Originally published in print in December, 2021.
Art by Eve Smith
Think you’ve heard the word ‘union’ used more than ever recently? You’re probably right. Less than two months after the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, essential workers across Amazon, FedEx, Instacart, Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods collaborated on a strike for increased safety measures to protect employees, as well as a more fair division of increased profits that had arisen as a result of the pandemic. In October, a federation of unions from 150 countries launched an international campaign to secure better protections for essential workers. This surge in collective action has continued into 2021 and shows no signs of slowing down. Long has the lone activist been a staple of the small screen (a topic for another time), but group organising is finally being shown on mainstream television to its full potential. By comparing shows such as Mythic Quest, Succession and Superstore, we start to see the successes and failures of representing unions on the small screen.
Of the three shows I will discuss in this article, Superstore spends the most time discussing unions. The attempts of the Cloud 9 employees to unionise their workplace is a major season five storyline. At the end of the previous season, an increased interest in unionising in the store led to management initiating background checks and calling ICE on its employees, the latter of which resulted in the incarceration of Mateo (Nico Santos). Tate’s Bake Shop, a New York business known for its cookies, allegedly threatened its workers with this very method of union busting as recently as March of this year, showing how accurate Superstore’s depiction of the realities of blue-collar work can be. When representatives of the fictional Cloud 9 union finally make it to the table with management, they get everything they asked for – until it is revealed that the store is being bought out, and the contract they agreed upon was never going to be honoured. Though this is largely the end of the storyline, it’s still notable for the time it spends on the store, and for the writers understanding that workers won’t immediately band together in perfect harmony without disregarding the need for cooperation. Even once the storyline is finished, workers’ concerns do not go unaddressed within the show. Zephra, the company that takes over the store, largely focuses on tech, and the Cloud 9 employees have to reckon with unhelpful ‘advancements’ like an employee and a CEO who prioritizes employee cereal bars over maternity leave.
In Succession we get the opposite perspective, that of the top executives in a company. Unions are not a major part of the show’s storyline, but when they do feature, their presence is felt. When Waystar Royco, the massive media conglomerate that is the show’s focus, acquires Vaulter, a digital publishing start-up, the top brass are dismayed to hear that workers want to unionise. The Roys only see this as a flaw in their newly-acquired asset, and Kendall takes them on successfully. He encourages the workers to “put off” unionising, ostensibly so he can protect their jobs, but in actuality so he can sell the company for parts and fire them without compensation. His framing of Waystar as a “family” is a common tactic used by managers that want to prevent workers from “being difficult” by asking for what they’re owed. That the Roys are against unions is arguably more important to see than the workers desire for them in Superstore; highlighting that even in their infancy, unions are considered a thorn in the side of corporate bigwigs. Roman (Kieran Culkin) lists “pay transparency [and] bargaining rights” as the objectives of organizers at Vaulter, and these are enough to have the company shut down. When Kendall (Jeremy Strong) tells the head of Vaulter that his staff need to “cool it on unionising”, the camera rests inside the building they stand outside, preventing the viewer from forgetting them though none of them are named characters. In a series so focused on terrible people, it’s an effective way of encouraging the viewer to remember the people whose lives the Roys toy with every day.
Mythic Quest similarly deals with the higher ups in a company, despite playing out more like Superstore than Succession, a half-hour workplace sitcom instead of an hour-long dramedy. The coders, who we spend very little time with, reveal their decision to unionise in the season one finale. They have spent months discussing this decision offscreen, and the next scene we see furthering this storyline is the executive producer and his assistant sitting down with a representative of the coders, the one named recurring character from this division in the show. This scene is undeniably funny (anti-union assistant Jo (Jessie Ennis) proclaiming that “the workers are grist for the mill” is gold), but when the coder’s representative actually voices the union’s demand, we see a gap between these and the previous fictional unions. There is little acknowledgment of the coders as a group, and even less acknowledgements of their various needs. They want better pay, end of list. Apparently all of the workers have discussed crunch, a form of unpaid overtime common and frequently criticised in the industry, and decided, “That’s what it takes to make the game great. We don’t wanna work less, we just wanna get paid for what we do.” It is difficult to see how they would come to this conclusion when we are told in this same episode that they have to stay at work until 3am “in case” their boss wants them to start work on his latest idea. In reality, crunch can go on for months so companies can ship games on schedule, and can take a tremendous toll on workers. Picking apart the decisions made in a sitcom might seem uncharitable, and it would be ludicrous to ask that Mythic Quest act as some kind of morality play, but when this episode is read in connection with the season’s third episode, where the solution to Nazis playing the game is not to kick them from it, but to simply lump them all together so they won’t impact other players (and the company still gets their money), one starts to feel uncomfortable.
It feels important to note that of the three shows discussed here, Mythic Quest in particular was criticised by cast and crew members for not adhering to COVID-19 safety standards while filming their second season. The show also receives both advice and funding from Ubisoft, a video-game company that was only recently sued by its employees for a pervasive culture of sexual harassment. While I’m excited to know that both workplace sitcoms and prestige programming have been proven as suitable modes to tell stories about labour organising, it’s unsurprising that such stories suffer when managed by the people who necessitate that organising.
