Rick Valencia stared through his windshield at the Hollywood writers pacing in front of the Paramount Studios gate, a blur of red T-shirts and picket signs blocking his passage, the Los Angeles Times reports.

He’d been driving trucks for more than three decades, but earned less in a year than some of these writers made in a week. Scribes in the upper echelon of the Writers Guild of America were bona-fide members of the Hollywood elite. The 57-year-old driver reflected on how enraged he had been in 1988 when writers crossed a Teamster picket line he had been walking.

Yet Valencia, who was hauling construction equipment for Paramount Pictures, wasn’t clenching his teeth in anger as he idled in front of the picketing mob for the first time last week. He sat in his truck in anguish. Should he risk his job by standing up for union membership and the right to a decent wage?

He crossed slowly, in no hurry for pickets to clear a path. “I’m happy to wait,” Valencia said later. Studios had threatened to replace Teamsters who failed to show up for work, but they could do little to workers’ who moved sluggishly through the day in quiet solidarity with the writers.

Hundreds of Teamsters such as Valencia were experiencing their own moral dilemmas last week amid the first major Hollywood strike in two decades.

The Teamsters, which supply not only drivers but location managers and casting directors, have the power to shut down the entertainment industry. Their trucks deliver the materials for making sets, the lighting equipment and other gear needed on location to keep the cameras rolling.

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