I first met Alex O’Keefe in late July at a fundraiser for the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) in Los Angeles. But I’d been hearing about him for a while. The twenty-nine-year old writer on FX’s The Bear had become a visible face of the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) strike because of his willingness to discuss his own economic precarity.

As O’Keefe told the New Yorker in an article published just before the 11,500 union members went on strike on May 2, O’Keefe had attended the ceremony where he won a WGA Award for Comedy Series “with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit.” He’d been living in Brooklyn when he wrote the hit show, and his apartment lacked heat — sometimes, he’d plug his space heater in and the power would go out, which led him to write some of the episodes at a public library.

At the TDU fundraiser in July, O’Keefe pledged his support for the Teamsters, who were then facing a possible strike at UPS, as well as the union’s Motion Picture Division, which faces its own contract negotiations next year. He spoke of the Hollywood dream factory as a workplace like any other, where “the assembly line cannot be stopped. People are asked to go faster and faster with less and less pay, all while the overlords watch us and critique our work without any democratic participation from the workers.”