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BELOW THE LINE
Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy
By Vicki Mayer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5007-1
Chapter One
Producers as Creatives CREATIVITY IN TELEVISION SET PRODUCTION
If the study of production as a characteristic of human action has been relatively absent in the study of television production specifically, then the notion of creation and creativity as social manifestations of human action has been similarly unacknowledged by television scholars. The hewing of creativity from a universal social characteristic to a specialized individual trait has a long history. From its Latin root creare, meaning simply "to produce," creativity turned into the monopoly, first, of artists who could channel the divine through their metaphysical expressions and, then, of all individuals who could express their inner talents. In the sphere of television production, creativity frequently conflates with the legal authorial rights that certain individuals hold as creators of television programs and series. In the annals of U.S. television history, Norman Lear, Stephen Boccho, Aaron Spelling, and, more recently, David E. Kelley, Joss Whedon, and Mark Burnett are examples of those workers who take credit as content creators. Together with their above-the-line personnel, they form the so-called creative class in the new television economy. To reconstitute the invisible labor of production and the identity work implicated in this limited yet highly visible hierarchy, this chapter both deconstructs the popular associations of creation and creativity and reconstructs the social foundations of these terms by looking at electronics assemblers, a community of practice that has been excluded from scholarly consideration.
A social theory of creation, according to the philosopher Hans Joas, dates to the 1800s, but it has been all but lost in the common associations today between individual genius and creative action. Proposed by Joseph Herder and Karl Marx but developed by American pragmatists in the early twentieth century, social theories of creativity examine how people coordinate their actions using a common language and tools already imbued with social meanings. This dual focus on shared language and tool use connects the creator to a system of symbols and material resources that both contains individual actions and marks them as different, hence as creative. By insisting that creative action has a social context, Joas distinguishes creative actions sanctioned as creative by society from those actions that are not. These conceptions of creation and creativity thus conjoin the interiority of mental labor with the exteriority of a world that enables its articulation. This unison contrasts the presumed division between internal creativity and external constraints in the construction of the paradigmatic producer of film and television studies.
Scholars have long recognized that television program creation is distributed among workers in a large industrial bureaucracy, but they have also maintained creativity as the special reserve of the individually talented producer. As summarized by Michele Hilmes, "Industry study is the translation of authorship into a dispersed site marked by multiple, intersecting agendas and interests, where individual authorship in the traditional sense still most certainly takes place, but within a framework that robs it, to a greater or lesser degree, of its putative autonomy." In its formulation, individual creativity in television production requires but also opposes the social constraints that are effective, practical, conventional, and, hence, uncreative by definition. While some scholars have focused on the limited autonomy that all above-the-line workers hold in a labyrinth of temporal, financial, and stylistic constraints, others have identified a special fraternity of auteur producers who have risen above these constraints to stamp their unique marks on television content. Even those jaded by the industry seem to hail the lone creator who achieves self-expression despite "cronyism, mutual backscratching, behind-the-scenes favors, revolving doors, musical chairs, careers made by falling upward [and] the 'amazing largesse' given to favored members of the 'creative community.'" Indeed, Hortense Powdermaker's early look into Hollywood production summed up the situation neatly by indicating that the industry destroys the creative inspirations of artists, who become mere assembly-line workers.
The limited articulation of creativity within the narrow confines of the creative class has the television producer and (nearly always) his trade oscillating between acting as an artist and acting as an assembly-line worker. Of these two poles, the assembly-line worker is the invisible laborer, the one whose absence of creativity unpins the artist's autonomy. While we may envision the creative producer as a particular type of unique individual, mental images of the assembly line cue up either an anonymous mass or, in the New International Division of Labor (NIDL), images of largely third world young women, docilely moving their agile fingers to the punch clocks of transnational commerce. Uninspired, they threaten the individualism and the creative spirit that above-the-line workers supposedly monopolize. Without them, though, there would be no television creator or a creative community, as the television set is among assembly-line workers' creations. It is this community of electronics line workers and their feminized labors that I turn to in order to deconstruct our received notions of creativity and to reconstruct a notion of creative action that is both social and individual in the practices of assembling.
