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We've talked before (here) about Columbia University Professor Charles Tilly's work on reason giving "Why?" (also see Malcolm Gladwell's article on Tilly's work here)

Reading Tilly is one of those events that forever changes the way we look at the world -- in this case -- why we too often seem to be talking past one another.   

The reason Tilly's book is so important to negotiators should be obvious.  As negotiators, we need to persuade, cajole, influence, seduce, tempt, hustle and sell not only the principled basis for our bargaining position, but also why our interests, needs and desires should make a difference to our negotiation partner.

So it is with the Writers' Guild, still on strike one full month after they exchanged keyboards for picket signs and paychecks for craft services at the front gates of Warners, CBS, Paramount and the like.

Recently, we posted the WGA's YouTube ad for the strike, "Why We Fight:  the Writers' Strike" on both our Negotiation and IP ADR Blogs. 

At 3 minutes and 50 seconds, this video is a textbook example of powerfully persuasive techniques that negotiators, litigators and trial attorneys can all use to "win" the negotiation, the oral argument, or the jury verdict.    

TAKE A LOOK AT THE VIDEO NOW

Why We Fight:  Wrapping it Up in the Flag

The video's title "Why We Fight" is taken from a series of seven documentary films made for the U.S. government by the revered director Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).  Capra's documentaries -- all entitled Why We Fight -- were instrumental in gaining and maintaining the support of a wary American public for our participation in the Second Wold War.  The last "good war." 

Before the viewer presses "play" on this video, its producers have already managed to wrap their short documentary up in the American flag -- carried by Capra -- a Hollywood figure more associated with can-do, hard-working, honest American "manhood" than anyone to walk off a Hollywood movie set since Ronald Reagan first strolled into public life.  

Back to Tilly and the Documentary's "Reason Giving"    

Although the Writers Guild of America is apparently still winning the PR war with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, opinion can swifty shift as related businesses begin to feel the ill-effects of an entire industry at stand-still.  This little video should stand them in good stead for quite some time and Tilly can tell us why.

How Why We Fight Wins the Strike Propaganda War

As we've previously discussed, Professor Tilly has created four reason-giving categories -- conventions, stories, codes and technical accounts -- each of which has its own appeal and each of which is more or less persuasive depending up the people we are trying to reach.

Why We Fight uses all of them, to powerful effect.    

Technical Accounts

The video's first minute is laregely a "technical account," i.e., a story informed by specialized knoweldge and authority. 

In this minute, we learn not only how writers are compensated -- by way of residuals when their work is aired -- but also why they are compensated in that fashion (an important point for people unfamiliar with residuals, who I've personally heard ask -- why should writers get paid every time the studio -- which already paid for the script -- airs the movie?  I'm not paid that way!) 

Embedded in this same minute is a Story, one of the most powerful means of reason-giving.  

We all know what a story is.  It is a narrative of human relationships with a beginning, a middle and an end, that generally carries some type of moral or social lesson within.  If you want to know how important stories are to the human animal, check any set of statistics of the amount of time the average American watches television.  Or ask the social scientists, who tell us that our species is more or less defined as meaning-making and story-telling creatures.  (See The Lemur's Tale--Story Telling in Primates and Other Socially Intelligent Animals by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, U.K.)

So What's the Story Here?

The story told in the first minute of this mini-documentary is one every American will know as well as his ABC's.  I Love Lucy.  For the writers, this story is a powerful tale of an historic injustice.

As the video instructs:

Imagine how many times you've seen I Love Lucy on T.V.  That show has run continuously for over fifty years.  Guess how much in residuals the writers have been paid.

NOTHING.

That show has earned hundreds of millions of dollars over the years.  And the writers never received one dime for all those re-runs. 

That's a narrative of injustice profound enough to make a Capuchin Monkey "strike" and throw his "money" (cucumbers) out of the cage.   And its told in three short paragraphs, one of which is a single word. 

