Whenever the actress Maureen O’Sullivan started a new gig, she was never sure how long it would last. Each day, she’d arrive not knowing when the job would begin or end, whether she’d get a meal break, or even, since her employer didn’t provide benefits, how she’d pay for a doctor if she got sick or injured. The strain of uncertainty was almost too much to bear, she recalled later, but that was just how the business worked. Her bosses told her that if she didn’t put up with it, they could easily replace her.

“We worked until we dropped, maybe ’til 1 or 2 in the morning … and then we’d have an early call,” the actress told an interviewer in 1995. “It was so awful … and I started to cry. ... And [the producer] said: If you don’t pull yourself together … I will see that you never work again.”

“So, under the threat of that, I worked.”

O’Sullivan was a movie star in the 1930s, but to anyone paying attention to the modern workplace, her experience sounds eerily like the new “gig economy,” in which work is increasingly contingent and short-term, with few benefits and little security. Like today’s growing ranks of freelancers and contractors, actors like O’Sullivan—who played Jane in the Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller (and became the mother of actress Mia Farrow)—struggled with the unstable nature of jobs and incomes. “There was seldom such a thing as continuous employment,” Jack Dales, who became a top lawyer with the Screen Actors Guild, wrote later. Benefits like health insurance or retirement plans were unthinkable.

Today, with contract, temporary and freelance jobs on the rise, the gig economy has become a preoccupation of countless articles, blog posts and TED talks. The economy’s new jobs often don’t have consistent hours, aren‘t long-term and lack the benefits Americans have come to expect from employers and which they often can’t get easily outside the workplace, particularly health insurance and access to retirement plans. Contract workers can be on the job for years with no help at all building the kind of nest eggs they’ll need when they retire. Experts are casting around for new policy ideas or tech tools to somehow help Americans weather life’s ups and downs in this new environment.

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But as O’Sullivan’s example shows, this generation isn’t the first to deal with those questions. In the entertainment business—first on Broadway, then in Hollywood—workers grappled with the problems caused by intermittent “gigs” on stages and movie sets for more than a century before Uber founder Travis Kalanick picked up a smartphone. And their experience may offer an interesting model for the new waves of contingent workers like ride-share drivers.

If O’Sullivan were an actress today, she’d enjoy guaranteed wages and pre-set work schedules; she’d also have access to an employer-provided safety net that followed her to every show, film or play she worked on. When she retired, she’d have access to both a pension and, if she worked on Broadway, a discounted assisted-living home for former actors. In other words, decades ago, entertainment workers faced, and largely solved, the types of problems modern gig workers confront, like odd hours, inconsistent income and no retirement security.

How did actors, screenwriters and stagehands do all this? Even though they worked for different employers on short-term gigs, they banded together to form a novel kind of union—one that, over the decades, and with a boost from a popular actor named Ronald Reagan, helped bring some personal and financial stability into a notoriously unstable career. The parallels to the modern economy aren’t exact, and the political winds are different today. But some people see the Hollywood experience as a potential model for today’s gig workers—a way for a group of workers only loosely attached to their employers to start building the kind of financial security that many assume is a thing of the past.

Ronald Reagan, then president of Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild, presented a union card to actress Lois Maxwell in 1947. Long before he became U.S. president, Reagan led the guild during a strike in 1960 that led to the creation of a pension program and other benefits for Hollywood workers. | AP Photo

HOLLYWOOD DURING THE pre-Depression “Golden Age” was anything but for its actors. Powerful studio bosses commanded huge entertainment empires, stretching over both the studios that made the films and the theaters that distributed them. Producers like the legendary Cecil B. DeMille kept an iron grip over actors like O’Sullivan, dictating when they had to come in, eat and even sleep.

Much like members of today’s contingent workforce, actors and crew members in Hollywood didn’t all work for the same employers, were often locked into punitive contracts and, at least at first, didn’t have much leverage to demand better pay and benefits. What they did have, however, was the ability to agree to work in the first place. Starting in the early 1930s with the onset of FDR’s New Deal, actors moved quickly to capitalize on the growing labor movement. Prominent actors including Bela Lugosi (who played Dracula) and Boris Karloff (who played Frankenstein’s monster) began quietly recruiting actors to join the nascent Screen Actors Guild. And once they had a critical mass of desirable actors enrolled, they broke their studio contracts and refused to work on films for studios that didn’t meet their conditions. With highly sought actors like Groucho Marx on board, the studios had little choice but to agree to their demands. The actors were soon followed by radio and television performers, who went on to form the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).

In one sense, they had the wind at their backs. The studios’ power had already started peaking, and in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that studios’ control over both production and distribution of films constituted an illegal monopoly—a decision that dealt a fatal blow to the already weakened system. This brought a fundamental shift in the employer-employee balance of power. A studio no longer could force an actor to work solely on its films, and Hollywood workers, through the power of collective bargaining, negotiated fairer schedules that offered the flexibility and freedom often touted by freelancers as the best part of their lifestyle.