Based on Joas's exploration of a social theory of creative action, this chapter explores the creative capacities of television set factory laborers in the international industrial zone of Manaus, Brazil. Located at the center of the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus and its inhabitants have had unique symbolic roles to play in national politics and global economies. There, line assemblers are the first laborers to contribute surplus value to television through their underpaid and grueling physical work and their unpaid and unrecognized immaterial work. The former has been the subject of a growing literature on the effects of global commerce and trade liberalization. The latter has appeared in recent ethnographies of factory work, mostly located on the U.S.-Mexican border. In the new television economy, both are equally necessary; the political economy of labor exploitation and the cultural performance of a compliant, feminized workforce reinforce the low status of the assembly-line workers in relation to those content creators who likely never consider them part of the television production process. The segregation of those who are supposedly creative and those supposedly noncreative in the production chain is emblematic of a global strategy for amassing capital by dividing workers and making them compete ultimately in a race to the bottom.
I met television set assemblers in Manaus over the course of five months on two separate visits, first in 2004 and again in 2005. If Hollywood seems geographically remote from Manaus, the social and cultural distances between myself, an Anglo-American media professor, and my subjects, Amazonian electronics assemblers, was probably greater. Initial entry into electronics factories, research facilities, and union headquarters resulted in interviews with executives, scientists, and political organizers, all people whose class and educational status approximated my own. I only spoke with factory workers on my second trip, when I joined two community organizations suggested to me by fellow professors at the local state university. The first, a sewing collective organized through the Catholic Church, recruited unemployed factory workers to generate self-sustaining revenues through contract sewing work (encomendas). Thrice a week, I went to chat with the women, help out with a little piecework, and meet with the workers' siblings, children, and neighbors, many of whom worked in the electronics factories. The second group was a class of electronics workers taking a course on social communication and justice as part of a university extension course in a working-class community. There, I participated as a guest speaker and fellow student on weekends, when I could go home with students after class to meet their factory coworkers and families. The contacts I made through these two sites filled my week with twenty-five formal interviews, many more impromptu conversations, explorations of vastly different working-class neighborhoods, and frequent social events, from dinner invitations to street theater performances. Together these form the basis of my (limited) understanding of the tapestry of work practices, routines, and events in the lives of electronics assemblers. For though this fieldwork brought me closer to the realities of television set creation in Manaus, there are still unbridgeable gaps between my recordings in the field and the embodied experience of being on the line.
Life off and on the Line
Terezinha stood almost a full foot shorter than my own five feet, four inches. Her petite hands, however, powerfully pushed fabric bolts through an industrial sewing machine as if they were made of air. Shifting the stitch left, then right, her hands had no visible scars from the years she spent assembling television sets and other electronics for Evadin, a Brazilian company with exclusive technology rights for the Japanese firm Mitsubishi Electric. She was fifteen when she got the job in 1981. Her declarative statements about that time frequently ended with a rhetorical question. "I only did components. Capacitors, resistors, transistors, integrated circuits, you know?" She continued to work in electronics assembly on and off for twelve years, leaving only to raise her family in accordance with her evangelical values. At thirty-nine years of age in 2005, she still remembered the period fondly: "I did everything that goes into the TV and gives it life."
Terezinha was a representative of what could be considered the first generation of television set assemblers. In the weekend classroom, the younger pupils who currently worked in the factories formed part of the second generation. Their divergent experiences and identities mapped the changing political economy of television set manufacturing and assembly in the region, reflecting global trends in the liberalization of trade, the regionalization of production, and the automation of factory work. These were not abstract forces for the residents of Manaus; global trends had transformed the landscape and demographics of the city, its labor economy, and the symbolic meanings of television set assembly from women's work to the jewel for a newly flexible, yet still feminized, workforce. In this section, I present these global shifts and their material effects for the city's working-class majority.
Terezinha began assembling television sets a decade after the first factories began importing electronic parts for television set assembly in the Amazon. Springer da Amaz?ia and Sharp do Brasil, hired 771 local residents in 1971 and 1972, respectively. By 1974, electronics companies, including Semp Toshiba, CCE, Philips, and Evadin dominated nearly 20 percent of what was then called the Manaus Free Trade Zone (MFTZ). Incentivized with near-total tax exemptions, low-interest loans, and cheap or free access to land, services, and labor, each of these companies complied with the military junta's effort to dominate the Amazon with people and capital. This effort also has a longer history. A century earlier, Manaus had become a synecdoche for the Amazon's domination through its rubber boom. Imperial decree opened the Amazon River to international transport, and the establishment of a national shipping company preceded an international influx of capital dedicated to the extraction and exportation of latex. European and U.S. trading companies directed the boom to steer a new global market, first, for waterproof and elastic goods, and later, for car culture. Brazilian latex monopolized the international import economy from 1887 to 1907, making Manaus the center for its shipping and commerce. The military junta hoped to resurrect this cosmopolitan sentiment of the belle époque in later years, one television set at a time.
