Philadelphia, The Real World, and union labor

[Michael Costello]

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/8202377.htm

"After squabbling with local unions, the producers of the MTV series today gave up on Philadelphia as the site of its 15th season. Taping was to begin in three weeks...City leaders believed that The Real World, with its huge audience of 12-to-34-year-olds, would boost the city's cool factor and help it retain recent college graduates...The series had sidestepped organized labor in 13 previous cities, including union strongholds New York City, Chicago and Boston, without incident."

The "squabble" is that the unions didn't want all the work to be non-union. My opinion of Bunim/Murray and MTV/Viacom has never been high, but it keeps going down and down. Is this what makes a "cool factor" - making millions of dollars on a television show, yet fighting tooth and nail to avoid the people who do all the work on that show getting paid a decent wage? I guess they want all the work to be done by undocumented workers getting paid $5 an hour, going back to a one-bedroom apartment where 8 other people live, in between "confessional" scenes of bratty little kids whining about this or that. I'm a 30 year old professional, and the Teamsters standing tall in Philadelphia increases its "cool factor" for me more than the whiny little brats on the "real world" ever will.