Opinion | I’m on Strike With the W.G.A. I Owe My Father at Least That Much.

None of this is unusual. It’s tragic and infuriating and grievous, but it is also very, very normal. Using fine print and loopholes and the tectonic grind of the legal process to cheat working people is as American as a Norman Rockwell painting. And while superficially there might not appear to be a direct connection between my father’s losses and the W.G.A. strike, both spring directly from this time-honored exploitation of the powerless by the powerful.

Do I sound bitter? Good. I am. Still, after 20 years.

Now you know why I’m a union man myself and why I’m striking. Unions, imperfect though they might be, are the only entities that have ever provided an effective counterbalance to the corporate rapaciousness that victimized my father. A strike is not a fight at all, but rather a collective assertion of our dignity. It’s not about money — except insofar as, in America, money equals respect. For me, it’s about the look in my father’s eyes when he realized that not only was his body broken but so were all the implicit promises that go along with being a good worker bee and paying your taxes and staying on the right side of the law.

My old man eventually got a settlement and was able to buy a little double-wide in which he would die, five years later, at 57, of lung cancer that was surely a legacy of his military service and his working life as a firefighter. It was nice, I suppose, that he was made whole and could buy another home for himself and my mother, but the truth is that, as with the heart attack itself, the damage was done. The home he’d bought with his labor, in which he had raised his children, was gone. The humiliation and frustration of losing it couldn’t be rolled back. This is another way they swindle you: making you feel that, hey, you got your money, the right thing has been done, so why are you still so unhappy?

I wonder if the people on the other side of the negotiating table will ever understand that it’s not about money and never has been. There’s an almost genetic-level memory of struggle and privation among working people, and we’re tired of having to fight like animals simply to be treated like human beings. We’re tired of entering into agreements that, one way or another, always get broken.

That’s what this strike is about, at least for me. I don’t need a cut of Netflix executives’ stock compensation. What I need — what I demand — is that they treat me and the people I love as though our lives and labor are every bit as significant as theirs.

Ron Currie Jr. is the author of the novel “The One-Eyed Man” and a writer for film and television, most recently for the series “Extrapolations.”