That's what studio workers are beginning to call it. Clinton administration trade policies are coming home to Los Angeles with a vengeance, they claim, affecting workers far removed from heavy metal industries. According to Michael Everett, of the Hollywood Fair Trade Campaign, even the city's crown jewel, the motion picture industry itself, is on the chopping block. Supporters came from other unions as well, including the longshoremen, communications workers and state, county and municipal employees.
Jobs are only going to Canada, say studio unions.
Twentieth-Century Fox made last year's most popular move, Titanic, in a maquiladora in Rosarito, sixty miles south of the border. And after production was over, the independent and militant Mexican union which represented workers there was forced out by government support for a more conservative union, more friendly to foreign companies. There's not much disagreement among U.S. unions nationally that Hollywood has a problem, or that it's shared with millions of other workers in dozens of industries in the rest of the country, and the world. No one argues that trade policies have a profound effect on jobs. But as thousands of union members prepare to go to Seattle, to demonstrate in the streets outside of possibly the most important set of trade negotiations this century, there is increasingly bitter disagreement in labor over what it will take to solve the problem, or even who the enemy is.