Conventions

Conventions are the rules your mother and grade school teachers taught you. Don't be a tattle tale. Share with your sister. Don't whine. Say thank you to the nice man for giving you an extra dollop of ice cream.  Anthropologists call these conventions "folkways." They are the unwritten rules of approrpriate social behavior that we breach at the peril of scorn to ostracism.

The central (and peculiarly American) conventions of the WGA  video? 

• People who make money as a result of your work should pay you a fair share of the money they make on it.   As the video instructs:

[I Love Lucy] has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the years and the writers never received one dime for all those re-runs. 

For every dollar the studio gets paid, we get paid 2 1/2 cents.

• Workers don't deserve to have money served to them on a silver platter -- they have to work for what they get.  The video recounts:

Because the writers fought for it [images of striking workers] we now get paid whenever the studios make money off of our work.

Codes -- "high-level" conventions -- are the formulas that invoke procedural rules and categories. The judge and jury apply codes such as "oral agreements can't transfer real property" to the Plaintiff's story about her landlord's promise to extend her lease for a year.

There's not much law in the writers' video, but there is extensive discussion of the private codes that govern commerce -- contracts.

To tell the writers' story of injustice -- the reason the strike needs public support -- Why We Fight includes a short history of the "private law" the studios and the writers agreed would govern their commercial relationship.

The Story of the Code Goes Like This 

In the '80s, the studio asked us, the writers, to take a cut in our VCR residuals so that the studios could "grow" the home video business.  We complied with our agreement. 

The studios told us they'd give us a greater percentage when the market matured.  That was twenty years ago.  Sales and studio profits have soared.  The studios didn't honor their promise.  

The money shot?

Now the studios want to do the same thing with the internet.

Technical Account

The internet allows the studios to make more money than ever before because they can broadcast "our work" without incurring the costs of manufacturing, shipping, or warehousing.  The studios' expected revenues over the next three years for streaming video on the internet  is $4.6 billion.

Convention and Code

The studios don't want to pay the writers anything at all for the streaming internet video because they claim it's "only promotional."  But that's not the truth.  The studios have projected income in the billions of dollars [presumably on ad revenues] for the next three years.

Once again, the video suggests, the writers keep their promises and the studios break theirs.  This has a post-modern TV "western" movie code theme in it -- the studios are the "white men" who spoke with "forked tongues" -- entering into treaties with the Native Americans and then repeatedly breaking their promises.  

Story 

The video goes on to put human faces on the striking writers.  They are ordinary people, suggests the video, nearly half of whom are unemployed at any given time.  These "residuals" are not a luxury, but a necessity.  Writers need them to support their families, pay their mortgages and purchase health insurance.  

What We Want

By the time the viewer gets to "what we want," the video-makers' uses of symbol, image, convention, code, story and technical account will have anyone but the most cartoonish Simon Legree studio-executive crying out for justice.  Heck, Ari Gold would be in tears.

Justice -- though codified in the law -- is more convention than code.  More fairness than legality. 

Why the video?  To convince the public that the writers' demands are just; to allow the viewer to experience the injustice portrayed, to persuade the viewer that the studios are greedy, dishonest and, simply, wrong.  That what the writers are asking for is in fact the only right thing to do.

And what DO the writers want?  It's simple says the WGA video.

We want the DVD rate to finally go up after twenty years.  This [image] is your $19.99 DVD.  This is what we get.  Our 4 cents.  This is what we want.  4 more cents.  And when our shows get played over the internet, we want to get paid the same rate as if we were on T.V. 

Three minutes and 50 seconds.  If you could do this in closing argument or at the beginning of your mediation presentation, you'd blow the other side away.  

Good luck to the writers.  Without them, there is no story.  No film.  No television.  No DVD.  No streaming video.  They fill the blank page with our own hopes, dreams, fears, desires, failures and successes.  We are moved, inspired or simply entertained.  You just can't help rooting for them.