But they still lacked access to some employer-sponsored benefits. Elsewhere in the economy, spurred by a postwar boom, U.S. employers who wanted to attract the best workers had begun offering benefits like health insurance and pensions. By 1950, 25 percent of all private-sector workers were covered by an employer-sponsored pension plan, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Hollywood workers figured, why not us too?

In 1954, AFTRA successfully negotiated the creation of the entertainment industry’s first employer-funded health and pension fund in talks with broadcasters. Broadcasters that wished to hire AFTRA workers would now have to pay into the union’s pension fund. Film and stage actors resorted to more bare-knuckle tactics to get theirs. In 1960, the Screen Actors Guild—under the leadership of Reagan, its president — went on strike to protest the lack of residual payments, the royalties they believed they were due for TV or film reruns and syndications. After six weeks, Reagan negotiated a $2.65 million settlement, which the Guild used to create the guild’s first health and pension plans. Actors Equity, which represents stage actors, went on strike the same year, winning its pension plan. Those benefits are still in place today.

Some of Hollywood’s top actors were organizing members of the Screen Actors Guild, including comedian Groucho Marx, left; Bela Lugosi, who starred as Dracula in the 1931 film, center; and Boris Karloff, who portrayed Frankenstein’s monster in three films from 1931 to 1939. | Wikimedia Commons

SO WHAT CAN modern gig workers take from the Hollywood example?

David Weil, a labor expert who served in the Obama-era Labor Department, thinks that Hollywood-style unions—known technically as autonomous unions—are a “compelling” model for putting more power in the hands of contingent workers, pointing to the building trades as another successful model. Carpenters, plumbers and other craft workers similarly work temporary gigs jobs on site and have a benefits program centralized in the hands of their union, the North American Building Trades Union.

It’s far from certain that unions could solve all the problems faced by gig workers. The varied nature of the gig economy today makes the task of organizing workers—already tough even for established unions in single industries—even harder. “It’s hard to organize people, period,” Weil said, “in any kind of labor market institution.”

It becomes even harder when today’s contingent worker, such as a ride-sharer, is effectively interchangeable with anyone possessing the same basic skill. The lack of “star power” among today’s gig workers means there’s no Uber-driver equivalent of Groucho Marx who can lend credence to a union drive. And unlike Hollywood of the 1930s, Silicon Valley of the 2010s is a far less fertile ground for labor. The libertarian-infused ethos of tech entrepreneurs is almost allergic to the very idea of unions, as evidenced by a recent Twitter rant by Tesla CEO Elon Musk against the United Auto Workers.

But at least a few efforts are underway to test the idea. In New York City, drivers working for Uber, Lyft and Juno have joined together in the nonprofit Independent Drivers Guild, which is structured like an autonomous union but is not officially recognized as one. In March, the group petitioned the city to raise the minimum wage for drivers and to cap fees drivers have to pay to the company. Another approach to a “gig union” is the Brooklyn-based Freelancers Union, founded in 1995, which represents independent contractors in fields as varied as graphic design and accounting. The Freelancers Union doesn’t attempt to negotiate wages or work conditions for its members, but it does address the safety-net problem, providing health insurance and advocating on behalf of its members with local government. In 2016, the group’s efforts helped lead to passage of a law in New York City called the Freelance Isn’t Free Act, which prohibits late or partial payment to freelance workers.

Freelancers Union founder Sara Horowitz at a White House event in 2015. The union has worked to organize independent contractors and “gig” workers and provide access to benefits. | Getty Images

So far, gig unions haven’t attracted any big-name organizers like Bela Lugosi to galvanize the movement. But they have other possible sources of momentum, including the fact that many cities with big gig economies—like New York, San Francisco and Seattle—also have highly labor-friendly local governments that are becoming concerned about the plight of their contingent workforce.

It took Hollywood workers decades to get where they are today, a multigenerational push that saw countless failures-to-launch and botched negotiations. Technological innovation, particularly the advent of subscription platforms like Netflix and Hulu, has caught the unions, set up for a 20th century media market, somewhat flat-footed. A 2012 merger of SAG and AFTRA was an attempt to meet those changes, acknowledging that consumers hardly distinguish between TV and films anymore when it comes to their consumption preferences. Still, Hollywood’s unions say collective organizing is the only way modern-day gig workers are going to get their chance in the spotlight.

“If you want it,” says Ray Rodriguez, who has been negotiating contacts for SAG-AFTRA for 11 years, “you’re really going to have to advocate for it.”

Andrew Hanna is a labor and immigration reporter for POLITICO Pro.

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