I've drifted slightly to the political right over the years, and become ambivalent about nearly every ideologies and all political moments. But when push comes to shove, for or against, I usually support labor unions when they get in a fight.

Not always. For instance, after spending a day last week with the extraordinary principal of the Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn, my basic unenthusiastic take on the New York City teachers' union was confirmed -- that this particular union at this particular moment probably does more harm than good by reflexively fighting innovation. But on the other hand, when the administrative staff at the Museum of Modern Art was on strike last summer, I declined to cross their picket line to appear on a panel at a conference about internet business -- and got into hot water for my choice.

Right now my ambivalence about unions is honed to a sharp edge. Because in addition to hosting a radio show, I create TV shows and screenplays. So I belong to a union -- the Writers Guild of America, to which pretty much every writer of TV and films must belong. And two weeks from next Tuesday, the Guild is expected to go on strike. To be followed a couple of months later, quite possibly, by a strike of the Screen Actors Guild.

As the unions will tell you, most screenwriters are not paid a million dollars a script and most actors scramble to earn a middle-class living. But, I'm sorry, writers' and performers' compensation demands are never going to command sympathy among the general public. The average earnings last year for "working writers," according to the TV and movie producers' association, was more than $200,000. The Writers Guild says the median income for writers was only $84,000. But whatever. It's not bad money.

Of course it makes sense for the Writers Guild to negotiate and enforce minimum rates of pay and health care contributions and screen credit and all the rest of it. But fundamentally, screenwriters are not autoworkers. And that's because unlike other unionized workers, a writer's success or failure -- like an actor's -- is in the end an individual success or failure.

Think about it. Police and teachers and factory workers living in the same community with the same earn more or less the same wages. But a film writer or TV actor, on the other hand, can earn 10 or 100 or 1000 times as much as his union comrade. That is fundamentally different from the situation of other unionized workers. And it makes labor solidarity for creative artists in show business somewhat problematic.

I mean, as a UAW strike deadline approaches, do you think that the guys on Ford's and GM's assembly lines work harder, sweating to produce as many cars as they can so that the companies will have more Tauruses and Tahoes in inventory to sell during the strike? Of course not. That would undermine the workers' only power.

But what are Writers Guild writers from West Hollywood to the Upper West Side of Manhattan doing right now? I guarantee you, if they've got an assignment or an idea, they're rushing to finish scripts and get them off to producers and studios by midnight April 30.

And the other big difference between writers and any other unionized workers I know about is that writers can do what they do in private. Which means, that if there is a strike, thousands of Writers Guild writers will continue inventing character and plot and dialogue at home, in private. And then, once the strike is settled, those writers will face the same question that writers faced after the 1988 strike: how many weeks do you have to wait before you turn in your script to maintain the illusion of retroactive union solidarity?

It's not just on screen that Hollywood is a world of make believe.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.