with the Wind. The fact of the matter is, there are blatant examples of racist stereotypes in some of these works of art that, although might have been widely accepted or flown under the radar at the time of their initial publication, are wildly offensive and damaging today. Historical context is key, and allows audiences to continue to experience the work while simultaneously acknowledging the potentially harmful impact of the content.

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When Fandom Isn't Enough

Our interests grow and change over time. A book series, television show, film franchise, or music catalog we were once deeply obsessed with might not hold our interest so much these days. We've outgrown it, thankful for the joy it once brought, and now ready for a different entertainment obsession to dive in to. Realizing you are no longer aligned with a once-favorite artist and the opinions they share can be as simple as acknowledging that you've outgrown them and you're choosing to move on.

With moving on comes the power of the pocketbook. When we stop spending our hard-earned money on products aligned with people and opinions we can't in good conscience support, we send a message about what we are and are not willing to tolerate. Maybe the artist will feel the impact, and maybe they won't, but we'll know, and we can take some kind of satisfaction in that.

At Noteworthy Communications, we know that broad generalizations make for poor communication. We're not claiming to hold the key to the correct, unimpeachable way to react when an artist or creator crosses a line that we cannot overlook, justify, or forgive. There is no right way. Every instance is unique and brings up different issues that deserve their own conversation. This chapter is merely offering a small fragment of a much larger conversation.

The entanglements between an artist and the work they produce are natural. We cannot have one without the other. However, context is everything and, as with many things in life, what we are willing to endure as a consumer falls on a spectrum. While there is no right response, we can at least take comfort in the fact that we can decide the right response for ourselves, and that there is always new art and entertainment to enjoy.