Paramount buying Warner Brothers and CNN
on PBS Newshour (great show, big recommend), they talked about the pending merger. The fed approved it, but 11 states are suing to block it. The owner of WB is threatening to leave california if the merger fails, taking thousands of jobs and billions in state revenue.
If the merger goes through, it threatens 4,500 jobs and also billions of revenue.
There is disagreement between some of the unions about whether to fight/allow the merger, and one of the commentators said, roughly:
Everybody's against the merger. The merger is bad, but they're choosing between the lesser of two evils
And I wanna propose a third option.
Merger gets blocked, WB begins their exit from California, and California seizes all of the property WB owns in CA. All of it. The buildings. The cameras. Desks and movie props and all of the things.
Then the state gives it to all of the WB workers in california. The people on the ground who actually know how to produce movies and news and TV shows and whatever. The people who actually use the cameras and the buildings and the props. They get ownership of the buildings and all of the equipment, and they just go on producing shows, under a new worker-owned business.
The state would not keep control. The seizing is just in order to give it to the workers - I'm not a fan of centralized power.
...
It can't happen in the U.S. Not today. Maybe not ever. It certainly wouldn't be legal currently, though. But this is my theoretical third option. I suppose the workers might need some financial capital to cover wages for the first, say, 12 months while they get their new intellectual property off the ground (or perhaps the IP could be seized too, but then we're running into even bigger fish)