Getting a job in an electronics factory in those early decades depended a bit on one's connections and a bit on what Terezinha and others called agility. The immigrants who had occupied extraction jobs during the rubber boom, first from the region, and then from drought-stricken northeastern states, became the first generation of MFTZ workers. They secured jobs early on and indicated their relatives and friends for positions. Assembly lines were segregated by gender. Men worked on the heavy equipment to build set cases and move freight boxes. Women and girls as young as fourteen assembled the small components for the insides of the sets. When Terezinha started working on the line, all the raw materials she worked with came from outside the Amazon. From her chair, she attached the pieces and then manually passed them to the next station. The process of quickly taking various pieces of a component and attaching them to each other was called the "hand game" (jogo da mão), referencing the labor power of the manual aspects of the job. "Thank God I was agile," Terezinha reflected on her swift promotions in the factory from one line to another and then to the quality control area. Some of the materials she worked with were toxic. Soldering wires had to be done by hand; the fumes blinded those who stayed too long at the post. The physical repetition required in assembly meant that workers had to be promoted to different stations to keep them from retiring early due to a stress injury or some other hazard. Terezinha said her supervisors let her take breaks to unwind her sore arm muscles at times, but that she was also valued as one of the fastest in her group. The workday was long, from sunrise till sunset, but she, like many workers, stayed even longer to play for company-sponsored sports teams. For her, the districts in the Industrial Pole (which all workers called the "District") became a city within the city, with infrastructure and services better than those in the surrounding worker communities. These jobs attracted new waves of immigration, with up to 93 percent of rural Amazon peoples coming seasonally to Manaus after harvests.
Changes in the global manufacturing economy and in national trade policies sparked dramatic effects in electronics factories and in the labor economy. Responding to international liberalization demands in the 1990s, Brazil legislated an industrialization model based on exportation enclaves to replace the import-substitution model of the previous thirty years. Neither wholly neoliberal nor clearly protectionist, the administration of Fernando Collor de Mello reduced import tariffs and quotas nationally while instituting basic standards for the nationalization of production processes. In other words, television set manufacturers in Manaus no longer paid import duties on many of the raw materials brought into the country, but they also lost their privileged tax-free access to Brazilian markets. The price for television sets fell dramatically as imports entered the national market. Conversely, the export market for the sets grew, particularly to Argentina and other parts of South America, but also to as far away as the United States, whose small televisions were no longer produced in Mexican facilities. At the same time, the Basic Production Program (PPB) ensured that all stages of the television set production process would be located in the city's industrial districts (figure 2), from the making of components to the set's final calibrations. This aimed to prevent a long-standing practice in Latin American free trade zones in which manufacturers simply shipped mostly finished parts to the zone for assembly to avoid import duties. Plants closed and the remaining companies conducted mass layoffs. Television set factories streamlined their operations by contracting with new components companies, many of them simply old enterprises restructured. They began to specialize in fewer core products, while new companies emerged to comply with the ppb. Factories outsourced internal services to a host of new companies maintaining everything from cleaning and the cafeteria to transportation and IT. Human resources companies sprang up throughout the city to provide an imminently flexible workforce that management could hire during periods of high demand and fire without added responsibilities.
All the students who worked in electronics during the week understood this new reality. They worked not only for some of the remaining pioneers of the MFTZ but also for a host of new human resource firms, service providers, and a new series of Korean and Chinese companies that opened satellite factories in anticipation of further trade liberalization policies and despite higher labor costs. The majority of these jobs were not unionized. Collor shut out the Metalworkers' Union, which represented the majority of electronics workers, after the union led the largest local strike in its history in 1990. Involving twenty-eight factories, the strike achieved some concessions, including higher wages, better transportation and meals, and day-care facilities. This meant better overall working conditions than in Terezinha's day, but the lack of union power meant the elimination of its oversight on the line and the no job security for senior factory workers. The number of temporary workers grew from 17 percent of the MFTZ workforce in 1992 to 26 percent in 1995. Strikes were inconceivable for this new generation as they hustled to maintain a job through the regular hiring and firing cycles that accompanied seasonal peaks and lulls in consumer demand. If they left or lost their jobs, they lost the political and social rights guaranteed them as workers in the formal economy, including their state-regulated wages, safety protections, arbitration rights, and both disability and retirement benefits. These rights, even if distributed laxly, made factory jobs overwhelmingly preferable to the alternatives in the informal economy and arguably, more important than being a national citizen.
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Excerpted from BELOW THE LINE by Vicki Mayer Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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