Run Run Run Runaway ...

A think-piece from the April 1972 Peg-Board referencing Hanna-Barbera setting up an Australian studio in February of that year:

Hanna-Barbera registered as an Australian company in Sydney... [T]he Aussies aren't taking this one in a prone or horizontal position ... [T]hey have gone to the highest echelon of their Government to get action... The infusion of the nationalistic angle into the fracas in an election year should promise some interesting developments. The Australians are known as gents who hae a high sense of national pride and a low flash point when their well-being in any sphere is endangered by foreign incursions ...

The hazard to us is that this establishes a most dangerous precedent. If Hanna-Barbera can thus establish an entire studio of its own in a foreign (and low wage scale) country, capable of producing entire series at greatly reduced budgets and consequent losses to American workers, the peril is obvious indeed ...

Thirty-five years on, runaway battles still rage, but the war is pretty much over.

Globalization (see "linkomatic" above) is a hard and ever-changing reality we all live with. Case in point: That H-B Sydney studio existed for decades before being sold to Disney ... where it produced higher cost dvd features before being shuttered when the parade moved on.

TAG fought the runaway wars through the seventies and early eighties. At the end, we lost. Ultimately, a union doesn't (and can't) control trade and industrial policy. Only a national government does that, and only an active and informed electorate can build the kind of government that will serve its interests and not the whims of various global conglomerates.

In the end, countries need semi-coherent trade/foreign/industrial policies to remain viable and robust. Sadly, the United States doesn't -- at present -- have those.